[Tealeaf]

Right....back to the subject of the warehouse & the 2 questions I originally posed, one of which has been correctly answered by A-B., that the rear design allowed for loads to be moved from/to barge-warehouse-cart in whatever combination neccessary, unlike most other warehouses or wharfs which simply backed on the the canal and loading/unloading was restricted to 2 of the combination.

But the genius of the design does'nt stop there, and that can be seen in the height of the entrance arch, which at first glance appears to waste potential storage space. Some of you, however, may be aware of the concept of "just-in-time-delivery", i.e. where fresh produce is delivered several times daily to ASDA by an artic wagon which draws up & everything is offloaded from the back. But this modern stuff is pretty primitive compared to what the Church Warehouse allowed for.

Look at A-B's last set of piccy's, and the one taken looking up into the roof of the arch. You can clearly see a loading hatch....goods could be hoisted straight up from the back of a lorry and straight into the warehouse. Alternatively, they could be slung to the side and delivered into the first floor loading bays.....all of course, within the shelter of the elements. It all means that a large cart can come in, get unloaded & be reloaded at the same time...as the jargon goes, "minimising turn-around time." I do not think that most modern warehouse storage and lorry delivery systems are yet capable of doing this.

So there we go. We have a fully integrated, flexible, warehouse/storage/transport system which fulfills it's design function and will no doubt look pretty when/if it's all cleaned up. I do not know of any similar Georgian/Victorian industrial building which fulfills it's criteria as well as this, and it certainly puts these modern warehouse white boxes with their multitude of loading bays to shame.