When an office move becomes a statement about the city you love

Alastair Machray, editor-in-chief of the Liverpool Echo

Office moves are a common occurrence for newsrooms as the industry seeks to finds itself a place for the future. Earlier this month, the Liverpool Echo left its waterfront home for new offices across the road. Editor-in-chief Alastair Machray shares the experience of moving across the road, to usher in a new era of publishing for one of the country’s best-known brands

Have you ever seen one of those films showing colliery ponies when they are finally let loose above ground after a lifetime in the mines?

That’s us at the Liverpool Echo. After decades without a window we moved this month into a new office just a stone’s throw (literally) from our old headquarters in Old Hall Street.

Why? Two reasons: firstly it was too big and too expensive. We could take a bottom-line benefit from upping sticks. Secondly, the old place was tatty, tired with its best days behind it ( I know how it feels). We needed something that gave our team the working environment they deserve and our brand the image expected of a rapidly-growing and hugely ambitious and innovative digital business.

The Liverpool Echo’s newsroom had been re-imagined a number of times in recent years as it became digital first

Fair play to our building services team — they found us some super options of which our new home in St Paul’s Square was comfortably the best.

It’s light, bright, new, smart, stylish. But most importantly of all it’s where we need to be: slap bang in the middle of the city we have served proudly since 1879.

I don’t believe in great news brands being out in the sticks or on business parks. I understand that in the challenging times we occupy, it is sometimes the only sensible option.But ideally our brands need to be in the middle of a town or city. Part of the fabric, part of the buzz.

Anyone who has been through this (and that’s most regional journalists now I guess) know how big a project an office move is.

We left a purpose-built newspaper publishing centre that was created to house 1200 people over five floors. We moved 400 people to a multi-department two-floor facility.

The Liverpool Echo’s offices in Old Hall Street reflected the optimism of an industry at its peak in the 1970s — even if windows were in short supply

Back in the early 1970s our old base in Old Hall Street cost us £8.8 million for what was a purpose-built newspaper publishing centre. It was built on the grand scale by a business, Trinity Holdings plc, which was doing incredibly well.

We built something bigger and better than we actually needed in the same way that the great Liverpool entrepreneurs at the turn of the 19th century flaunted their prosperity by building the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building — the Three Graces.

In Old Hall Street we built a cathedral to publishing.

In the Press Hall, which once hummed and rattled beneath our feet, we printed 460,000 newspapers each day at our peak — more than any city outside of London.

From the old offices, the Echo newsroom covered many stories which set the agenda nationally, including Heysel, Hillsborough and the murder of James Bulger

It was a place that witnessed unprecedented change in the publishing industry:

• Broadsheet to tabloid
• Hot metal to cut and paste
• Typewriter to computer/keyboard
• Cut and paste to onscreen make-up
• Print first to digital first

Within its huge wall some of the biggest stories in regional newspaper history played out and were faithfully chronicled:

• Heysel
• Hillsborough
• James Bulger
• Anthony Walker
• The Alder Hey Organ Scandal
• Rhys Jones
• European Capital of Culture

Whether you’d worked there 40 years or 40 days you couldn’t help but be wistful as the last days arrived.

The Echo’s one-time arts critic Joe Riley still comes in, long after retirement, to write a column. He’s the only journalist who has worked in three Echo offices, having had his newsdesk bollockings in the Victoria Street building back in 1969.

For many of us Old Hall Street with its brutalist architecture but wonderfully warm workforce had been a second home. A scene for drama, for warmth, for sadness, for joy, a museum of amazing memories.

Work starts almost immediately to turn it into a swish four-star hotel and I’m thrilled about that. It’s great that the ‘Echo building’ will continue to be a centre-piece of Liverpool’s remarkable renaissance.

The Echo newsroom at 9pm on a Friday — boxes are still being upacked (and there are windows all around)

So here we are in our new home. A week or so in and all is well. The kit works, the personal belongings crates have made it over the road and been reunited with their owners. The light, natural, glorious light, streams in through WINDOWS.

A stream of journalists, helpless as abandoned toddlers, queue at my PA Jayne Middlebrook’s desk with a thousand questions to which she and only she has the resourcefulness and patience to answer.

The meeting room booking system doesn’t work, Darren won’t sit near Carla because she’s too noisy, Jack won’t wear his security pass and the trainee’s smashed the pool car into the wall of the new garage. Tonia’s special chair hasn’t arrived and now her back’s gone and it’s my fault.

It’s starting to feel like home.