The story of the Three Graces

Three buildings, three different jobs

Stand at the Pier Head and look at the waterfront skyline, and you’re looking at three buildings that were never actually designed as a matching set. The Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building — collectively known as the Three Graces — were built between 1907 and 1917 by three different architects for three completely different clients, and yet they read today as a single, cohesive statement of Edwardian civic confidence. That coherence is partly luck and partly the product of a city that, at the time, had the money and the ambition to build big regardless of who was footing the bill.

The Port of Liverpool Building (1907)

The earliest of the three, and the one visitors most often overlook in favour of its flashier neighbours, is the Port of Liverpool Building — domed, Edwardian Baroque, built as the headquarters of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, the body that ran Liverpool’s entire dock system at the height of its global importance. Its dome and detailing owe an obvious debt to St Paul’s Cathedral, a deliberate architectural statement: this was the building from which the busiest port in the British Empire was administered, and it was designed to look the part.

The Royal Liver Building (1911)

The most photographed of the three, and Liverpool’s most recognisable single landmark, the Royal Liver Building was built for the Royal Liver Assurance company (an insurance and friendly society, not a shipping firm) and topped with two copper Liver Birds — a mythical cormorant-like creature that gives Liverpool its name and its civic symbol. Local legend holds that if the two birds — one facing inland, watching over the city, the other facing out to sea, watching for sailors’ safe return — were ever to fly away or mate, the city would cease to exist. It’s a good story, and it’s stuck: the Liver Bird appears on the city’s coat of arms, on Liverpool FC’s badge, and across the city’s branding to this day.

At completion, the Royal Liver Building was one of the first buildings in the world to use reinforced concrete on this scale, and it was briefly among the tallest buildings in Europe. You can now go up it: the Royal Liver Building 360 tour takes visitors to the clock tower and rooftop viewing platform, offering the closest look most people will get at the Liver Birds themselves.

Book the Royal Liver Building 360 tour to climb the clock tower and see the Liver Birds at close range — the clock faces are larger than Big Ben’s.

The Cunard Building (1917)

The youngest and most restrained of the three, the Cunard Building was constructed as the Liverpool headquarters of the Cunard Line, the shipping company behind the Lusitania, the Mauretania and, decades later, the Queen Mary 2. Its Italian Renaissance-palazzo styling was a deliberate contrast to its neighbours — no dome, no rooftop birds, just heavy, confident classical stonework that mirrors the interior of a first-class Cunard liner more than a typical office block. It now houses the British Music Experience alongside commercial office space, having been repurposed rather than left as a monument to a shipping company whose passenger operations moved on decades ago.

Why they were built at all

The Three Graces weren’t built out of civic vanity alone. They represented an enormous, coordinated bet by Liverpool’s major maritime institutions — the docks authority, an insurance giant, and the world’s most famous shipping line — that the city’s position as the British Empire’s second port was permanent and worth building monuments to. For a few decades, that bet looked entirely justified: Liverpool handled a huge share of Britain’s transatlantic trade and passenger traffic, and the Pier Head buildings were a genuine statement of confidence rather than nostalgia.

That confidence didn’t survive the twentieth century in the way its builders expected. Liverpool’s docks went into steep decline from the 1930s onward, accelerated by containerisation and the shift of British trade toward the English Channel ports after the war. But the buildings themselves outlasted the industry that paid for them, and they’re now protected as part of Liverpool’s UNESCO-recognised (delisted in 2021 due to waterfront development concerns, though the buildings remain Grade I and Grade II* listed under UK law) maritime mercantile heritage.

Seeing them today

The best vantage point for the classic Three Graces photograph is from the Mersey itself — a river cruise or the Mersey Ferry gives you the view Edwardian ship passengers would have had arriving into Liverpool, which is genuinely how the buildings were meant to be seen. From land, the Pier Head itself offers the closest access, with the Museum of Liverpool nearby providing context on how the waterfront developed.

For the fullest account of each building’s history and current use, our dedicated Three Graces guide covers visiting details, and the Royal Liver Building guide has the specifics on the rooftop tour. What’s worth remembering, walking past them today, is that these three buildings were never meant to be a matching trio — they became one by coincidence of scale, timing and a shared conviction, since proven wrong, that Liverpool’s maritime dominance would never really end.