Liverpool Heroes 3: Vikings in Liverpool

OK, so perhaps the Norse Vikings are aren’t the first people to come to mind when we think of ‘Liverpool Heroes’. They’re distant in time, left little visible trace in our city, and went about changing society through the delicate application of pointy-horned helmets.

But of course none of that is strictly true. There are traces of the Norse presence on our doorstep, and may have paved the way for Liverpool itself to be settled half a millennium after they first arrived.

Place names – Norse Language in Liverpool

The most obvious clues to the way in which Norse settlers changed the landscape are the place names seen across the county. In fact, the distribution is the very thing which gives greatest evidence to the local historian.

In the west of the region are the village and town names of Scandinavian origin: Toxteth, West Derby, Kirkby (and West Kirkby). In the north and east are names which signal the presence of Anglo-Saxons: Walton, Bootle, Childwall. These names contain elements of the language the inhabitants spoke (e.g. botl = Old English, “dwelling place”; kirk = Norse, “church”), and therefore must date from the time the Norse arrived from Scandinavia via Dublin, and began moving into Anglo-Saxon territory.

Norse Politics and Merseyside Geography

In addition to the language, place names reveal elements of the geographical or political situation of the time.

Raby on the Wirral, and Roby near Huyton, get their name from the Norse for ‘boundary settlement’. Where these villages stand was once the edge of a land division, probably between the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons (one of whose centres was Chester, to the south east of Viking Wirral and indeed Raby).

Other place names show that Norse settlements were on sand dunes or mosses (‘Meols’ is from the Norse ‘melr’, meaning “sandhill”. Rather than the ruthless invaders we imagine them to be, for a time they were confined to the less fertile ground on the edges of the land.

Thingwall – both on the Wirral and the Hall of that name south of Knotty Ash – signal the site of ‘Things‘, Norse parliaments. Not only does this show how Vikings settled and set up rather civilised government structures, it also shows how a common name on modern Merseyside owes its origins to something brought in by the Scandinavian incomers.

West Derby (Norse: “park with deer”) became an important administrative centre at this time, being the centre of the West Derby Hundred, which stretched from the Mersey to the Ribble at Preston. The medieval ‘wapentake’ court was held here, a castle was built shortly after the Norman Conquest, and West Derby’s importance to government lasted until the 14th or 15th centuries when Liverpool itself rose to prominence.

Vikings – Liverpool Heroes?

By the time their culture disappeared beneath the incoming wave of William the Conqueror’s army, the Vikings had made an imprint in the geography and history of Liverpool and Merseyside.

Place names which survive right up to today tell us where their churches were, their parliament and their borders, and they also tell us the type of landscape they occupied. But was the effect of these invaders on the Liverpool landscape ‘radical’?

They arrived, settled and established a court at West Derby, and for around 500 years this inland location was the centre of power in north west England. Later, Edward the Confessor saw fit to site a hunting lodge here, and later still William the Conqueror deemed it a worthy reward to Roger de Poitou, one of his most powerful allies in the invasion.

If it wasn’t for the society which grew up here around the Thing from the 8th Century, West Derby may have remained a tiny woodland village, and perhaps the attention of King John would not have so naturally fell on the Mersey for a place to launch his Irish campaigns.

Who knows what Liverpool would have looked like had the Vikings not settled on and spread from the Wirral all those centuries ago?

Further reading on the Vikings

A great overview of the Vikings on Merseyside is Viking Mersey by Stephen Harding, and details of the West Derby Hundred can be found in History of West Derby by J.G. Cooper and A.D. Power.

Liverpool Heroes 2: Kitty Wilkinson

Kitty Wilkinson’s story is classic Victorian Liverpool: born in Londonderry in 1786, Wilkinson moved to Liverpool with her parents when she was just 8 years old. Tragically her father and sister were drowned at the end of the crossing when their ferry hit the Hoyle Bank.

(This article was originally inspired by International Womens’ Day, which takes places on March 8th each year).

Despite being faced with the terrible hardships of the time, she was known for opening her house to anyone who needed help. One of the services this entrepreneurial woman took on was to allow people to use her house and yard to wash their clothes for a penny a time. During a cholera outbreak in 1832 she offered her scullery boiler to all who wished to wash their clothes and linen.

This proved so popular that her cellar gradually evolved into a wash house. None of those who worked here became infected by cholera, so effective were her disinfection efforts (e.g. the use of bleach to help clean clothes), and Kitty’s efforts led directly to the opening of the first public wash house. This was in Upper Frederick Street, and opened in 1842.

Given support by the District Provident Society and William Rathbone, Wilkinson was made superintendent of bath, and through the newspapers was crowned ‘Saint of the Slums’.

In 2010 it was announced that a statue was to be erected in her honour, and would be placed in St Georges Hall. As councillor Flo Clucas, who campaigned for the statue, said: “Through rising from abject poverty to achieve lasting reforms in public health Kitty Wilkinson is a real inspiration for every woman in this city.”

So how did Kitty Wilkinson shape the landscape? She pioneered the public wash house movement, and the last wash house closed only around a decade ago. The Upper Frederick Street building was a monument to her efforts, and in a sense the rest of the wash houses were also. In less concrete terms she also affected the human landscape of Liverpool. For the first time there was a place to go to clean your clothes properly, and the effects on stemming the spread of disease through the city are a legacy of Kitty Wilkinson’s generosity and hard work. This woman was a testament to fact that even those born into the poorest levels of society can make a massive difference to the built and experienced landscape.

Further reading on Kitty Wilkinson

For a detailed look at the achievements of Kitty Wilkinson, see Michael Kelly’s 2007 book The Life and Times of Kitty Wilkinson.

For an overview of the history of personal hygiene read Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing by Katherine Ashenburg.

Liverpool Heroes 1: John Alexander Brodie, City Engineer

In writing about the historic landscape of Liverpool, it’s easy to hide people from the narrative. This post on JA Brodie is the first in a series on Liverpool Heroes which aims to redress the balance. It ties in (rather loosely) with Liverpool’s Year of Radicals, celebrated in 2011.

These people weren’t radical in a left-wing sense (some far from it) but they were the pioneers, the bringers of change. They certainly left their mark on the landscape, some in subtle ways. A couple of these people are obvious choices, and some less so. Either way I hope you learn something new and interesting.

And so without further ado, and in no particular order, we begin with…

J.A. Brodie (1858 – 1934)

J.A. Brodie was the Liverpool city engineer from 1898. He became President of the Institution of Civil Engineers due to his achievements, and was the first local authority engineer to be so. The list of accomplishments is impressive, as is the effect he had on the shape of the city.

Brodie was one of the first to suggest an electric tram system for Liverpool. The city’s electric trams ran from 1898 to 1957, and even today the tracks pop up from time to time during roadworks. The Queens Drive and Prescot Road central reservations are the remains of tram routes which ran along them.

He proposed the development of a ring road, the aforementioned Queens Drive. He widened, straightened or diverted roads such as Black Horse Lane in Old Swan in the 1920s and 30s. The suburban sprawl of West Derby, Tue Brook and Childwall were still in the future. But even today Queens Drive holds up well with the volume of traffic, which couldn’t have been foreseen 90 years ago.

Brodie beyond roads

In 1905 the first pre-fab concrete tenements were built in Eldon Street. Brodie had been experimenting with concrete as a solution to the housing shortage, and in 1905 he exhibited a pre-fab cottage at the Cheap Cottages Exhibition in Letchworth. There’s probably little need to elaborate on the use of pre-fab concrete in Liverpool buildings in later years, but for better or worse (and despite trade union opposition to Liverpool’s production of concrete prefab parts) J.A. Brodie was a pioneer here.

As if being responsible for one of Liverpool’s major thoroughfairs, and a pioneer in building technology we still live with wasn’t enough, Brodie also put forward the idea for the East Lancs road, so that we can more quickly get to our neighbours in Manchester. And finally, of course, he invented the goal net, an invention of which he was particularly proud.

So: J.A. Brodie: engineer, architect, footy-dispute-preventer. And a man who’s effect on the landscape of Liverpool is visible almost a century after he died.

Image: Building the East Lancs Road 1932, released by Robert Wade under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license