Liverpool’s history: 20 places and the stories behind them

1. Old Dock: the invention beneath the shopping streets

Down the rough brickwork at Old Dock you can follow the side of a basin that once held ships. The shopping streets overhead are a useful part of the view. You’re looking at ground that had a working life before anybody thought of laying it out the way it is now.

Thomas Steers’s dock opened in 1715. Its distinction was to be a commercial enclosed wet dock: gates held the water inside as the tide fell outside. Ships could remain afloat, and cargo could be handled without everything stopping for the river. That sounds straightforward now. For merchants paying for vessels, crews and goods in transit, time saved was a considerable advantage.

The surviving masonry gives this idea a useful scale. These were working walls, holding back water around ships. Looking along them, I find the practical ambition of the place more interesting than any claim to picturesque antiquity. The dock also served merchants involved in enslaving and selling Africans. Its efficiency belonged to a trading system through which Liverpool accumulated wealth at a devastating human cost.

The dock was filled in the 1820s and a Custom House later occupied the site. Excavation in 2001 brought this bit back into view. I’d look down at the depth of brick and think of gates holding water in on a falling tide. That was a practical change that helped Liverpool trade on a scale with terrible consequences for enslaved people.

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2. Royal Albert Dock: architecture built around the cargo

I always give the iron columns under the warehouses a moment. Jesse Hartley could put iron beside brick and stone and dispense with structural timber, taking away some of the risk from fire. The buildings make more sense to me once there’s something valuable inside them that people want to keep safe.

Prince Albert opened the dock in 1846; the warehouses were completed in 1848. Their position at the water’s edge made the movement of cargo between ships and storage more direct. Hydraulic machinery helped with the lifting, while bonded warehouses allowed import duties to be deferred. Tea, tobacco, wine and spirits needed somewhere secure to wait. The architecture was part of the trading system, as consequential to the business as the vessels arriving outside.

Look at the repeated window openings, the loading bays and the sheer depth of the warehouse blocks. Their regularity makes a handsome enclosure, but it also speaks of goods being sorted, stored and accounted for. I like the way the dock lets you read that purpose without needing an elaborate reconstruction. Water, quayside and warehouse are still close enough together to explain one another.

Commercial work ended by the early 1970s. The revival in the 1980s brought quite different occupants. From the waterside I’d look for the repeated loading openings and think how close somebody could get a cargo to the place it needed to go. That was the point of all that care in building.

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3. Pier Head and the Three Graces: the offices behind the skyline

There were three different kinds of office work behind the view from Pier Head. I find it easier to see each building once I’ve put a job back in it. The docks needed running, a shipping line needed desks, and an insurance society needed a place to carry on its business.

The domed Port of Liverpool Building opened in 1907 as the headquarters of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. The Royal Liver Building followed in 1911, with Walter Aubrey Thomas’s paired clock towers and their liver birds. Its client was an insurance organisation that had grown from a burial society founded by working men in 1850. The association between this enormous building and the need to provide for a funeral brings the skyline down to a more intimate scale.

Between them sits the Cunard Building. Staff moved into the new offices in June 1916, although construction was not completed until 1917. The University of Liverpool’s Cunard archive records a building occupied by clerks and shipping businesses as well as the company whose name it carries. Cunard’s Liverpool headquarters belonged to an enterprise that had been based in the city since 1840.

The differences are worth a slow look: the emphatic dome, the Liver Building’s upright towers, the Cunard’s more restrained, palazzo-like frontage. These were workplaces designed to be seen from the river. Their scale makes sense in a port where the management of docks, voyages and financial risk could generate buildings this assertive.

I’d give the doors and windows a look from pavement level. The dome and towers do what they were intended to do from across the water, and it’s the entrances that help me imagine the people who had to turn up and work underneath them.

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4. Western Approaches: the work behind the Atlantic convoys

The Atlantic map is the thing I’d spend time with at Western Approaches. It fills a wall. Across from it there are windows looking into the operations room, with desks and telephones below. Before anybody could give an order there had to be people who could take a report and put it in the right place.

Western Approaches Command moved from Plymouth to Derby House in Liverpool in February 1941, under Admiral Sir Percy Noble. From this headquarters, naval and air personnel coordinated the protection of Atlantic convoys. Merchant ships bringing supplies faced German U-boats, and their position, escorts and available air cover mattered desperately. The bunker made an ocean-wide operation into something that staff could plot and discuss in a room.

Women formed most of the workforce, including members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service and Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Their work included signals and the plotting of movements. The room is a useful corrective to the idea that wartime command consisted chiefly of a handful of senior men reaching decisions. Those decisions depended on information handled by many other people, often very young.

Elsewhere in Derby House, the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, established in 1942, used war games to study U-boat attacks and develop convoy tactics. Captain Gilbert Roberts led a team largely made up of Wrens. They tested possibilities and trained naval officers, work whose analytical importance is now recognised by the Ministry of Defence’s own researchers.

The equipment is ordinary enough to help you see the work. A telephone call or a mark on a map could change the picture for somebody upstairs. The rooms have been restored for visitors, and the women who did much of the plotting and analysis are the people I’d keep in view while you look at them.

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5. Liverpool Town Hall: the city’s business at the top of Castle Street

At Liverpool Town Hall I’d look at the carved frieze before the dome. The faces, animals and ornament belonged to a building opened as an Exchange in 1754. It gives you a way into the business people were doing when they met here, and into where a great deal of their money came from.

John Wood the Elder’s building opened in 1754 as an Exchange as well as a centre of civic government. Its merchants were meant to conduct business in a covered central courtyard, though the space proved unsatisfactory and trading continued outside. That overlap between commerce and government is essential to understanding the place. Liverpool’s merchants did not simply fund the city from a distance; some also governed it.

William Gregson, mayor in 1762, was a slave trader. Historic England identifies the Town Hall as an important surviving building through which to examine the relationship between Liverpool’s civic authority and the transatlantic slave trade. The African heads and other overseas references in its carving belong within that history. The pleasing proportions are still there to admire, but admiration becomes more useful when it pays attention to what the decoration is saying.

A fire in January 1795 gutted much of Wood’s building. Reconstruction followed designs by James Wyatt, with John Foster the Elder overseeing the work. The familiar dome dates from 1802 and the southern portico from 1811. What appears from the street to be one assured design therefore includes substantial rebuilding and changing ideas about how the city should present itself.

The fire of 1795 and James Wyatt’s reconstruction belong to the history of the rooms you see now. I’d put the civic splendour beside William Gregson’s trade in enslaved people. You can make that connection from the pavement if the interior is unavailable.

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6. Bluecoat: the school behind the courtyard

The Bluecoat’s courtyard puts me in mind of a school day, particularly after the scale of the waterfront. Robert Styth and Bryan Blundell founded a charity school in 1708. A child had to come through these gates for something as ordinary as a lesson. The money that kept the school going needs its own place in the story.

The charity school was founded in 1708 by the clergyman Robert Styth and the merchant Bryan Blundell. The present building began taking shape in the following decade, with its first boarders arriving in 1718. Boys and girls received an education, but work occupied much of their time. The Bluecoat’s own history describes children spending two-thirds of their time on income-generating labour and one-third in lessons. Charity came with expectations about usefulness and discipline.

The institution’s research also makes clear how closely its support was tied to slavery. The Blundell family and other merchant supporters were involved in the slave trade and in commerce in commodities produced by enslaved people. Research summarised by the Bluecoat suggests that at least 65 per cent of regular subscriptions derived from that trade or from slavery-related commodities. This is a precise and troubling connection between local philanthropy and exploitation elsewhere. The school’s charitable purpose did not prevent it from benefiting from the suffering of other people.

After the school moved to Wavertree in 1906, artists began using the premises. An arts centre was formally established in 1927. That continuing cultural life gives the courtyard its present purpose; contemporary work also offers ways to question the institution’s inheritance. The building is most rewarding when you let both histories remain in view, rather than choosing the more comfortable one.

Artists found a use for the building after the school moved to Wavertree in 1906. The doors and wings still make it easy to picture a school taking up the space. I like giving those traces a look before going in to see what the arts centre has made room for.

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7. St George’s Hall: music, law and civic confidence

Mary Phillips hid in St George’s Hall overnight in 1909. She came out during Augustine Birrell’s speech to make a case for women’s suffrage. I’d think of her before walking past those very orderly columns. A building meant for music and the law was also somewhere a person might go to be heard.

Harvey Lonsdale Elmes designed a building that combined concert rooms with law courts. Work began in 1841; the hall opened in 1854, with Charles Robert Cockerell contributing to its completion. Beneath the classical exterior, Liverpool brought cultural celebration and the administration of justice into the same enormous civic undertaking.

That combination becomes tangible on a tour. Courtrooms and cells belong to the same complex as the Great Hall and its Willis organ. You can begin to understand how differently this building would have been experienced by someone arriving for a concert and someone brought here to face a charge. A civic monument tells us something about a city’s aspirations; its internal routes tell us who was allowed to enjoy them, and on what terms.

There is considerable pleasure in the workmanship too. The columns outside set up a severe rhythm, while the ceremonial interior allows much greater richness. The Great Hall’s Minton tiled floor is one of its celebrated details, although it normally sits beneath a protective covering. I rather like the discipline of having to look beyond the most photographed feature. The relationship between the rooms is at least as interesting as any single decorative surface.

Elmes’s hall made room for courtrooms and cells as well as music. I’d choose a tour that lets you put those rooms together. The contrast is in the doors people used and the reasons they came through them, all behind one rather imposing front.

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8. William Brown Street and Central Library: a city builds a room for reading

The shelves curve right round the Picton Reading Room. I’m fond of looking up from wherever I’ve found a seat. It’s worth knowing how Liverpool got the room, including the sources of the money that built the library and museum before it.

William Brown's new library and museum opened in 1860. The reading room followed in 1879, designed by Cornelius Sherlock and named after James Allanson Picton, the first chairman of Liverpool's Libraries Committee. Its dome, galleries and tall bookcases gave public learning an architectural presence to match the city's commercial ambitions. The Hornby Library, added in 1906, extended that commitment to books worth keeping.

Brown's name also requires a little reading. His family business traded in cotton produced by enslaved people; its American banking interests acquired plantations and enslaved people through foreclosures. The library belongs to the history of public generosity and to the history of how mercantile fortunes were made. Holding those facts together makes William Brown Street more intelligible.

The building has its own wartime fracture. The Brown Library suffered severe bomb damage in the Second World War and was rebuilt in the 1950s. Today, Liverpool Record Office is based here, with documents, photographs, maps and newspapers reaching back to the thirteenth century. I like that the street's grandest claims can be investigated inside one of its grand buildings. A visitor can admire the dome, then begin asking better questions about the city underneath it.

The bomb damage was serious, and the later rebuilding is part of the library you can use today. I’d give the Picton room time for the simple idea of building somewhere a person could sit and read. The public use of the building and the history of the money behind it both deserve that attention.

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9. St Luke's Bombed Out Church: the night still visible in the walls

I remember looking through a window at St Luke’s and finding sky where I’d expected a room. The stone tracery still gives you the shape of a church. A fire after the bombing in May 1941 took away the things that made it possible to go inside and use it.

The church had taken two decades to build. Its foundation stone was laid in 1811 to a design by John Foster senior. A dispute over land interrupted the work; his son, John Foster junior, took over after his father's death and developed the design. Consecrated in 1831, St Luke's combined parish worship with a particularly Liverpool concern for civic standing: its enlarged chancel accommodated the Corporation. It also hosted concerts, adding a musical role to its religious and civic ones.

An incendiary bomb struck shortly after midnight on 6 May 1941, during the May Blitz. Fire destroyed the roof and interior, leaving the masonry shell. The broken church we see preserves evidence of a particular night in the city's recent history.

The decision to preserve it as a memorial matters as much as the survival of the walls. Reopened to the public in 2007, it now accommodates arts and community events. I find that continued use convincing. A building once made for people gathering still has people gathering inside it, while the missing roof keeps the circumstances of its loss visible. The space can sustain pleasure and remembrance without asking the visitor to confuse them.

People chose to keep the shell as a memorial. From the public pavement, the windows tell you quite a lot about that decision. There’s also a way to go in on open days and for events, which gives a very different sort of life to what was left.

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10. Liverpool Cathedral: a twentieth-century undertaking in Gothic stone

I had to get the date of Liverpool Cathedral into my head before the stone stopped making me think of a much older building. Giles Gilbert Scott was twenty-two when he won the competition in 1903. The work went on long enough for people to use one part while another still had to be paid for and built.

Its architect was an extraordinary appointment. Giles Gilbert Scott was 22 when he won the competition in 1903. The experienced George Frederick Bodley was appointed alongside him, but died in 1907, leaving Scott to develop the project. Scott substantially revised the design, replacing the proposed twin towers with the single immense tower that gives the cathedral its commanding shape.

The building grew in usable stages. The Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1910; the main cathedral's consecration followed in 1924, with decades of work still ahead. Construction continued through the upheavals of two world wars and the changing fortunes of the port, using mainly sandstone quarried at Woolton. Scott died in 1960, eighteen years before the formal completion of his life's largest project.

I’d give the Lady Chapel its own time. It was consecrated in 1910 and has a lighter, more intricate feel than the immense spaces that came later. Both belong to a long, practical story of deciding what a city needed and when it could afford it.

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11. Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral: two ambitions, one site

Looking up into the lantern is the part I’d make time for at the Metropolitan Cathedral. John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens made the glass. It gives the people sitting round the altar colour and light from above. A much heavier building had been planned for the same ground.

The first major scheme here was different again. In 1930 the archdiocese bought the former Brownlow Hill workhouse site. Edwin Lutyens designed a vast domed cathedral, and construction began in 1933. War interrupted the work; its cost ultimately defeated the scheme. The surviving crypt gives that abandoned ambition a substantial physical presence, with brick vaults that deserve attention in their own right.

Frederick Gibberd's winning design took a radically different course. Built between 1962 and 1967, it placed the congregation around a central altar. The central altar answered the competition brief’s call for closer participation in the Mass, part of the liturgical reform later formalised by the Second Vatican Council. Architecture changed where people sat, what they could see and how they worshipped together.

I keep looking up at the lantern, whose glass was designed by John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens. Red, blue and gold make light part of the building's structure in the mind, even where it has no structural work to do. Outside, William Mitchell's entrance reliefs give the approach a pleasingly physical counterweight to that elevated glass.

If you can reach Lutyens’ crypt, take a look there as well. The plans changed with the money available and with what the congregation needed. The two places make that clearer than the shape of the finished cathedral can do on its own.

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12. Williamson Tunnels: the brickwork is certain; the explanation is not

The bit I’d spend time looking at underground is where an arch meets the sandstone. Somebody had to make that work, pay for it and keep people supplied with material. Joseph Williamson made his money in tobacco and snuff and developed property here in the early nineteenth century. The vaults are better evidence of the work than of his intentions.

Joseph Williamson made his money in the tobacco and snuff trade. From the early nineteenth century, he developed property around Mason Street in Edge Hill and directed the construction of an extraordinary collection of underground chambers and passages. Some early arches had a practical job, supporting gardens behind houses on ground that fell away towards Smithdown Lane. That explanation accounts for part of the building work. It does not settle the purpose of the whole complex.

The familiar account presents Williamson as a benefactor employing poor men on projects designed principally to give them paid work. It is a plausible interpretation with a long history, but the evidence does not establish it as the complete explanation. Friends of Williamson's Tunnels explicitly acknowledges that uncertainty. I appreciate a place that allows an honest unanswered question to survive.

Williamson died in 1840. Later infilling obscured many spaces; volunteers have painstakingly cleared sections and made them accessible again. Look at the different relationships between rock and brick: a wall cut from sandstone, a vault carefully assembled above it, an opening leading somewhere the first glance cannot explain. The pleasure comes from noticing those decisions. The workers left more dependable evidence than the stories subsequently told about their employer.

Two operators tell different parts of the story from different sites. Choose one before setting out. I like leaving the question of motive open long enough to give the brickwork a proper look. The reason for all that effort is still a question you can bring away with you.

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13. Edge Hill station: the railway revolution between ordinary trains

Edge Hill is somewhere I’m happy to have a train to wait for. The long buildings make a working station feel unusually close to the railway’s beginnings. The 1830 terminus and the present station are different places. This one dates from 1836, when it needed to handle a new route into the city.

There is an essential distinction to make here. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, but its original Edge Hill station occupied a nearby site. The present station opened in 1836, when the railway's extension to Lime Street changed the way passengers reached central Liverpool. Confusing those two sites loses the interesting story of how quickly the new railway had to develop.

It also obscures how experimental railway operation remained. Trains descending towards Lime Street initially used gravity; stationary engines and ropes hauled them back up the incline to Edge Hill. The age of steam involved more than locomotives pulling carriages everywhere. Gradients, tunnels and the limits of machinery demanded other arrangements.

The buildings record several stages of that work. The 1836 station ranges use classical proportions and carefully treated masonry. The adjoining hydraulic plant and accumulator tower date from 1882, recording a later phase of the railway’s machinery. I like the combination: the familiar architectural order of the passenger buildings, with the more obviously functional structures alongside them.

Metal brought some of the station’s spaces back into public use in 2009. A good look from the permitted platforms gives you the earlier work as well. I’d think about a train descending by gravity and the gear people needed to haul it back uphill.

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14. Chinatown: the arch, the seafarers and the families

The upturned roofs and dragons at the arch are hard to walk past. Craftspeople from Shanghai assembled it for Chinese New Year in 2000. I like to keep that date in mind. It’s a new expression of a connection that began a long time earlier with people making a life from the ships.

Liverpool's Chinese community grew through maritime trade. The Holt brothers' Ocean Steam Ship Company, established in 1865 and known as the Blue Funnel Line, connected Liverpool with China through a network in which John Swire & Sons acted as agents. Chinese seafarers came with those ships; some settled, married and made families in the city. The history of the port is also the history of those households.

During the Second World War, Chinese crews helped carry the supplies on which Britain depended. In 1945–46, a British repatriation programme sent Chinese seamen away, and some were separated from their British wives and children. A Home Office archival review published in 2022 found evidence of coercion, including threats of deportation and pressure on men unable to find work. It also established that the surviving records cannot answer every family's questions. Describing every departure as a formal deportation would miss the different means by which men were pressured to leave.

Chinese crews carried supplies during the war and men were forcibly removed in 1945–46, leaving families behind. Those are people worth keeping in mind from the pavement. The arch gives you a place to stop in a living neighbourhood, and the harbour records explain how much its families were asked to give.

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15. The Hardmans’ House: the people behind the portraits

The fireplace next to the cameras is the bit I remember in the Hardmans’ studio. A room made for a house was given over to making a living. I’d keep Margaret Hardman in view as much as Edward. She was a photographer and business partner with work to do in the same building.

Margaret was a photographer and business partner. She joined the earlier Bold Street studio in 1926; the couple married in 1932 and subsequently ran studios together. Their customers included actors and politicians, but also nurses, soldiers, brides and families marking an occasion. Look at those portraits as deliberate presentations of a life. A uniform, a pose, the lighting on a face: each helped determine how somebody wished to be remembered.

I find the domestic rooms as revealing as the studio. The couple occupied three small rooms at the back of the first floor while photography spread through the house. Their preserved possessions allow the visitor to follow work into ordinary life: the success of the business did not translate into spacious private accommodation. The studio closed in 1965; the house and its equipment survived, and the National Trust received the collection in 2003. Much of the photographic archive is held at Liverpool Record Office.

We value this place because it preserves the making of a photograph as well as its finished surface. A portrait can look effortless. These rooms restore the labour, the machinery and the two people behind it.

The front of the portrait is usually what a customer saw. The equipment, clothes and small rooms behind the studio are where I’d spend time on a visit. It took quite a lot of everyday work to make that finished surface look effortless.

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16. Mendips: John Lennon’s suburban beginnings

At Mendips I’d give the bookshelves time. Mimi and George put them up to encourage John Lennon to read. The leaded windows and enclosed porch give you the look of a comfortable suburban house, with a family thinking about what a boy might do when he grew up.

The house makes that progression unusually tangible. Mimi and George installed bookshelves to encourage John’s reading. The porch became a rehearsal space, separating noisy music from the rest of the household. I like that small architectural negotiation: teenage ambition having to find somewhere it was allowed to happen. The Beatles’ history includes ordinary arguments about how a home should be used.

Lennon met Paul McCartney at St Peter’s Church fête in nearby Woolton in July 1957. Their work together soon extended into these rooms, learning songs and attempting their own. There was grief here, too. Lennon’s mother, Julia, died after being hit by a car near Mendips in 1958. The domestic setting gives that familiar biographical fact its proper scale: this was a family dealing with a sudden death.

Yoko Ono bought Mendips and gave it to the National Trust in 2002. Its interiors were furnished to evoke the late 1950s, bringing surviving features and carefully chosen replacements together. I find it most useful alongside Forthlin Road: two households, with different incomes and expectations, supplying space for the same musical partnership.

Yoko Ono gave the house to the National Trust in 2002. The rooms have been furnished to evoke the late 1950s. The visit has the scale of a home you can put a schoolboy in, which is the part I most want to remember when the story gets to the records everybody knows.

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17. 20 Forthlin Road: songs in the front room

A telephone mattered to Mary McCartney because she was a midwife. It’s one of the reasons the family wanted 20 Forthlin Road. I like starting with that piece of practical business. The house was built as council housing in 1949, and Jim and Mary moved in with Paul and Mike in 1955.

Mary died the following year, leaving Jim to bring up the boys with help from the wider family. Music found room here. Lennon and McCartney could rehearse while Jim was at work, returning to ideas and trying them out together. Mike’s photograph of the pair working on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ in the front room is especially valuable. It puts the song back among the furniture and makes collaboration visible. Someone had to sit down, play, listen and try again.

I spend time on the room itself. Its decoration records family taste and economy: Mary pieced together her chosen wallpaper from inexpensive roll-ends. The National Trust bought the house in 1995 and restored its late-1950s appearance; one wallpaper design was recreated from a surviving fragment. The front windows came from another house across the road. This is a researched presentation of a home, with the work of conservation visible once you know what to look for.

The wallpaper, rooms and family photographs give the songwriting a place in an actual household. I’d take this and Mendips together on the Trust tour. They give two different ideas of what it took to find time and space for music in the life of a family.

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18. The Cavern Club: where repetition made a band

The distance from the stage to the people listening is what interests me under the Cavern’s brick vaults. A band had to learn to make a room like that listen. The Beatles appeared at the original club 292 times according to its chronology. That’s a lot of evenings in which to get better at it.

Alan Sytner opened the first Cavern in a warehouse cellar on Mathew Street on 16 January 1957. His inspiration was a Paris jazz club, Le Caveau de la Huchette. Jazz came first; skiffle and beat music helped change the programme as younger audiences and performers arrived.

The Beatles first played here on 9 February 1961. The club’s chronology records 292 appearances before their final Cavern performance in August 1963. That number is more instructive than a general claim about musical genius. It represents returning to a stage, working through material and developing a relationship with people who knew what they liked. On 9 November 1961, Brian Epstein came to see them at a lunchtime session. The meeting helped turn a formidable local act towards a much larger future.

The original club closed in 1973 during redevelopment associated with railway plans. Its cellar was filled; later excavation found the old vaults could not safely be retained. The reconstruction opened in April 1984. Knowing that sequence helps me read the place honestly: its material history includes demolition, salvage and Liverpool’s determination to bring the club back.

The original cellar was filled after closure in 1973, and the present club is a reconstruction on part of the site. I’d come when there’s music. The room makes sense at the scale of people playing and listening quite close to one another.

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19. Speke Hall: belief, inheritance and a Tudor house

The date 1598 above Speke Hall’s entrance makes me look at the courtyard a little longer. It marks one stage in a house the Norrises had been reshaping since the 1530s. There are smaller details to look for once the black and white front has had its effect. A household living through religious restrictions had reasons to make some of them discreet.

The Norrises’ Catholic faith affected the building in less conspicuous ways. During Elizabeth I’s reign, refusing Church of England services exposed families to punishment. At Speke, hiding places for priests and concealed vantage points gave religious loyalty a physical form. Looking around the house, I find that relationship between belief and architecture more compelling than any general Tudor atmosphere. A wall could protect somebody. An opening could provide warning.

Then there is the later history beneath the old-fashioned appearance. Richard Watt bought Speke in 1795 with a fortune derived from slavery, including Jamaican sugar production and trafficking enslaved people. Richard Watt V began a major restoration in 1856, furnishing the house in the Gothic Revival taste with the benefit of inherited wealth. The Tudor fabric and the Victorian interiors belong to different chapters, connected by ownership and money.

I would give the later rooms as much attention as the Tudor frontage. The joinery records somebody’s taste; the furniture records decisions about how to live here. Reading the house in layers makes the restoration more visible, and keeps the source of its owners’ wealth in view.

Richard Watt bought Speke in 1795. His fortune belonged to a later Liverpool, with money made through slavery and Caribbean trade. I’d give the later rooms their own time. The things a household put inside Tudor walls can tell you as much about the city as the carpentry.

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20. St James’s Cemetery: the city beneath the cathedral

Coming down into St James’s makes the cathedral above feel like quite a different building. The hollow began as a quarry. It gave Liverpool a place to bury people, with steep sides and paths somebody had to shape around the ground they inherited.

A private company established the burial ground for Liverpool’s Anglican community. Architect John Foster designed its buildings, entrances and carriage ramps; John Shepherd laid out the landscape. The quarry walls gave the designers enclosure and drama. I look at the paths cut into the sides and imagine the practical problem they solved: bringing a funeral procession down to a burial place while making its approach feel dignified.

The circular memorial to William Huskisson draws the eye. Liverpool’s MP died after being struck by the locomotive Rocket during the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway on 15 September 1830. It is a devastating incident to hold beside the public excitement surrounding the new railway. The monument gives that moment of industrial history a particular person and a place of mourning.

Much of the cemetery now reads as a garden. Many gravestones were moved or removed during twentieth-century landscaping, but the people buried beneath them remain. I find that essential to remember when crossing an apparently empty patch of grass. The surviving inscriptions represent only part of the community here.

Huskisson’s monument is the easiest one to pick out. The garden has many fewer visible gravestones than it once had. I’d leave a little time for the descent and the way back up. The quarry, the memorials and the paths give you different pieces of a city’s dealings with the same space.

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