The History of Liverpool Cruises – From the Old Docks to the New Terminal

When you think of Liverpool’s maritime history, cruises might not be the first thing that pops into your head. The city was one of the major ports in the United Kingdom back when the likes of slavery was one of the most popular forms of making money from imports and exports. It is a shameful part of the city’s history that it has never shied away from.

Cruising was, though, another part of the city’s past and has also become part of its present, thanks to the development of the cruise terminal that is able to welcome some of the biggest ships on the seas. Here is a brief look at the history of cruising from Liverpool’s famous waterfront.

Liverpool’s Docks

The first ever enclosed commercial dock in the world was the Old Dock in Liverpool. Built in 1715, it converted the Lyver Pool, which is now mostly found under the Liverpool One shopping area, into an enclosed dock and helped to make the city one of the most important in the country. More docks were added, connected thanks to lock gates that allowed it to extent as much as 7.5 miles along the bank of the River Mersey.

The system was the most advanced in the world, with ships able to move along it 24 hours a day, with the manner of the docks separating them from the rises and falls of the River Mersey itself.

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♬ (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay [2020 Remaster] – Otis Redding

Part of the reasons why Liverpool was able to become such an important port city was that there was rail track totalling more than 100 miles that offered connections from the docks to the rest of the country. The Park Lane Railway Goods Terminal was built in 1830, accessed via the Wapping Tunnel.

The Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City was made up of six separate locations, with each being related to a different component with the Pier Head as the obvious focal point and the Three Graces of the Liver Building, Port of Liverpool Building and the Cunard Building behind it, making the area amongst the most recognisable anywhere.

Cruise Ships Arrive

The history of Liverpool and cruise ships dates back to the 19th century, with long distance scheduled travel for commercial passengers first taking place in the city in 1819. That was when the SS Savannah crossed the Atlantic, becoming the first steamship to make the voyage.

In spite of the success of the journey, it took another 21 years before regular trips of that nature began thanks to the Britannia-class steamship. At around the same time, the cruise liner Cunard Line opened an office on Waters Street, just across the water from the dock. The company opened the Cunard Building in 1916, making it its global headquarters.

By the 1870s, Prince’s Landing Stage had opened on Prince’s Dock, to the side of the Pier Head. It was specifically designed to allow liners to berth alongside it for the embarkation and disembarkation of passengers. Moves were made to make this process better in 1895 when a railway station was opened nearby.

By the end of the 19th century, only London was seen as a more important port in the British Empire than Liverpool, thanks to the fact that the Mersey port had been the main one for trans-Atlantic passengers for in excess of 50 years, to say nothing of the fact that it was one of the most important emigration ports in Europe.

Signs of the old Dock Railways are all over Liverpool’s Central Dock area. pic.twitter.com/tRN2R5tP7J

— Liverpool Vista (@LiverpoolVista) July 16, 2024

Between the 1920s and the 1970s, cruise liners continued to become safer and safer for the passengers, to say nothing of more luxurious and faster. It allowed the city’s reach to spread far and wide, which is why the shipping lines began to offer cruises of their own in order to supplement their regular business. Pacific Steam Navigation began sail from Liverpool to South America, whilst Harrison’s offered liners to the Caribbean, Blue Funnel went to the Far East and the Blue Star Line promised passage to Argentina.

Even when the Depression hit in the 1930s, cruising numbers stayed steady as the operators changed what they offered.

Canadian Pacific, for example, started to offer people ‘guinea a day’ cruises that lasted a week, whilst Lamport & Holt’s two ships, Van Dyke and Voltaire, became more popular. The RMS Lancastria was dedicated by Cunard Line to long distance cruising. Not that everything went to plan.

The Sylvania was a ship designed for North Atlantic sailing, meaning that only the public rooms were air conditioned. When it began to sail to Tenerife instead, the crew had to sleep in the dining room to stay cool overnight, meaning that the room had a terrible stink to it when passengers began arriving for their breakfasts.

The Decline of the Docks

By the early part of the 1960s, Prince’s Dock’s place in the heart of the British maritime trade was beginning to decline. The advent of shipping containers meant that ports like Southampton began to take a much more important role in the country’s trading, with business moving away from Liverpool as a result. In 1967, Cunard decided to end the cruise services out of the city, with Canadian Pacific following suit four years later.

In 1973 a decision was taken to demolish the dock, which then stood redundant and mostly derelict throughout the 1980s. It took another decade or so before it began to be regenerated for commercial, leisure and residential use.

For Liverpool, cruise ships were a thing of the past by the time the new millennium rolled around. Yet for many, there were numerous aspects of the city that made it ideal for such journeys, which is why efforts were made to restore certain aspects of the city’s cruising past. In 2007, with £19 million having been spent, the Liverpool Cruise Terminal opened its doors and saw cruise ships start to dock in the city once again.

It was initially restricted to ‘port-of-call’ visits, meaning that they weren’t allowed to begin or end in Liverpool, but that stopped in 2012 when turnaround services once again started at the terminal and have taken place since.