Retail giant Marks and Spencer announced yesterday it would be moving to a new building in Liverpool One after nearly a century on Church Street.
M&S announced to staff on Thursday that they would be moving out of Compton House, their iconic site on Church Street, after nearly 100 years. The retail giant will be moving to the Debenhams building on Lord Street in Liverpool One.
Debenhams closed its Liverpool store in May, along with 123 others nationally. The collapse of the retailer saw the loss of around 12,000 jobs.
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Pete Dobson, regional manager for M&S, said: "We’re really excited to announce our plans to open a brand new M&S store in the Liverpool ONE shopping centre. The new store, which we expect to open in mid-2023, will offer the very best of M&S in a prime location in Liverpool city centre."
M&S moved into Grade II listed Compton House in 1928 and has been housed in the building ever since. The building was one of the first purpose-built department stores in Europe, but also spent a short period of time as a hotel.
Compton House was rebuilt in 1867 after a fire destroyed the original building two years earlier. Although originally thought to have been an accident, an investigation found it had been purposely started by 20-year-old Thomas Henry Sweeting.
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Sweeting confessed he had started the fire by throwing a lit match among goods in the building's cellar. The blaze gutted the building causing £100,000 worth of damage plus £200,000 in lost stock. The fire also resulted in the loss of 1,200 jobs.
The building was rebuilt less than two-years later and It was at the time the world's biggest department store with five floors. After the store's closure in 1871, the building was converted and renamed the Compton Hotel.
During its peak, it was reported to be one of the finest hotels in central Liverpool, described in one Liverpool Daily Post newspaper advertisement in 1876 as a "magnificent hotel for families and gentlemen. Splendidly furnished and with every modern luxury."
However, another tragic incident happened at the hotel just two years after opening. An accident in 1877 resulted in the death of a 23-year-old porter named W.H. Gill who had made the unwise decision, alongside some other of the hotel's employees, to travel to the basement in a laundry lift.
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A piece of machinery was being transported from the laundry on the fourth floor down to the basement. A foreman working in the laundry at the time asked two porters to help him lower the machinery down.
As the machinery was descending in the lift to the basement, the foreman and the two porters decided to jump on top of the travelling lift box. The clerk of the hotel owner who witnessed the men told them they were in direct violation of how the lift should be operated, but his concerns were laughed away, and the men began to descend rapidly towards the basement.
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Unfortunately, despite attempts to slow the lift, the brakes couldn't stop it and the lift, with the men, crashed 60 feet down the shaft into the basement. Two men escaped with minor injuries but a falling cog from the top of the lift's mechanism fell on W.H. Gill, killing him instantly.
A less tragic incident at the hotel also made the newspapers in 1889, when a 28-year-old man named James Moore was arrested for stealing an umbrella. Moore was spotted leaving the lavatory of the hotel by an employee walking with what appeared to be a stiff leg.
The employee followed Moore into Whitechapel where he saw him take the umbrella out of his trousers. He was promptly arrested and sent to prison for six weeks.
The decline of the city's economy in the early 20th century led to the hotel's closure in 1927. Growing retailer M&S moved into Compton House the following year and made it their flagship store in the city.
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Old photographs show that the building has not changed greatly in its 150-year history, except most notably the two tower roofs have now disappeared.
