In 2007, Liverpool was 800 years old!
No medieval buildings survive in the city centre but
the ancient street pattern is still there. What follows is a summary of the
city's history, a tour of its seven original streets, now flanked by
Victorian and more recent buildings and a description of some of the new
streets and districts created when the city expanded in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
An outline of the city's history
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 and a port at Meols on the north
Wirral coast. 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 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.
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. 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. In 1651,
Royalists under the Earl of Derby approached by sea but were rebuffed by
Parliamentary ships from Liverpool. Cromwell was in the ascendancy. 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. 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 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.
Rich and poor in a powerful city
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.
By the 1790s Liverpool ships controlled 80% of the British slave trade and
over 40% of the European slave trade. Liverpool ships took manufactured goods
to Africa, then slaves to the Americas and then brought sugar, cotton and rum
back to Liverpool. Liverpool poet, historian and Member of Parliament William
Roscoe was a leader of the campaign which succeeded in abolishing the slave
trade in 1807.
Through the nineteenth century, Liverpool grew to be the second city of the
British Empire, the second port of Britain, a major centre of cotton trading,
imports of food and raw materials, exports of manufactured goods and coal,
shipping, insurance and banking. The world's first passenger railway started
here. 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.
The nine miles of docks on the Liverpool side of the Mersey and the four
miles in Birkenhead constituted Britain's second port. 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 and elsewhere, their passengers using a mainline railway terminal
beside Princes Dock. A much-valued elevated railway, the Overhead, ran the length
of the docks.
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. Liverpool produced pioneers
of social reform. In 1846 Dr Duncan was appointed Britain's first medical
officer of health and began a programme of improvements to water supply,
drainage and living conditions. Kitty Wilkinson pioneered the provision of
public wash houses. Josephine Butler successfully campaigned to free
prostitutes from the harsh penalties to which they but not their clients were
subject. 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, among Britain's
loveliest parks (where one million daffodils were planted a few years ago,
indeed a sight to be seen). 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 600 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. Alas, 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 including Bruch, Beecham, Boult and Sergeant. Augustus John
taught in the Art School. These projects stemmed form the wealth, the
confidence and the determination of the leaders of Britain's second city to
be as good anyone in the world.
