A fourteen storey brick tobacco warehouse over a dock basin, and the walkways Peaky Blinders used as the street outside the Garrison pub.
What Stanley Dock looks like
The rises fourteen storeys over the dock basin, its red brick piers divided by rows of small windows and darker brick infill panels. TOBACCO WAREHOUSE is spelled out in raised brick lettering across the top cornice. Built in 1900 and 1901 from about 27 million bricks, it has a floor area of roughly 1.6 million square feet, said to be the largest brick warehouse in the world by that measure. It was converted into apartments between 2015 and 2021. A glazed arcade now runs the length of its ground floor, with entrances set behind slim black piers facing the quay.
The older quay warehouses on the north side of the dock are five storeys, with round arched window openings and a colonnade of columns at ground level. One of them is now the , its arcade glazed in behind the columns, with a pontoon walkway and mooring berths running out over the water. To the south of the Tobacco Warehouse, the Stanley Warehouse still stands derelict. Its window openings are boarded over or left open to the weather, with scaffolding up one corner.
A bascule bridge crosses the dock's western entrance, where meets . runs along the south side, past stone gate piers and a small lodge building at the entrance gates. A stone plaque reading STANLEY DOCK 1848 is set into the quay wall. A branch canal off the dock connects to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal by a staircase of four locks, eighty feet apart.
Shot in Stanley Dock
In the BBC series Peaky Blinders, the walkways outside the Tobacco Warehouse played the street outside the Garrison pub for the season one finale's showdown between Tommy Shelby and Billy Kimber. The dock's quayside has also stood in for other cities on screen, playing 1940s New York docks in the first Captain America film and London's Thames warehouses in Sherlock Holmes.
Peaky Blinders, Series 1
The Tobacco Warehouse walkways
Played the street outside the Garrison pub
The walkways along the warehouse's quay played the street outside the Garrison pub for the season one finale's showdown between Tommy Shelby and Billy Kimber. The Tobacco Warehouse was still a derelict shell when the series filmed, before its conversion into flats between 2015 and 2021.
Red Hook still has whole blocks of turn of the century brick warehouses standing right at the water's edge, close to the same run of storeys as Stanley Dock's own quay buildings. The waterfront there is worked rather than landscaped, with loading doors and blank brick walls facing the docks. Red Hook's warehouses sit closer together and mostly run lower than fourteen storeys, so a shot needs to stay tight on one or two buildings to hold the match. Try searching brick warehouses at the water now.
Speicherstadt in Hamburg, Germany
Hamburg's Speicherstadt is the same idea at a bigger scale, red brick warehouses built directly over the water with loading doors facing the canals instead of a road. The wall of matching brick fronts reads the same way from the water as Stanley Dock's own quay. The canals are narrower than Stanley Dock's basin and the buildings carry pointed gables the Tobacco Warehouse does not, so a shot straight down a waterway holds the match better than a wide dock view. Try searching red brick warehouses over water now.
The Royal Docks still carry isolated brick warehouse blocks standing alone against open water and sky, the same kind of unbroken wall the Tobacco Warehouse has. Millennium Mills is the closest match, a single derelict block with nothing else crowding the frame. Newer flats and a cable car now stand around the Royal Docks, so a frame has to exclude the skyline behind the warehouse to hold the period. Try searching derelict brick warehouse block now.
