Across the Universe | Stanley Dock, Liverpool — the inland dock that stood in for Jude's Mersey

Jesse Hartley cut this dock backwards. Every other basin in Liverpool pushes out toward the river; Stanley Dock, opened on 4 August 1848, was dug inland, behind the line of the quay, so that the Leeds–Liverpool Canal could drop down through its lock flight and meet the sea trade without ever touching the Mersey current. Stand on the cobbles now and you feel that inversion — the water sits in a stone trench, walled in on all sides, the sky reduced to a rectangle above the granite.

Then there is the warehouse. Built between 1897 and 1901, the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse is a brick cliff, fourteen storeys of load-bearing masonry laid up out of something on the order of twenty-seven million bricks, long claimed as the largest brick building in the world. It has the blank, repetitive window grid of pure utility, and at certain hours the whole west face turns the colour of dried blood.

This is the Liverpool that Julie Taymor's film needed. Jude begins the story as a dockyard boy from a port city that made its living hauling other people's cargo, and Merseyside's own film-location guides list Stanley Dock among the sites the production used — the same stone the crews of Sherlock Holmes, Captain America and Peaky Blinders have since worn down. Nothing here was dressed up to look period. It already was.

Come in from Regent Road, north of the city centre, past the dock wall. The Titanic Hotel and the Rum Warehouse occupy the restored South Stanley block, so there is coffee and a way in off the street, and the great tobacco hulk stands opposite, still empty, still waiting. Walk to the lock gates at the canal end and look back along the water. The frame you are standing in is the one the camera used: brick on three sides, one strip of grey Liverpool sky, and no horizon at all.