Quote Originally Posted by petromax View Post
The pool was a smelly bank of mud with a thin creek running through it, only navigable at high tide. Ships, or rather boats, beached to unload.



Blocking off the entrance would have kept the tide and boats out; unless the area behind a river wall was dredged, excavated and tidal gates installed, which is more or less how the Old Dock was built (but with three more sides to form quays for loading and unloading). There was no scope to build the Wallasey-sized 'floats'.

The Wirral side was a more natural harbour but was very poorly connected to the rest of the region (being a peninsular)
Building the Old Dock was clearly a partial land reclamation project. The water in the Old Dock was about 20-25% of the total water that the pool could hold for sea going ships and about 10th of the size if all was dredged up to Williamson Square having only smaller boats at the furthest points. The Liver-pool could have been far larger than the Old Dock by dredging and making one long quay around the pool as what happened at Wallasey Pool to create Birkenhead Docks - which was tidal and smelly mud at low tide as well.

Why was Wallasey Pool named "Birkenhead Docks? Odd.