Liverpool’s Goree ‘Slave Rings’: What the Evidence Shows

What the Goree Piazzas actually were

Goree was a reclaimed strip of waterfront beside George’s Dock, extending south from Water Street. A 1765 plan of Liverpool by John Eyes labels the area the “Goree Cawsey” and shows intended warehouses beside the intended dock.

The later complex consisted of two long ranges of warehouses divided by Brunswick Street. At ground level, covered arcades ran beneath the buildings. Those arcades were the “piazzas”. The word described an architectural feature; it did not, by itself, mean that the site was a public square or a market.

The warehouses stood close to one of the busiest parts of Liverpool’s waterfront. Goods could be moved between quays, streets and storage space under cover. Corn, cotton, sugar and other commodities passed through a trading system in which slavery and slave-produced goods were embedded.

Further reading: Liverpool History Society and Bygone Liverpool Part One.

Why was it called Goree?

The Liverpool name referred to Gorée, the island off the coast of Senegal. Britain captured the French-held island on 29 December 1758 during the Seven Years’ War and returned it to France in 1763. British accounts treated the capture as strategically important to West African commerce, including the trafficking of enslaved Africans.

That makes the name itself historically significant. Liverpool’s Goree was not given an innocent label that was later associated with slavery by accident. It recalled a place already bound up in European competition and the Atlantic slave trade.

Care is still needed. UNESCO presents Gorée as a major memorial symbol of the slave trade, while historians continue to debate how large its direct numerical role was compared with other African embarkation points. Its symbolic importance, and the context behind Liverpool’s use of the name, are much less disputed.

Sources: Royal Museums Greenwich and UNESCO Courier.

The buildings may be younger than the familiar date

Many accounts state that the Goree Piazzas were built in 1793. That date comes from nineteenth-century historian James Picton, but it is not secure for the arcaded ranges remembered in later photographs.

A modern reconstruction based on maps, leases, views and newspaper reports argues that the 1793 date belonged to James France’s warehouse behind the future arcade. Work on the front range probably began around 1796. It does not appear in a Thomas Serres waterfront view from May 1797, and the complex was still incomplete when a major fire swept through Goree on 14 September 1802.

The range was rebuilt. In November 1806, The Monthly Magazine described the rebuilt Goree warehouses in terms indicating that the complex was then complete. The fairest chronology is therefore not a single confident date but a sequence: work probably began in the later 1790s, the incomplete buildings burned in 1802, and the rebuilt range was complete by 1806.

Sources: Bygone Liverpool Part Two, The Monthly Magazine, November 1806 and the Merseyside Historic Environment Record.

Two restraint stories became one

One reason the slave-rings claim sounds convincing is that real restraints connected with Liverpool’s slave-trading economy survive in the historical record. The problem comes when two different categories of object are merged.

Portable manacles sold in Liverpool

Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published an illustration in 1808 showing handcuffs, leg shackles, a thumbscrew and a device described as a mouth opener. Clarkson explained that he had bought such equipment from a shop in Liverpool and that it was used aboard slave ships.

This is direct evidence of Liverpool’s material role in equipping voyages of enslavement. Local businesses did not merely insure ships or trade in distant commodities; some supplied instruments designed to control human beings at sea.

Sources: Library of Virginia and Slavery Images.

Fixed rings at the waterfront

The Goree legend concerns something different: fixed iron rings or staples in waterfront buildings. University of Liverpool researcher Nicholas Fuqua reported that he found no evidence of enslaved people being chained at Liverpool’s waterfront. He also concluded that rings linked with the legend were installed after the transatlantic trade and served other purposes.

A warehouse explanation is far more plausible. Number 18 Goree Piazzas had been used as a corn warehouse and mill before Thorn’s Dining Rooms occupied it. A 1914 sale notice referred to machinery and fittings suitable for the corn trade. Rings in warehouses might be used for lifting, lowering, tethering equipment or securing cargo.

That does not allow us to assign one exact function to every remembered ring. To do that, we would need secure provenance, an installation record or a surviving fitting that could be examined. No authenticated human restraint, engineering drawing, invoice or contemporary account of confinement at Goree has been identified.

Source: University of Liverpool, Researching the slave trade in Liverpool.

Enslaved people really were sold in Liverpool

Correcting the Goree claim must never be turned into the false suggestion that slave sales did not happen in Liverpool. Contemporary newspaper advertisements show that enslaved people were physically present, advertised and sold in the town, particularly during the 1750s and 1760s.

The locations named in surviving notices include coffee houses, inns, offices near the Exchange and warehouses. None of the compiled advertisements identifies the later Goree Piazzas.

Among the clearest examples are:

• 12 September 1766: Eleven people said to have arrived from Angola were offered for sale at the Exchange Coffee House in Water Street. This is the largest documented group sale so far identified in Liverpool. It took place near the future Goree complex but before the arcaded Piazzas were built.
• 5 December 1768: An eleven- or twelve-year-old Black boy was offered for auction at William Stainton’s house, the Sign of the Custom House, in Brooks’s Square.
• 15 October 1779: A fourteen-year-old Black boy was offered at George Dunbar’s office. The date is important because it shows that advertisements continued after the Somerset judgment of 1772.

These notices prove something that the Goree legend can sometimes obscure: Liverpool’s involvement was not confined to ships sailing beyond public view. People were treated as property within the town itself.

Sources: University of Glasgow, For Sale advertisements and Runaway Slaves in Britain Liverpool research note.

What the Somerset case did and did not decide

It is sometimes argued that slave sales at Goree would have been impossible because of Somerset v Stewart in 1772. The case was important, but that description goes too far.

Lord Mansfield ruled that James Somerset could not lawfully be forcibly detained and removed from England for sale overseas. As English Heritage explains, the judgment was deliberately narrow. It did not issue a comprehensive ruling that slavery had ceased to exist in England, although many people understood it more broadly.

The 1779 sale notice and a 1780 Liverpool-area advertisement concerning an escaped man described as enslaved reveal the gap between legal argument, popular interpretation and continuing practice. The case against the Goree arcade story therefore rests on the absence of contemporary evidence, the buildings’ chronology and the late emergence of the tradition, not on Somerset alone.

Source: Runaway Slaves in Britain database entry for 1780.

Goree and the documented slave economy

If the rings and dungeon cannot be proved, what can be said with confidence about Goree’s relationship with slavery? Quite a lot.

Research into leases and trade directories identifies merchants and occupiers with different connections to slavery. T and W Earle were slave merchants. John Gladstone later became a major plantation owner. Bancroft and Lorimer dealt in sugar, while other businesses handled cotton, West India produce, insurance and shipping.

Those relationships should be stated carefully. An owner was not necessarily an occupier, a lessee was not necessarily an investor, and some firms operated in the older Back Goree warehouses rather than the later arcaded range. Precision prevents a genuine history from being weakened by claims that the records do not support.

One advertisement makes the commercial connection especially stark. Gore’s Liverpool General Advertiser of 24 January 1805 offered two plantations in Demerara and Berbice together with 154 and 94 enslaved people. Enquiries were directed to Jones and Davies at “Goree”. The people being sold were overseas, not imprisoned beneath Liverpool’s arcades, but the transaction in human property was being administered from a Goree address.

The most defensible description of Goree is therefore that it was:

• named after a West African island whose strategic importance was tied to European commerce and slave trading;
• built and occupied within a port economy deeply dependent on slave voyages and slave-produced commodities;
• used by firms connected with slave trading, plantation ownership, sugar, cotton, shipping and finance;
• an address from which at least one documented overseas transaction involving plantations and enslaved people was handled; and
• not a documented slave pen, auction arcade or site of waterfront chaining.

How the slave rings story developed

The story appears in print long after the events it claims to describe. That does not tell us exactly when people first repeated it by word of mouth, but it allows us to trace the legend’s public growth.

• 1889: The Liverpool Mercury described open ground at the foot of Water Street as a former “Liverpool Slave Market”. It cited no contemporary evidence and did not yet anchor the claim to the Goree arcades.
• 1891: Novelist Hall Caine supplied the earliest explicit description located in this research of Goree as a “human auction mart”. It appeared in rhetorical literature, not in a documented local history.
• 1907: Historian Ramsay Muir referred to the image of Black people “chained to staples” in the Piazzas, but called the idea a “popular superstition”. This is the earliest explicit chains-and-staples version located in the review.
• 1923: University architecture professor Charles Reilly wrote that “local tradition” said enslaved people had been exposed for sale in the arcades. His wording recorded a tradition rather than proving an event.

During the twentieth century, letters, popular histories and childhood recollections added rings, chains, cellars and dungeon-like details. Repetition gradually made a late tradition sound like an eyewitness account from the eighteenth century.

Sources: Hall Caine, The Little Manx Nation, Ramsay Muir, A History of Liverpool and Jessica Moody’s work on Liverpool’s memory of slavery listed below.

The Dining Rooms display

Thorn’s Dining Rooms occupied number 18 Goree Piazzas from about 1915 into the 1930s. Later visitors remembered being shown a cellar containing rings, chains, irons and notices of slave sales. This display may have done more than anything else to give the legend a physical setting.

Because the unit had previously been a corn warehouse and mill, ordinary industrial fittings could easily have been reinterpreted. It is also plausible that other objects or printed notices were added to create an attraction for customers.

Plausible is not the same as proved. No contemporary Thorn brochure, inventory, acquisition record or expert authentication has been located. It is reasonable to say that Thorn’s helped popularise a cellar display interpreted as connected with slavery. It is not yet safe to say as fact that the proprietor deliberately fabricated a fake slave dungeon.

Why such a powerful story survived

Liverpool’s role in slavery was spread across the city and across the Atlantic. It existed in shipping offices, insurance, credit, domestic service, warehouses, manufactured goods, plantation ownership and imported commodities. Much of it left paperwork rather than a single dramatic place that people could visit and point towards.

Dark cellars and iron rings made that dispersed responsibility visible. They offered a simple image: here was the place, and here were the objects. Historian Jessica Moody treats Goree as a site of memory. The legend is historically important because it shows how Liverpool tried to imagine and narrate slavery, even when it is unreliable evidence for what happened at that precise spot.

This also explains why correcting the story can feel uncomfortable. Some fear that removing the rings removes Liverpool’s culpability. In reality, the opposite is true. The documented history shows that the system was not confined to a hidden dungeon. It was normalised across respectable businesses, streets, offices and trading relationships.

Further reading: Jessica Moody, The Persistence of Memory and The Memory of Slavery in Liverpool in Public Discourse.

What happened to the Goree Piazzas?

The buildings were damaged during the May 1941 Blitz, but it is misleading to say they simply disappeared under wartime bombing. Demolition had already been proposed by 1924 as the Corporation considered clearance and road widening in the area.

Most of the complex was cleared between 1947 and 1949. A small fragment at the Water Street end survived longer and was marked for demolition in 1958. By then the buildings that had carried the legend had almost entirely disappeared, leaving photographs, recollections and repeated stories to stand in their place.

The honest conclusion

The Goree Piazzas were genuinely bound up with Liverpool’s slave economy. The name came from an African island associated with European slave trading. Businesses connected with slave voyages, plantations and slave-produced commodities operated in the Goree area. An 1805 notice directed a transaction involving plantations and hundreds of enslaved people through a Goree address.

What the available evidence does not support is the familiar claim that enslaved Africans were chained to fixed rings, confined in Goree cellars or exposed for sale beneath the arcades. Real sales occurred elsewhere in Liverpool, and portable restraints for slave ships were sold in the city, but neither fact authenticates the alleged Goree rings.

Absence of evidence cannot prove that no isolated event ever occurred. It does mean that a specific and serious claim should not be repeated as fact without contemporary support. The more accurate account is not an attempt to excuse Liverpool. It replaces one dramatic but unproven scene with evidence showing how deeply slavery’s business penetrated the ordinary commercial life of the port.