Published
Oct 1, 2025
Author
Simon Rhodes
Cains Brewery
In 2008 we were visiting our friends and collaborators Union North (soon to become FVMA) in the newly opened Elevator building on Parliament Street in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle.
We were immediately excited by the vast expanse of open-plan studio – 3,000 sq ft! With space to breathe and stretch out, exposed brickwork and the general warehouse loft demeanour, our heads were turned so much we couldn’t concentrate on the meeting in hand. Eyes were opened and possibilities arose.
Within a few months we’d moved from our original place in Liverpool’s famous Georgian Quarter (lovely studio, terrible landlord) to our new home at Elevator.
The Baltic Triangle nestles between the bustle of the city centre, the docks and Toxteth/Dingle. During the 18th and 19th centuries, around 40% of the world’s trade passed through the city’s docks at their 19th-century peak, and much of the landscape and building infrastructure still reflects the area’s past service to that colossal trading and shipping heritage. Timber from Norway and the Baltic States once filled the warehouses here – Norwegian wood in the truest sense, long before Lennon’s song gave the phrase a more romantic twist. Whale oil, too, arrived from Arctic waters to feed the city’s lamps and industries, with carcasses supposedly rendered on Greenland Street – linking Liverpool’s prosperity to distant northern seas.
Post-war, until the 2000s, the area pretty much comprised industrial workshops of all kinds, light manufacturing and semi-abandoned spaces. Slowly, artists and musicians drifted here thanks to low rents and a glut of exciting, gritty places to work from.
Remaining Victorian behemoths like the Cains Brewery site (home of Higsons Brewery, founded in 1780 and later acquired by Cains in 1858) are now home to pubs, bars, restaurants, markets and artist studios, and feel like a playground for the residents of the newly built apartment blocks that rise up between steel prefab sheds and medium-rise brick-built Victorian warehouses. Nearby stands the impressive Gustaf Adolf Kyrka (the Grade II* listed Scandinavian Seamen’s Church, built 1883).
Print by Dorothy
New industries
These days the Baltic Triangle is rightly known as Liverpool’s creative district – around 300 creative and digital companies reside here. (Organisations such as Baltic Creative and Elevator Studios have a remit squarely directed at supporting creative and digital enterprise too.) It’s also a place for drinking, eating, entertainment and music.
Latterly it has become home to thousands of new residents, with a smattering of high-end retail, eateries and coffee shops too (Utility, Manifest and Seven Store and Dorothy are all good examples) – giving rise to a more rounded urban neighbourhood; a place that no longer feels abandoned after 5pm. These new places and their denizens cohabit happily with the industry of the recent past – the taxi repair shops, trade suppliers and builders’ butty vans are all part of what makes it tick. The edges are still rough (and there’s a particular charm in that).
Whilst rubbing shoulders with game devs, web devs, architects, digital developers, artists and musicians, nascent venue operators, watching boarders at the infamous New Bird skatepark, visiting empty buildings, attending art happenings and events – it became clear that there was huge scope for good, independent businesses and an appetite for much more.
Cains Brewery
