The Foundation Stone of St George’s Hall: A Royal Celebration in Liverpool

Posted on June 30, 2025

On the 28 June 1838, Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s coronation took place at Westminster Abbey. The day was met with festivities and rejoicing across the country. In Liverpool, celebrations began very early with people starting to fire guns and pistols at 3am as a kind of “feu de joie”. A Royal Salute of 21 guns was fired on the waterfront and the parish churches rang their bells beginning 6am.

At 11am the chief feature of the day in Liverpool began: a huge trades procession which was headed by a lorry drawn by 5 horses on which was the foundation stone of St George’s Hall, the music festival building. The procession went from Dale Street, through the main streets of the centre of town and finishing at the site planned for the laying of the foundation stone: the north-east corner which at that time was the yard of an Old Infirmary (near to where the Wellington Column stands today).

📷 A description of the plaque on the foundation stone taken from a page of a book about St George’s Hall by the superintendent of the building in the early 1900s, Henry Jennings (published 1902).

It had been raining for the duration of the procession but as the crowds of 30,000 gathered at the foundation “the blessed sun of heaven shone brightly forth, and… smiled approvingly on the scene”, reported a local newspaper. The stone was lowered into the ground and the Mayor William Rathbone was handed a trowel which he then handed to John Drinkwater, the Grand Master of the Freemasons who completed the ceremony. The Mayor then declared, “I have just received information from the Right Worshipful the Grand Master, that the stone has been laid of St George’s Hall.”

The ceremony ended with the Mayor proposing that the crowd should sing “God Save the Queen” with a shout that would be heard at Windsor!

Despite all of this pomp and ceremony, the laying of the foundation stone may have, in hindsight, been premature; a design for the building had not been selected and the funding for the construction had yet to be secured. In fact, the building we know as St George’s Hall today is a combination of the music building and the law courts, construction began in 1841 and is on a different site to where the foundation stone was laid.

Also, the exact location of the 1838 foundation stone is not known and remains a mystery!