Tsar, I'd like to say I've found the answer but having exhausted search combinations involving Garston, Speke, Factory etc, it's got me well and truly stumped.
The film is a telephoto shot so the depth of field is very compressed, so I think that complex is actually quite some distance beyond and behind the white Bank at the junction at the end.
If you follow the line of view down St Mary's in the film (screen capture below) on satellite view I'm guessing it's probably where that overgrown green patch right in the middle is now, to the right of the old Gas Works. I don't think it's any further away as I think that would put it a bit too close to old Speke aerodrome as it was back then and that thing looks pretty high. Annoyingly, there appears to be some lettering on the side of the building in the film but the resolution is just too low to identify it.
What I did find seriously depressing was the difference in St Mary's back then to how it is now. What was once a bustling road seems to be now just a run down procession of boarded up windows interspersed with the obligatory booze shops, tanning salons and bookies and it's not even as if that's a really old film. Terrible.
Bloody hell, it appears I actually managed to get an image to load!!
Gulley, I've spent a bit of time on your Garston mystery, and I've come to the conclusion that the video has been doctored in some way.
Have a look at the pic below - its a Google maps screen grab of Garston. The dotted line is my best guess at the line of sight in that picture.
As far as i can see, there are only 2 possible sites for that humungous building:
1. The land between Speke Road [new bypass] and Speke Road [original route] i.e. where Woolton carpets is now, right behind the old bank, or
2. On the grassed area over the other side of the railway.
I discounted [1], because I've spoken to a couple of people who lived in Garston for many years [i.e. WW2 until the 90s], and
no-one remembers a building like that on that location. they do remember various factories/works there, but nothing anything like the size of the building in the photo. I cant believe that something that big, right in the middle of Garston would be completely forgotten.
I discounted [2] because even accounting for the foreshortening effect of the lens, if that building is in location 2, then it's a good couple of hundred yards behind the old bank, and so would be a couple of hundred feet high to show up like that from St Mary's Road. Again, that means its absolutely
huge, and surely someone would remember?
Couple of other things that make me a bit suspicious;
1. If you zoom in on the image, the building seems to "pop" from the rest of the picture. I'm no photograpic expert at all, but that part of the image just doesnt look right.
2. I have a 1964 copy of Kelly's [Gores] Directory, and there's nothing listed on St mary's rd or Speke Rd that would account for a building like that.
3. If you look at location 2, you can see the remnants of some old building foundations near the car park on the bottom left. I reckon that's the old Gasworks building, and the building on your image doesnt look like a gasworks to me [or like the many images available on the web of the old Garston gasworks buildings].
4. You cant really extend my dotted line any further, because you end up on Bryant and May land, and apart from the fact that theres no way that building was part of B&M, theres also no way it could be that far away anyway, because then it would have to be about 500ft tall to be spotted from St Marys road like that.
There were a couple of buildings in Garston docks that might have looked like the one shown -the old Ffyfes banana building had long chutes on it, and was very large, and the old salt silos were similar too. Problem is that as far as I can tell, both of these were way over to the right of the building shown, near the railhead on the docks.
I really enjoyed researching this, as I was actually married in St Michaels church [bottom left of my picture below] and lived in Garston for a year when we first got married.
I'll keep having a mooch to see if I turn anything else up on the subject.
Oh, and you're quite right about the state of St Mary's Road now. That bypass killed Garston-real shame.
