The restored historic former Liverpool Sailors' Home gates are located on Paradise Street near to the original location of the Seaman’s Mission, in what is now the Liverpool One shopping centre.
The Grade II-listed cast iron gates marked the entrance to the Sailors Home, which opened in Canning Place in 1850.
Liverpool Sailors' Home on Canning Place was designed by Liverpool architect John Cunningham (1799-1873) and was open for business from December 1850 to July 1969. The home was designed to provide safe, inexpensive lodging for an average of 200 men sailors, and to offer educational and recreational opportunities, in contrast to the temptations on offer in the docklands area.
The ornamental cast-iron gates were installed in 1851, soon after the Home opened, and were designed by Cunningham in collaboration with a local ironfounder Henry Pooley (1803-78), who had already provided ornamental railings and columns for the building’s interior. The gates served the dual purpose of protecting the savings banks attached to the Home and barring entry to seamen who might wish to gain entry to the building after the strict 10pm curfew. The extravagant ornamentation in the upper part of the gates mirrored the motifs in the sandstone carvings above the building’s entrance and included a welter of nautical motifs – sails, entwined fish, scallops and shells, ropes, horns, and wheels – crowned by a Liver bird, the most familiar heraldic motif of the city. Below, the ornament mirrored that of the balcony railings inside the Home with their exotic double-tailed mermaids supporting tridents and anchors and surrounded by a lattice network of rope. SOURCE: (
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The gates were taken down for repair in 1951 after suffering bomb damage in World War II but ended up languishing outside a foundry in the Black Country.
The gates, (often referred to as the 'pooley' gates after the designer Henry Pooley) feature nautical symbols including ship wheels dolphins, four twin-tailed mermaids, or melusines and one of the earliest architectural depictions of the Liver Bird motif.
British Listed Buildings describe the gates as follows;
"Gates and gateway, circa 1840/50s of cast iron.
History: The gates were made in Liverpool by Henry Pooley and Son to the designs of John Cunningham and installed at the Liverpool Sailors Home by 1852. The gates were removed from the Sailors Home following the Liverpool Blitz as part of restoration works, and the house itself was demolished during the 1970s.The gates were offered for sale in 1948 to W & T Avery which had merged with Henry Pooley in 1931. By 1951 the gates had been erected at Avery’s Soho Foundry in Smethwick, Sandwell. In 2011 consent was granted to move the gates back to Liverpool and they were subsequently installed in Paradise Street adjacent to the former site of the Sailor’s Home.
Description: Gates and gateway. Lower part in four sections, the two central ones opening as gates. Each has diagonal lattice infill cast to resemble rope, with a knot at each inter-section. Each has a central lozenge with a cast mermaid with two tails. Above is an elaborate superstructure, with a Liver bird above ropework draped with cloth, flanked by nautical symbols including oars, flags and bugles, ships' wheels and intersecting dolphins." SOURCE: (
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