Aug 18
Following on from the success of last year’s event, dozens of historic buildings will be open for the public – for free – as part of September’s Heritage Open Days.
English Heritage will co-ordinate as usual, although the event relies primarily on volunteers, building owners, civic societies and other societies. Read more
Jul 19
A press release from the new Museum of Liverpool: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mediacentre/displayrelease.aspx?id=960
Jun 9
Well, now that Historic Liverpool is up, running and generally settling into its new clothes, we can get back to talking about the rest of the news! RIBA are planning tours of Liverpool, the City Council is planning to sell its historic buildings, and SevenStreets show you the best of RIBA’s upcoming Northwest Architecture Festival. Read more
May 30
I’ve been very excited about this for a little while, and though it may be just me who thinks this is cool, I’m pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, polished-and-improved, shiny-swishy Historic Liverpool!
And that’s why I’ve been neglecting this blog for several weeks now. Read more
Apr 12
Proposals for new developments at Childwall’s All Saint’s church look set to get planning permission. The plans are labelled ‘controversial’ by the Liverpool Echo.
All Saint’s is Liverpool’s oldest surviving church – parts date to the Medieval period – although the only parts of the building which will be knocked through are more modern sections of wall. In addition to this around 180 bodies may need to be exhumed and moved to the Bloodstained Acre, land to the north never before built upon. Read more
Apr 8
The Merseyside Archaeological Service (MAS) has been shut down, and now there is no longer access to the Merseyside Historic Environment Record. According to the notice on the Liverpool Museums website this was due to the removal of funding by all partners.
The MAS was set up in 1991, and received funding from the five Merseyside local authorities (Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley and St Helens). Historic Environment Records (HERs) grew out of the Sites and Monuments Records which began with Oxfordshire in the 1960s to cover the whole country by the 1980s. The change in name came in the last decade to reflect the increase in coverage and scope. Read more
Dec 28
Liverpool Waterfront, by Ade Bond via Flickr
It’s the end of 2010. It’s been an… interesting year politically – a coalition government for the first time in my lifetime; frequent use of the word ‘swingeing’ in many and varied ways; the Conservation Centre is shutting its doors to the public; and snow is keeping you indoors reading this.
But what else has happened this year? Anything to warm our annual nostalgia cockles?
2010 started on an optimistic note – it was the World Museum’s 250th anniversary, though this was somewhat overshadowed with the closure of the Conservation Centre.
February saw start of the excellent Streets of Liverpool blog. Later in February the keys were handed over for the new Museum of Liverpool, although controversy rose its ugly head later in the year when a historic view was shown to have been blocked.
March and April went by in a blur (oh yes, probably because I got married) and when things recovered the election was fast approaching. At the same time Lewis’s was heading for closure as everyone felt the pinch of recession.
In July the first object – a carriage from the Overhead Railway – moved into the museum, but at the same time the North West Development Agency closed its doors. Another funding source for culture had disappeared.
The Peel Waters project cropped up again and again in 2010. English Heritage expressed concerns about the effect of the new buildings on the World Heritage Site, while in later months Council Leader Joe Anderson reacted angrily to what he saw as EH’s interference with Liverpool’s development and future prospects. Meanwhile we were spoiled for heritage and arts projects, including: Edge Hill station being turned into an arts venue, Heritage Open Days bringing people into Liverpool’s historic water supply, the funding of conservation for 95,000 aerial photographs of England as well as Visible in Stone – women’s history and the built environment and in October Black History Month. Finally, Historic Liverpool underwent a bit of a redesign, although it’s far from a finished project. Here’s to another year of additions to that!
Phew! Liverpool and its heritage have had their ups and downs this year. We’ve celebrated the old, welcomed in the new (mostly) and commemorated the highs and lows of Liverpool’s past and imminent future.
Any predictions for the coming 12 months? Or is that an impossible task? And as for 2011, what kind of posts would you like to see here? More about researching Liverpool local history? Should I keep to the news and concentrate the history on Historic Liverpool? Or something completely different?
Oct 26
Quite a short one for you today. I’ve just completed the Historic Liverpool page on the history of Croxteth Park.
The township of Croxteth Park naturally includes most of the park itself, but funnily enough not Croxteth Hall itself. This is still a very wooded area today, and originally was part of the vast hunting forest which stretched from Toxteth to Simonswood. This meant that the area didn’t get built on for hundreds of years, and only really saw development in the 1980s when the estates of Coachman’s Drive and Fir Tree Avenue appeared.
Before then the nearest development was in Gillmoss, which grew from a tiny collection of cottages and farm buildings into a classic example of post-war large scale development.
Even now, Croxteth Park sits on the edge of Liverpool, and remains a ‘green lung’ for anyone in the city to enjoy.
Oct 7
The National Archives' Domesday on a Map tool
Having written about the bigger themes this week, I’ve had to skip past a few other interesting links related to the history of Liverpool. So here they are, just for you:
Firstly, as an excitable mapping/interactive/web geek, I was interested in the new Domesday on a Map tool from The National Archives.
This, as the name might suggest, is a map showing all the places mentioned in the Domesday Book. You have to zoom in to see any detail, but once there you get markers indicate the places named in Domesday, with an outline of the rough extent of the manor.
Click on the markers to see the historic name of the place (in 1086) and the page of the Book on which its described.
Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer David Thomas tells us why the map was produced in his blog post on the topic.
Domesday Book predated Liverpool by about 200 years, but a couple of places in the area were very important at the time, and get an entry: West Derby, Woolton, Toxteth and Childwall amongst others.
Whether or not your local history research is in Liverpool, Domesday on a Map is definitely must-see.
Planning permission was submitted to Liverpool City Council last Monday, 4th October, for Liverpool Waters, a plan to develop 150 acres of Merseyside docklands.
The scheme will include the tallest building outside London (possibly to be dubbed the “Shanghai Tower“), and for better or worse will transform Liverpool’s skyline.
Permission has already been granted for Wirral Waters, a similar scheme for the waterfront on the south side of the Mersey.
Planning permission documents have also been submitted for a stretch of Edge Lane including the retail parks and industrial areas.
The scheme will cost £200m and include a new park in addition to ‘leisure and retail units’ (“shops” to you and me).
The Merseyside Civic Society have awarded 8 different projects in four different categories at its relaunched awards scheme.
The categories are best New Build, Green Space, Open Space and Refurbishment. Read the full article on the MCS Awards website.
As two of my regular reads collide, SevenStreets has an article on Colin Wilkinson’s Streets of Liverpool, a site of interest to anyone reading this post I should think.
As well as discussion of how the site started, Colin describes how he came to where he is now, via the Open Eye gallery on the corner of Whitechapel to the Bluecoat Press which he has run since 1992. There are also a couple of classic photos from Colin’s archives.
Well, that’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll have some more Historic Liverpool news sooner or later, as I’m trying to find time for more additions to that site.
Sep 27
Manchester Ship Canal, 25th May 1947
The Heritage Lottery Fund have recently agreed to grant £1.75 million to help put an amazing collection of aerial photographs online.
The photos will be conserved, scanned and made available on a new website, to be called Britain from Above, and is a collaboration between English Heritage and the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland and Wales.
Aerofilms was a company set up in 1919 by veterans of the First World War, and flew across the UK taking over a million aerial shots. These are now held in Swindon, Edinburgh and Aberystwyth by the three main organisations involved.
The project will start digitising chronologically, and so will have photos from 1919 to around 1927 when the website launches in 2011. Once up, visitors will be able to search for images, and tag and add notes to them to create a ‘crowdsourced’ archive of information. This is going to be a pretty amazing resource – I’ve seen some of the shots (an example is above), and the Aerofilms collection kept growing until 2006 so it’s an important historic resource. Until the site goes up you can order photos covering England through the usual NMR channels.
For more details, contact aerofilms@english-heritage.org.uk, or sign up for updates on the English Heritage news page. Of course, as soon as I hear any more myself you’ll hear about it here!
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