Mathew Street & the Cavern Club

The street was originally called Mathew Pluckington Street, after a Liverpool merchant, and for generations it was the heart of the city’s wholesale fruit and vegetable trade.

Beneath one of the fruit warehouses, a cellar that had served as an air-raid shelter in the war opened on 16 January 1957 as the Cavern Club, a jazz venue whose first act was the Merseysippi Jazz Band. As beat music took over, the Beatles became regulars: they played the Cavern 292 times, from 9 February 1961 to 3 August 1963.

In 1973 British Rail compulsorily bought the warehouses for a Merseyrail ventilation shaft that was never built. The club closed on 28 May 1973, the buildings came down and the cellar was filled with their rubble. A reconstruction opened in 1984, and the present club has been run by Bill Heckle and Dave Jones since 11 July 1991.

Across the street, Eric’s opened in 1976 and became one of the north’s key punk and post-punk clubs in the four years it ran. Arthur Dooley’s sculpture Four Lads Who Shook the World looks down on the street, and a statue of Carl Jung recalls his line that “Liverpool is the pool of life”.