Landscapes Archives • Historic Liverpool

Parkgate, Wirral

Parkgate is a small town on the western coast of Wirral, facing across the Dee to Wales, and downstream from Chester. It’s popular with people from the region for days out (and home to a famouse ice cream parlour!). But it’s not widely known that Parkgate not only has a history to rival that of […]

Black and white photo of Lime Street and St George's Plateau, Liverpool

Five postcards from Georgian Liverpool

A good friend of mine recently sent me a handful of postcards he’d found, showing photos of Liverpool in the first quarter of the 20th century. He’d house-sat for me and noticed my existing collection, in a folder on a bookshelf, and I don’t know whether he checked, but he managed to get some that […]

Liverpool University and its Institutional Landscape

The area coming to be known as Liverpool’s Knowledge Quarter (how many quarters can one city have?) has distinct landscape characteristics. The university is just one resident in a neighbourhood of academic and other institutions. The excellent Building a Better Society (2008, hard copy from Hive; download free PDF) by Colum Giles highlighted these. The […]

Photograph of Prince's Dock, Liverpool, looking north

Postcards from Edwardian Liverpool

Recently, I was contacted by Monica Lewis who had found a collection of postcards belonging to her grandfather. He was in the Navy in the First World War, and Monica thinks these postcards (amongst many from other parts of the world) were accumulated over the course of his career. She’d like me to share these […]

Photograph of entrance to Kazimier's pub garden

Breathing Spaces, or A Sense of Placed

My interest in landscape is not just restricted to history and archaeology. I’m just as interested in the modern urban landscape (of Liverpool in the case of this blog), because it’s the product of everything that went before. Archaeologists recognise the ‘layers’ of landscape development as truly as they see the ordered layers in the […]

Photo of St George's Hall, Liverpool, with CGI enhancements

The City and the City and the Liverpool Landscape

This website is all about the historic landscape. It’s about how the landscape shapes what happens in the city, and it’s about the landscapes that we invent by living in it. Just think of the ‘Knowledge Quarter’ and the ‘Cavern Quarter’. Though they’re sickly marketing-gimmick names they do acknowledge some of the character that certain […]

A traveller to the Pool

The town grew up around a ‘dark pool’, from which is took its name. The pool flowed into a wide river which would one day be famous across the globe, almost synonymous with the town. The river in turn empties into the Irish Sea, for a long time an important trading route both east-west and […]

Paton Street, Kirkdale, in aerial photos and maps

A question came in back in October 2016, looking for information on Paton Street in Kirkdale. I couldn’t find out any information on this myself, as there were few clues. However, Phil D came to the rescue recently with some aerial photos (truly a rarity!) and some maps to locate ourselves with. Go to the […]

Photo of the entrance Bryn Celli Ddu burial chamber

Neolithic Anglesey and the Merseyside connection – a trip with the NSG

Anglesey and North Wales are very close to Liverpool hearts. Countless Welsh builders helped create some of our inner suburbs in distinctive yellow brick, and the red bricks of the University are Welsh too. More recently, there can’t be many Scousers who haven’t had a day trip or two to Llandudno, Conwy or Beaumaris. On […]

Plan of Port Sunlight from 1914

Port Sunlight: traces of nature in the man-made landscape

Port Sunlight is a classic and easy-to-read ‘landscape’, in the sense that word is used on this site: it was created in one quick phase, for one purpose, obliterating everything that came before it. And what’s more, it’s seems to have changed little since it was created. Or is that really the case? William Hesketh […]

Aerial view of Croxteth Hall, taken in 1954

Croxteth Park from the air

Having written about Liverpool history for a while now, I’m lucky enough to be copied in to a lot of interesting tid-bits of the city’s past. This happened recently when Croxteth Park’s Twitter account posted several aerial shots from the middle of the last century. I’d like to share them with you here. The first […]

Liverpool’s Largest Landscape: Western Approaches

This site often talks about the role played by Liverpool’s geography throughout history. From the location of the ancient Calderstones (wherever that might have been) to the collection of banking institutions on Castle Street, Liverpool Landscapes, Historic Liverpool and the book Liverpool: a landscape history have tried to communicate the importance of positioning to the […]

Alder Hey and the Remains of War

Those of you trying to drive past Sainsbury’s on East Prescot Road in West Derby back in March 2013 may have found themselves diverted around a police bomb squad. A suspected hand grenade was discovered in Springfield Park as work began on the new Alder Hey hospital. There are conflicting reports as to whether this […]

Stanley Park, landscape of leisure

North Liverpool is an area that I’ve become much more interested in since I started Historic Liverpool. It’s seen such changes in its time, and been home to every part of Liverpool society. Stanley Park’s a great subject for closer inspection, especially as it’s become something of a metaphor for one of the passionate divides […]

Bootle: seaside village

This map is taken from a detailed one from the Illustrated Globe Encyclopedia printed in 1878. The point of interest I’m drawing your attention to is Bootle. In 1878, and also visible on the First Edition Ordnance Survey map of the area, the village of Bootle sits alone to the north of Liverpool. The docks […]

Liverpool’s Electric Tramway

This article all about transport: roads, rail and that in-between technology, trams. Like a lot of Liverpool’s landscape, the trams were both pioneering and behind the times. The first Act of Parliament was granted in 1868, and Liverpool was the first city to be granted such an Act, and yet Liverpool stuck with trams when […]

Extract from an 1885 map of Liverpool by Bacon

Waterloo, Victoria and Trafalgar Docks: Liverpool at the forefront of dock technology

When reading about Liverpool’s ever-expanding dockland landscape, you can’t help but be drawn into the technological advances. These too helped create the dock landscape we see today. The map here is of the northern docklands, specifically Waterloo (1824), Victoria and Trafalgar (both 1836). They were built at the beginning of the age of steam ships […]

Toxteth – Some distant childhood memories.

The following article is a bit of a departure from the normal round of news or analysis. I was approached by Derek Tunnington who was born in Leeds but grew up in Toxteth, and has many memories of his childhood in Liverpool. What follows is his account of those years. Over to Derek… Toxteth – […]

Detail of Penny Lane Anglican Church 2, by dkwonsh via Flickr

Churches, and Rural Landscapes in Urban Liverpool

This article was inspired by Celia Heritage’s article on parish churches. Her love of churches, in terms of history, began through researching family history and looking for ancestors’ gravestones. What to look out for in a parish church What to Look Out For in a Parish Church is the first article on the revamped Celia’s […]

Photograph of the monument to Edward VII outside the Museum of Liverpool

7 ways in which Liverpool is the Museum of Liverpool

The ‘Museum of Liverpool‘ is a very fitting name, because this is a museum about the city, and about the people. It’s the largest national museum dedicated to a city in over a century, and opened in a year when the M Shed in Bristol, the Cardiff Story, and Glasgow’s Riverside Museum Project bring similar […]

Photograph of St. James's Church, Toxteth, by SPDP

Toxteth – redressing the balance

July 2011 marked 30 years since the violence in Toxteth which would hang a cloud over the suburb of Liverpool for decades, at least in the eyes of the public at large. It came to symbolise the economic problems of early 1980s Liverpool, and helped cement the stereotype of inner city, unemployed Scousers which probably […]

A photo of early morning sun among the woodland of Sefton park, Liverpool.

Woodland on Merseyside and the Mersey Forest

The year 2011 was declared as the International Year of Forests by the UN (see the Echo for some of Liverpool’s plans). The very modern Mersey Forest has seen 8 million new trees planted since 1994. But there’s a much longer and fascinating history of woodland and forest in this area. The origins of the […]

The British Side of Liverpool Cosmopolitanism

Liverpool is famous for many things. Its long-held cosmopolitanism is probably one of those you can remind Scousers about without too much eye-rolling. Liverpool has a history of being a world port, and notoriety for its role in the African slave trade. These have, perhaps more than any other factors, helped forge the city’s image […]

Madryn Street, in a map from 1890

Madryn Street: Ringo’s Birthplace and the Welsh Streets

The childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney are massively popular tourist attractions. George Harrison’s and Ringo’s homes (like 9 Madryn Street) don’t get so much as a blue plaque. But is Ringo’s birthplace really of any historical merit? It depends on how you judge it, of course. Ringo only lived there for 5 […]

Mapping the history of Liverpool

Old maps of Liverpool, articles and interactive maps of the historic landscapes of Merseyside.

Buy maps

Many of the maps on this site can be bought as high quality prints, either as paper or ready-framed.

You can also buy notebooks, postcards, greetings cards and other map-printed items!

Go to the shop to find out more

The book

Liverpool: a landscape history is a book about Liverpool and Merseyside from the very earliest days to the 21st century.

You’ll learn about everything from the Calderstones to the Capital of Culture.

Signed copies are available direct from me, the author, in the shop.

Get old maps from Cassini