There has been a theatre on this corner since 15 October 1866, when the New Prince of Wales Theatre and Opera House opened with what was then the largest auditorium in Liverpool. Nine months later, in July 1867, it changed its name to the Royal Alexandra in honour of the new Princess of Wales. It ran successfully for nearly sixty years, hosting the great variety performers of the Victorian and Edwardian stage — Dan Leno, the king of music-hall comedy; George Formby Sr., father of the more famous ukulele-strumming son; Florrie Forde, the Australian singer who could fill a hall with "Down at the Old Bull and Bush." By the early 1920s the building was no longer big enough. On 16 February 1924 the Royal Alexandra closed its doors for the last time. The next day the demolition crews moved in. Within fifteen months a new theatre rose from the cleared site.

The brothers W. and T. R. Milburn designed the new Empire for Moss Empires, the powerful music-hall chain that operated theatres across Britain. They built it on a steel frame faced in Portland stone, in a free Neoclassical style — five bays across the front, the central three rising to an attic above the lateral pair, paired Ionic columns flanking the recessed balcony windows. Inside, E. O. Griffiths carved the auditorium ornament. The seating layout was unusually steep, raked sharply to give every patron a clear sightline to the stage. The first production in the new building was a musical comedy called Better Days, starring Stanley Lupino, and the place was full. Liverpool in 1925 still had the money and the audiences to fill 2,348 seats night after night. The Empire would be the city's largest live venue for the next century, never bettered.

In 1957 a local schoolboy skiffle group called the Quarrymen, fronted by a 16-year-old John Lennon, appeared at the Empire. Nobody noticed them much. They came back in 1959 calling themselves Johnny and the Moondogs, and again nobody noticed them much. They returned a third time in 1962, by which point they were the Beatles, had just signed with EMI, and were about to upend popular music. The Empire was their hometown stage — the room where the boys who had grown up around Lime Street and the docks finally played to a Liverpool audience as something more than a club act. Through the 1970s and 1980s the Empire booked everyone. Led Zeppelin played there. Queen. Kate Bush in 1979, on her one and only concert tour, treating a Lime Street audience to the choreography of "Wuthering Heights" in full Victorian dress. AC/DC. Black Sabbath. Iron Maiden. Cilla Black, the Scouse girl who became Britain's biggest TV personality of the 1970s. Shirley Bassey. Elton John. The room held them all.

Every Victorian theatre worth visiting has its ghost story, and the Empire keeps two. The first is Len, a former scenic painter who is said to walk the upper levels and occasionally be glimpsed by stagehands during late get-outs. The second is a girl of about nine or ten in Victorian dress, sometimes seen sitting alone in the circle, sometimes drifting down the centre aisle. Neither has ever been recorded saying anything; they keep to the corners of long evenings, as theatre ghosts traditionally do. The living have been more vocal. Two Royal Command Performances took place at the Empire in the 1970s, royalty coming north from London because no London theatre had the seating capacity. Today the Empire is part of the Ambassador Theatre Group and stages everything from the West End musical tours to opera and even professional wrestling. Each summer, a Stage Experience programme produces a full musical with local teenagers — Summer Holiday in 2007, The Wiz in 2008, working through Bugsy Malone, Fame, West Side Story, Annie, Grease, Cats, and Rent. It is, by some margin, the largest single-stage producing theatre in north-west England. The auditorium has not been bettered. The ghosts, presumably, are pleased.