The setting may look straight from a thriller or heist movie, but the location is real as a new safety deposit box facility has opened in the Royal Liver Building.
A service allowing private individuals and businesses to safeguard their valuable possessions in a secret vault has been set up in the basement of the famous landmark.
Liverpool Vaults offers 1,000 safe deposit lockers, protected by innovative security and advanced technology, and claims to be the only one of its kind in the city.
The space was once used to guard Royal Liver’s records, but it has now been given a £1 million makeover to transform it into a modernised purpose-built safe deposit box area.
Surveillance technology, such as seismic shock sensors, 24-hour monitoring and biometric identification technology, will protect the vault,. It will be accessed through a process of personal identification, customer codes and digital photo recognition.
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The smaller boxes are intended for the storage of jewellery, cash, valuable coins or CDs, while the larger boxes can store luxury watches, stamp dealers, valuable paperwork or artwork.
Merrion Vaults co-founder, Seamus Fahy, told JMU Journalism: “There was no other safe deposit box facility in Liverpool and our research suggested there would be a strong demand for this. We’ve already received hundreds of enquiries before we opened.
“Banks no longer offer safe deposit boxes – they are closing branches and want their customers online.
The business is run by parent company Merrion Vaults, Europe’s biggest independently-owned safe deposit company.
The Liverpool opening marks the latest move in a series of new ventures for the firm, with vaults already up and running in Glasgow, Newcastle and Dublin.