The seven original streets and their surroundings
Much of the city's retail and commercial activities are still concentrated around the seven streets laid out by King John's agents all those years ago. The area where the Pool once was and the edge of the Mersey where the Liver Building now stands are still the key to understanding the city's history. Despite the fact that hardly any buildings more than about two hundred years old are to be seen there, a tour of the seven streets and their surroundings is a good basis for understanding the city's history.
High Street
The High Street ran north-south where Exchange Flags, behind the Town Hall, is now situated. (The city's merchants made their deals on The Flags). It was once known as Juggler Street, after the French word jongleur, meaning street musician or player. The present magnificent Town Hall was completed in 1797, replacing earlier structures. The Town Hall is used for Council meetings and for official and private functions. It is still the Town Hall, despite Liverpool having been made a City in 1880.
Old Hall Street
Going north from the Town Hall, continuing the line of the old High Street, is Old Hall Street Street. It was around here that, in the Civil War in 1644, the victorious Royalists entered the town aided by a traitor to the Parliamentarian cause who broke part of the protective earth fortification that skirted the north side of the town. The powerful Moore family had a house here. It was renamed the Old Hall when the family moved to Bankhall, a couple of miles further north, now best known for its Merseyrail station. Sir John Moore was one of the sureties for the two burgesses elected to Parliament in 1295. Sir Peter de la Moore was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1377.
When Old Hall Street was first extended through open country towards Bootle, there was much noise from a colony of frogs - which became known as "Bootle organs". In Edmund Street, off Old Hall Street, was the home of the Rev. John Newton who captained a slave ship in 1752 and 1753, later became an Anglican clergyman in Northamptonshire and later still in London. He wrote "Amazing Grace".
Castle Street
Going south from the Town Hall is Castle Street, running along a ridge of land which becomes a promontory between the broad river Mersey and the site a tributary known as the Pool. At the southern end of this ridge, overlooking the Pool, a royal Castle was built around 1234. This was taken down just after 1700. The Queen Victoria monument and the hotel entitled “62 Castle Street” are now on the site of the castle. Some of the castle's dungeons still exist underground. New indications of where the castle stood are now being provided. In Castle Street opposite the NatWest bank is the stump of the sanctuary stone, beyond which fugitives were safe.
Water Street
Going west from the Town Hall is Water Street, originally called Bonke (Bank) Street, leading down to the Mersey. Now lined with superb examples of Victorian commercial architecture, for most of the Middle Ages the street led to The Tower erected about 1252, on whose site Tower Buildings now stands. The Tower was taken down in 1820. This was for many years the property of the Earls of Derby, major local landlords for most of the city's history. In a sense, The Tower rivalled the royal castle, of which the other major local landowners, the Molyneux family, later Earls of Sefton, were Constables for a time.
Across the bottom of Water Street is the Goree, named after an island off the coast of West Africa where slaves were traded in the eighteenth century. The slave trade, politely known in Liverpool as the African Trade, was one of the major sources of Liverpool's wealth in the eighteenth century.
Alongside the Pier Head waterfront are the Three Graces - the monumental Royal Liver, Cunard and Mersey Docks buildings which are recognised world-wide as the symbol of maritime Liverpool. The new Museum of Liverpool is being built alongside.
Dale Street
Going east from the Town Hall lies Dale Street, once the main road out of Liverpool. King John and later monarchs gave plots of land here to boost the population. The street later had many inns, from some of which, from the mid-1700s, stage coaches departed for other towns, passing across the bridge over the Pool where the entrance to the Birkenhead Tunnel (the world’s longest under water tunnel when it was constructed) is now situated and continuing up London Road towards Prescot. In Dale Street was born George Stubbs (1724-1806), England's most celebrated painter of horses. He used to dissect horses muscle by muscle to understand the mechanics of their walking, trotting and galloping.
Chapel Street
Parallel with Water Street and to the north of it is Chapel Street. At the bottom of Chapel Street is the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas (the patron saint of sailors). It was built around 1360. In those times, the Mersey washed the west wall of the churchyard. The Church has been much altered since, most recently after suffering severe damage in the 1941 onslaught on Liverpool by German war planes. Before St Nicholas was built, there was a little chapel called St Mary Del Key on this site. It contained four altars, one being a large white statue of Mary, mother of Jesus. As St Nicholas Church was enlarged, it took over the site of the chapel. Liverpool was made a separate parish, carved out of the parish of Walton, a village 3 miles north, in 1699. It was given two rectors and two parish churches, one being St Nicholas. The other, St George's, was consecrated in 1734, having been built on the site of the then recently demolished castle.
Tithebarn Street
Parallel with Dale Street and to the north of it is Tithebarn Street, originally known as Moor Street, referring to the type of terrain through which it ran. This was the other main way out of town, in a northerly direction. The tithe-barn, in which Sir William Molyneux stored the tithe (one tenth of their produce which local farmers had to pay to him), may have stood where Tempest Hey joins Tithebarn Street. At the top of Tithebarn Street was St Patrick's Cross, named after the spot where in the year 432, according to local legend, St Patrick preached before taking Christianity to Ireland.
Georgian and Victorian areas outwards the old town centre
From the 1700s, the town started to grow. Lord Street was laid down, running east from the site of the Castle. It took its title from Lord Molyneux of the family which became Earls of Sefton. Where Lord Street joins modern Paradise Street a bridge was built over the Pool in 1672. When the building in which McDonald's is now situated was built after the devastation of World War II, the remains of an old bridge were found deep underground.
After the bridge over the Pool was built, a new street called Church Street was laid down and named after St Peter's Church which stood for over a century until 1922 where Top Shop now is. A brass cross is set into the pavement outside the shop to mark the site. The Athenaeum (older than its namesake in London!), moved in 1922 from its original building in Church Street to a new building on the site of the churchyard site. St Peter's was temporarily the Anglican Cathedral after Liverpool was made a diocese in 1880, while plans for the present Cathedral were being drawn up. When Church Street was widened at this point in Victorian times, graves had to be moved. It was found that water flowing underground had turned some of bodies in them to stone. This water was flowing from the Moss Lakes which were in the area where the main part of the University of Liverpool is now situated. Water from these lakes still flows, from a fountain in St James' Garden behind the Anglican Cathedral.
From the junction of Lord Street and Church Street, Whitechapel and Paradise Street go north and south, built over the upper part of the Pool. Whitechapel, so named because of a nearby chapel, led up to the old bridge over the Pool at the bottom of Dale Street. It was originally called Frog Lane because of a colony of frogs there. It had a reputation for being a place of "ill repute". Paradise Street was named after a London street where Thomas Steers, who built the first dock, once lived. It led down towards Canning Place where a large, domed Victorian classical building housed the Customs & Excise until it was destroyed by bombs in World War II. Paradise Street is now the centre of one of the biggest retail developments in Europe, Liverpool One.
At the top of Church Street once stood the Waterloo Hotel. Garibaldi, who led Italy to independence, once stayed there on his way to New York. Church Street and Ranelagh Street lead to the Adelphi Hotel, visited in the days of transatlantic travel by liner by an amazing cast list of the great and famous and more recently in the BBC docu-soap “Hotel”.
From the Dale Street bridge over the Pool, roads lead north along Scotland Road, east towards London Road and south east to Lime Street. Scotland Road was built in the eighteenth century as a new route to the north, one of two original turnpike (i.e. toll) roads out of the town. Scotland Road became the focal point of Irish immigration into Liverpool. (In 1847/48, 300,000 Irish people came a the twelve month period, some going on to the United States, others remaining in the city.) Their story is commemorated in St Anthony's Catholic Church in Scotland Road, where many thousands of Irish descendants are buried in graves beneath the Church. Another beautiful Church whose parish was the largest Catholic parish in England, St Francis Xavier, is up the hill from here, off Shaw Street.
The streets off Scotland Road were places of terrible poverty. Thousands lived in stinking courts and mean terraced houses many of the men working in the city’s nine miles of docks and in industries associated with them. The houses where Irish and other immigrants lived spread eastwards up Everton Heights, where in the previous century merchants lived in large villas with well-tended gardens and orchards. The graveyard of St George's Church at the top of the hill commemorates some of them. Scotland Road itself was the scene of much evening drunkenness and violence until well into the twentieth century. It saw many clashes between the Protestant and Roman Catholic communities which continued until World War and the clearance of bad housing in the 1960s, when people were moved to new estates on the outskirts of the city. Since the 1960s, sectarianism has largely ceased to exist in Liverpool and the city, under the leadership of successive Roman Catholic Archbishops, Anglican Bishops and Free Church clergy has become a model of co-operation between different parts of the Christian Church, in which representatives of other faiths are also involved.
The continuation of Dale Street after Scotland Road is William Brown Street (named after a former Lord Mayor). Further on this becomes London Road, for centuries the main way out of town. On the left of William Brown Street several potteries once stood, Liverpool ware being well known here and in America. The magnificent buildings on this site now - the newly refurbished World Museum Liverpool, the Central Library which houses the Liverpool Record Office and the Walker Art Gallery, make a vista of nineteenth century classical architecture with few rivals. (The Record Office is the the busiest in Britain outside London is to be redeveloped and expanded in 2010 and much of the material in it digitised). Across the road is St John's Gardens and behind them is St George's Hall, said to be the finest nineteenth century Greco-Roman building in Britain. It contains a magnificent concert Hall and rooms built as law courts and used as such until a few years ago.
On the right of Scotland Road around St George's Hall - in St John's Gardens and facing Lime Street - is a superb collection of statues. One is of William Ewart Gladstone, one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers, born in 1809 in Rodney Street, Liverpool, near the Philharmonic Hall. Another statue is of Benjamin Disraeli, another Victorian Prime Minister, whose Conservative Party had strong support in Liverpool for many decades and who described the city as the second city of the British Empire. A plaque in St John's Garden commemorates French prisoners who were buried there in the eighteenth century when the site was occupied by a church. They had been prisoners taken by Liverpool privateers, government-approved pirates who plundered the ships of enemy countries.
Lime Street was first called Limekiln Lane, from the lime works there. These were closed in 1804 because of the health hazard which they caused. Nearby, cock fights, dog fights and bare knuckle boxing used to take place. On Shrove Tuesday it was the custom to turn cockerels loose in the presence of boys who had their hands tied behind their backs to prevent them seizing the cocks except with their teeth.
Opposite St George’s Hall is the Empire Theatre, home of plays, variety shows, opera and ballet and Lime Street Station, which once has the largest single span roof in the country. Beyond that are two superb Victorian pubs, the Crown and the Vine, and the Adelphi Hotel.
