Early days
Six large pieces of sandstone, between one and two and a half metres high, the Calderstones, are the earliest signs of human activity in Liverpool. There are few records of Liverpool's existence before 1207. The Romans were apparently never here, although they had a legionary base at Chester, twenty miles away, a quarry at Storeton in Wirral, a port at Meols on the north Wirral coast and settlements east of the city. Liverpool is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, the register of land made for King William I in 1086. But other habitations which have now been incorporated into modern Liverpool and its suburbs were mentioned in this record, including Crosby, Litherland, Bootle, Walton, Kirkdale, Wavertree, Toxteth and Esmedun (which became Smithdown).
King John wanted a port from which to send troops to Ireland, a port independent of nearby Chester, which was too much under the control of its powerful and independent-minded Earl. On 23 August 1207, he issued letters-patent which resulted soon afterwards in the little fishing hamlet of Liverpool becoming a borough. John invited people to come to settle in his new township and offered them tax concessions and land to do so. His agents laid out seven streets to accommodate them. While several Earls of Sefton were constables of the royal castle, the Earls of Derby had their own fortified building, the Tower on the river front.
Around this time, the Norman Baron Roger de Poitou, who controlled the southern part of the County of Lancaster, created a deer park of some 2,300 acres in the Toxteth and Smithdown areas, to the south of the hamlet of Liverpool. Tradition has it that the remains of a hunting lodge from medieval times survive in a property near modern Lodge Lane, but apart from Speke Hall, an Elizabethan "black-and-white" house in the suburbs near the airport, the Bluecoat School and several churches, there are few buildings dating back to the seventeenth century or earlier in the modern city.
The Civil War touched Liverpool, as it did most parts of the kingdom. Liverpool was at first occupied by the Royalists. A ship brought Parliamentary forces into the Mersey in 1643. They took the church and set up a defensive position on the line of Dale Street. The town was then garrisoned under Colonel John Moore for the Parliamentary side, with gun batteries along the line of modern Paradise Street and Whitechapel and fortifications from Old Hall Street to the Dale Street bridge over the Pool (situated where the entrance to the Birkenhead Tunnel was created centuries later). Liverpool men attacked Birkenhead. In 1644 Prince Rupert set out to take the town from a base in Everton Village and set up cannons where Lime Street now is. The Parliamentary Roundheads counterattacked and took the town back. In 1651, Royalists under the Earl of Derby approached by sea but were rebuffed by Parliamentary ships from Liverpool. In 1654 the defensive gates at the ends of the streets and the mud fortifications were taken down and the Dale Street bridge repaired. William Stanley, brother of the Earl of Derby, was elected to Parliament for the town in 1660 and assisted in the restoration of King Charles II.
Commerce and civic administration continued through this period. In 1654, Liverpool's first attempt at street lighting was undertaken. Lanterns set up at two of the crosses which graced street intersections. (One was the High Cross, where Exchange Flags now is, and the other the White Cross, at the modern junction of Old Hall Street and Tithebarn Street. (There is now no trace of either of these Crosses nor of St Patrick's Cross, at the top of Tithebarn Street, nor the Town-end Cross in Byrom Street).
Chester's misfortune in the silting up of the river Dee was Liverpool's gain. By the seventeenth century, maritime trade was moving down the Dee to Shotwick, then to Neston and Parkgate. Later, ships unloaded in the Hoyle Lake, a sheltered part of the sea opposite modern Hoylake on the north Wirral coast, their goods going on towards Liverpool by barge or cart. In the mid-seventeenth century the little port by the Pool of Liverpool was getting bigger but there were still only about 300 houses in the seven streets with a population of around 1,500.
In 1666, the Antelope, financed by Liverpool men, sailed for Barbados and returned the next year with a cargo of sugar. Transatlantic trade grew from this modest start. The population also grew, reaching 6,000 by 1708. In 1715 a four-acre enclosed commercial dock, the world's first, designed by Thomas Steers, was brought into use. It became known later as the Old Dock.
More trade and more docks followed, the population rising to 34,407 in 1790 and 77,653 in 1801.
Georgian and Victorian power, wealth and poverty
Merchants became wealthy, partly through the slave trade and from privateering (government supported piracy against enemy ships). The first known slave ship here was the Liverpool Merchant which took 220 African slaves to Barbados in 1699. Liverpool ships took manufactured goods to Africa, then slaves to the Americas and then brought sugar, cotton and rum back to Liverpool.
Through the nineteenth century, Liverpool grew to be the second city of the British Empire and the second port of Britain. The world's first passenger railway started here in 1830, running through Edge Hill, where there is a small museum, to Manchester. At the end of its seventh century as a chartered borough Liverpool conducted a third of Britain's exports and a quarter of its imports. It owned a third of Britain's shipping and a seventh of the registered shipping of the world. There were nine miles of docks on the Liverpool side of the Mersey and four in Birkenhead. Ships plied between Liverpool and all parts of the world. Passenger liners, including the Cunard and White Star vessels and the Empresses, had regular services to the United States, Canada and elsewhere. Their passengers used a mainline railway terminal beside Princes Dock, alongside the modern Crowne Plaza hotel. A much-valued elevated railway, the Overhead, ran the length of the docks.
Liverpool's wealth was amazing, even outstripping, on a per head basis, that of London at certain times. But not everyone shared in this and for many, not least the 300,000 Irish who came here during the potato famine, living conditions were truly dreadful. At 100,000 people per sq mile, Liverpool was the most densely populated town in England. The mortality was unparalleled – one in every 25 people were stricken with fever in one year. Following the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, the city was obliged to tackle the problem of there being 1,200 thieves under the age of 15 and 3,600 prostitutes in the town.
In the face of these circumstances, Liverpool produced several great pioneers of social reform. Dr William Duncan was the country's first Medical Officer of Health. He brought about major improvements in water supply and sewerage. Kitty Wilkinson pioneered public wash houses for the poor. Guide Dogs for the Blind were first organised in Wallasey, just across the Mersey. Agnes Jones was pioneer of the training of nurses. Monsignor James Nugent was one of the first to run homes for destitute children, Josephine Butler successfully fought to end the harsh punishment of prostitutes, sometimes inflicted on women who were totally innocent.
Far worse, of course, than the plight of Liverpool's own poor was the lot of the slaves taken in Liverpool's ships from Africa to the Caribbean and the United States. Towards the end of the eighteenth century about three quarters of all European slaving ships left from Liverpool. Overall, Liverpool ships transported half of the three million Africans transported across the Atlantic in British ships. . One of the slave ship captains was John Newton who wrote "Amazing grace" having left slavery and become a vicar in the Midlands. The slave trade changed the ethnic geography of the world, transplanting thousands from one continent to another. Liverpool MP William Roscoe was probably second to William Wilberforce in fighting for the abolition of this trade a campaign which was successful in 1807.
At the turn of the century there were 80,000 Welsh speakers in the city. Some people still view Liverpool as the second city of Wales. There were also large numbers of Scots, Scandinavians, Jews, Germans and of course even greater numbers of Irish. Others recall that some years ago there were more Somalis in Liverpool than in any other city except Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. Before the terrible blitzkrieg of 1941, many of the city’s 22,000 Chinese were concentrated in the area below the Anglican Cathedral. Many of their descendants of these Chinese still live in the city and its suburbs.
This cocktail of people gave rise to the city's wealth and to its poverty and suffering. It sustains its humour and may account for the astonishing number of showbiz “greats” who were born or lived in the city, not only the Beatles, but Gerry and the Pacemakers (whose favourite song "You'll never walk alone" is sung at every Liverpool football match), Frankie Vaughan, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, Cilla Black, Jimmy Tarbuck, Derek Guyler, Derek Nimmo, Rex Harrison, Rob Wilton, Ken Dodd, Lita Roza Billy Fury, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Zutons, Ted Ray, Rita Tushingham, Roger McGough, Ricky Tomlinson, John Peel, Freddie Starr, Kim Cattrall, Paul O’Grady, Alexei Sayle, Anne Robinson, Paul Raymond and many others.
The city grew and spread north, south and east in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across the dock road and behind the warehouses lining it were built thousands of small terraced houses, back-to-backs (which had no exit from the rear and usually no indoor sanitation) and the infamous courts in which one toilet and one water tap served the ten or a dozen families living around the tiny courtyard.
Further up the hill, away from the malodorous town centre, the rich merchants lived in luxurious mansions, villas and terraces. Some of the finest houses for the merchants were around Sefton Park, one of Britain's loveliest parks. The wealth of some of the merchants was staggering. One mansion had tableware for banquets when the merchant owner entertained clients made entirely of solid silver including cutlery, plates and drinking vessels.
Liverpool became the greatest centre of the arts in Britain outside the capital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The University of Liverpool was created in 1903, absorbing an earlier college. The building of the immense Anglican Cathedral started in 1903. It took until 1974 to complete. It is the largest Anglican building in the world and the fifth largest cathedral of any denomination. Its length is 619 feet compared with 510 for St Paul's in London and 715 for St Peter's in Rome. In 1933, construction of a Roman Catholic Cathedral began. This would have been even larger than the Anglicans' plans. Only the crypt was ever completed but a new Cathedral of a different design was completed in 1967. Prestigious buildings for an art gallery, a museum, a public library and a concert hall were built. The "greats" of British music played in the Philharmonic Hall with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra including Bruch, Beecham, Boult and Sergeant. Augustus John taught in the Art School. These projects stemmed from the wealth, the confidence and the determination of the leaders of Britain's second city to be as good anyone in the world.
Decline and rebirth
The start of World War I in 1914 saw the beginning of a decline in Liverpool's fortunes. The passenger liners moved to Southampton, which had better tidal conditions, but were themselves later superseded by air travel. Liverpool's substantial banking and insurance businesses moved to London as part of the general concentration of the nation's business leadership in the capital. World War II brought death and destruction to Liverpool. Large numbers of Liverpool seafarers were killed and much of the central area was destroyed by German bombs, especially in May 1941. Liverpool was the most bombed British city apart from the capital. But the port remained open, the only British port to stay open throughout the war.
In the later part of the twentieth century, more docks were built but the mechanisation of dock work meant that, while currently handling as much tonnage as ever in its history, the port now employs only a few hundred people instead of the 15,000 who once worked in it. Industrial plants such as Tate & Lyle's sugar refinery and Meccano of Dinky toys and Hornby trains fame were closed. (Henry Tate and Frank Hornby were Liverpool men). On the plus side, a second tunnel under the Mersey was created. New industry preferred to be in the southeast of England and successive governments favoured the south east for the headquarters of the growing number of public sector departments. The population of the city fell from nearly 800,000 in the 1940s to about 450,000 as the twentieth first century dawned. Some people had moved to residential areas just outside the city, others had gone further. Now the population is beginning to rise again, amidst controversy concerning government schemes to demolish and replace older houses rather than refurbish what is already there.
The twentieth century saw re-housing in the suburbs, much of it in council-controlled estates, the earlier ones of good standard, the later ones less satisfactory. Many of the mid-twentieth century blocks of flats were so bad that they have since been demolished. The condition of many of the houses built in Victorian times for the rich had seriously deteriorated. Many were torn down. Others are now being refurbished. Housing for Liverpool people and industrial estates spilled over into neighbouring boroughs.
National policy was slow to tackle the decline in this and other northern areas. Britain's expanded commercial and political links with other European Union countries made matters even more difficult. The success of the Liverpool and Everton football clubs and the rise of the Beatles and a other pop groups seemed to be all that sustained Liverpool in the 1960s and 70s. (Over the years, Liverpool football club is top equal in the number of times it has been League Champions, 3rd as winners of the European Cup, 4th as FA Cup winners and top as winners of the League Cup. Everton have won the European Cup once, the League title nine times and the FA Cup five times). Yet despite these morale boosters, severe riots broke out in the Toxteth area of the city in 1981 drawing attention to the city's plight.
There followed the government supported International Garden Festival of 1984 and the beginning of important financial assistance from the European Union's Regional Development Fund. Most of the south docks, which had been closed, were redeveloped into offices, apartments, houses and a marina. The Albert Dock, Britain’s largest Grade I listed building, was refurbished and a branch of The Tate, a Beatles museum and a range of leisure and retail businesses established there. A corner was being turned.
European Capital of Culture 2008
In the early years of the twenty first century, new growth was much stronger, assisted by the Year of Heritage in 2007, which threw more light on the greatness of much of the city’s past. Then came the city’s year as European Capital of Culture. This attracted visitors to the city in unprecedented numbers, brought considerable international media attention and gave the people of the city new pride and confidence.
The year saw the completion of a number of major construction programs and a general tidying up of the city. Among work completed was a major and very attractive new shopping area, Liverpool One, bordered by Lord Street, Church Street, Hanover Street and the Dock Road (Wapping). A visitor centre was created in St George’s Hall, which was itself beautifully refurbished. A large and very successful conference and exhibition centre, the Arena, was constructed beyond the Albert Dock. A new museum, the Victoria Gallery, was created within the University of Liverpool, in what was the original “red brick” university building. At the Roman Catholic Cathedral a direct route from the main Cathedral into the Lutyens crypt, now frequently used for exhibitions, was created. The Anglican Cathedral created a new café and improved visitor facilities. A dozen or more new hotels have been built and have achieved high occupancy rates. A new ferry terminal was built at the Pier Head. Work was started on a new Museum of Liverpool just up river from the Pier Head. Improvements were made at Lime Street station, coinciding with completion of faster train services to London. Much of the shopping area was resurfaced and improvements made to various public facilities. Liverpool airport has built up strong business with budget airlines and now has a scheduled service to Amsterdam, making that city a better gateway to Liverpool for many overseas visitors than taking the train to London and going out to Heathrow. A number of major high-quality office buildings have been built.
