[1] Following the Liverpool Blue Coat School's move to another site in 1906, the building was rented from 1907 onwards by the Sandon Studios Society.

The building's future still unsecured, it took the intervention of the architect Charles Herbert Reilly, head of the Liverpool School of Architecture.

He convinced the industrialist William Lever to rent Bluecoat Chambers in 1909 and subsequently buy it, renaming it Liberty Buildings.

[4] Sharing the space with the Sandon Society, Reilly moved in with his School of Architecture from 1909 until shortly after World War I.

The front encloses three sides of a quadrangle and is separated from School Lane by a low wall with railings and gatepiers.

The main door in the centre of the central block has Ionic columns with a broken pediment containing a cartouche of the arms of Liverpool.

These included art exhibitions, debates, discussions, public meetings and campaigns, poetry readings, musical concerts and recitals, and cultural lectures.

The 1908 exhibition of works mostly by members of the Sandon Society also included the first showing in Liverpool of Claude Monet who received a special invite.

[17] In 1911, the Sandon Society took on parts of Roger Fry's London Post-Impressionist exhibition, showing works by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, and Van Gogh for the first time in the UK outside the capital.

[20] During the early summer a display entitled Mr Roscoe's Garden, comprising part of Liverpool's Botanic Collection, was held.

[23] Since the reopening, the galleries have held major exhibitions by John Akomfrah, Mark Leckey, Sonia Boyce, Jonathan Baldock, Bruce Asbestos[24] Keith Piper, Siobhan Davies Dance & Niamh O'Malley, amongst others.