Everything Old Is New Again

I'd been to Kirkby exactly twice before in my life.  The first time was at the turn of the Millennium, when I came here for a job interview at Knowsley Borough Council; I didn't get the job, and my main memory of the place is the bus exchange, where I loitered while I waited for my appointment.  The other time was when I collected the station, and back then I walked out, took a photo, and walked back in.  

This was the first time I was walking to the town centre without being a bag of nerves, and it meant I could look around and see Kirkby properly.  I imagine there's a certain amount of sniggering going on out there among local readers, something along the lines of why would you want to?, but I was open-minded, and to be honest, it looked like one of a hundred other English towns I've visited over the past couple of decades.  Rows of houses, semis and terraced, small blocks of flats, the odd cottage that pre-dated the construction of the estate and now looked out of place.  

I was walking along one of those "shared spaces" they have for pedestrians and cyclists.  I hate those.  A white line down the middle of the pavement to divide you from people on bikes, but nothing to say who should be on the left or the right.  It's not infrastructure, it's paint.  Dig up the pavement and put in a proper cycle lane with a kerb either side - there was certainly enough room.  Of course that costs money, but at least people might use it.

I passed a woman walking an incredibly odd looking dog - it was like a black labrador, except it had the legs of an Irish Wolfhound; it looked like it was on stilts - and a house with a Liverpool FC themed number plate.  Five stars were arranged neatly across the top line, and then, above the Liver Bird, they'd added a sixth, slightly off centre.  

Millbrook Park - sorry, Millbrook Park Millennium Green - appeared on my left, a long stretch of lawn and trees curving around a small brook.  There was a helpful notice board to welcome you to the park, but I'm afraid it was covered with bollocks - not graffiti, nonsensical copy that actively irritated me.  There were Tips to make the most of Millbrook Park Millennium Green  which included:

• TALK: this is a great place to meet friends

as well as

• DAYDREAM: this parks [sic] offer a perfect setting to rest, unwind or enjoy a picnic

Thanks for the hints, guys!  I wouldn't know how to use a park without them.  Perhaps you could advise me on how to use the paths - I put one foot in front of the other, right?

St Chad's Church, one of those older buildings that dated from the 19th century (though there's been a church here for hundreds of years more) sat amidst a neatly landscaped park, and then there was a huge roundabout to signal the entrance to the town centre.  This gave me my first look at the All-New Kirkby.  Originally built after the war, Kirkby was a place for Liverpool residents who'd lived in slums to move to; it was a New Town, even if the Government refused to designate it as such.  It carried with it that hope of a new, healthy, exciting future, a 20th century where people can live somewhere designed for them.  Town planners tried to make it a place where the residents would thrive.

The problems started almost immediately.  People were moved here before facilities were opened.  Communities were broken up and scattered.  Kirkby became the home of Z Cars, the slightly dodgy northern town riddled with crime, and then the 1970s crashed into Merseyside.  Joblessness rose, drug addictions followed, poverty swept across the town and kneecapped all of those hopes that the city had imbued in its child-estate when it built it after the war.

For years, the town has been undergoing regeneration of one kind or another.  The 2000s have, however, brought real concerted efforts to remake Kirkby.  At first this involved a new stadium for Everton alongside a Tesco superstore.  There was considerable opposition to this, both from the locals and from Everton fans, who noted that it would mean moving the club outside the City of Liverpool. Kirkby is Liverpool, to me, the same way Bootle or Birkenhead or New Brighton are, but that's because I'm an outsider who doesn't understand the passionate disdain each part of the city region has for one another.  All the Merseyside boroughs count as Liverpool as far as I'm concerned, the way Tower Hamlets and Brent and Enfield are all London.  Those plans failed when the Government refused to support them, so Everton, eventually went off to the docks, while Tesco simply wandered off.

The council joined up with a different developer, who helped to construct a new retail offering on the north side of the town centre, while the local authority demolished an office block and a swimming pool and a library, moving them to newer facilities elsewhere.  Then that developer partnership went south, and it's only now that a huge patch of land just south of the main precinct is getting developed - though I'm not sure what they're building.  There was going to be a Lidl and a cinema as well as new houses, but looking around I can only find evidence that the houses are going ahead; the Lidl will almost certainly appear at some point, but it all seems to have gone quiet on the cinema front. 

On the plus side, the bus exchange has been vastly improved since I last saw it, so there's that.  It now backs onto a new Civic Square, constructed on what was a car park for the council, which has some large Instagram friendly chairs with wings positioned around for tourists to use as backdrops in their photos.  Kirkby being overwhelmed with tourists, of course.  Still, you can't argue that it's not an improvement on a car park.

I was headed for the Kirkby Centre, the replacement for the civic centre that sat on one edge of the square.  It's home to the library and the Kirkby Gallery, which the website informs me is "one of the best contemporary art galleries in Merseyside and the North West of England" - a bold claim, given that Merseyside is also home to the actual Tate Gallery.  I scampered up the stairs and found a pair of closed doors to the gallery, but a helpful sign informed me that this was because they were keeping the heat in.  That wasn't all they were keeping in.  I pushed it open a couple of inches and was confronted with the noise of over-excited primary school children in the middle of some kind of art experience.  Everywhere I looked there were red jumpers.  I backed away.

Instead I went into the library next door, which does have a piece of art of its own: a fibreglass and resin sculpture by William George Mitchell.  It was commissioned for the original library and then ported over to this one.  Its 1960s aesthetic doesn't quite fit with the more pared down practicality of 21st century municipal - it's like wandering into an Amazon distribution warehouse and finding a Chagall on the wall.  It needs to be surrounded by architecture as brave and interesting as it is.  At least they kept it, though; it would've been easy to chuck it in a skip for being outdated.

I checked the stacks for James Bond books - not a single Ian Fleming, shame on you Knowsley Libraries - then walked back out and into the shopping precinct.  Like High Streets all across Britain it had seen better days.  A central square was surrounded by Iceland, Max Spielman, B&M, and a closed Sayers with a logo they haven't used for at least thirty years.  Charity shops and vaguely council-looking outlets occupied many of the storefronts.

There was also, though closed now, a Benetton.  A bit of scouting around on the internet revealed it lasted three whole years, from 2022 to 2025, and I am absolutely astonished.  Benetton is one of those brands I thought was high-class and expensive - I always think of Victoria Wood saying "I don't always buy anything in there but I do like to go in and unfold things" - so the idea of it being in one of the poorest parts of Merseyside next door to a Pound Bakery is baffling.  Mind you, the only branch in the Liverpool city region is in Allerton, not Liverpool One as you'd expect, so who knows what's going on there.  

The shopping centre reminded me a little of Coventry.  The same Fifties/Sixties aesthetics, the same long straight lines of construction, the simple yet clean look.  It was a precinct built for an era of small local shops and mum walking into town a daily run for groceries, before fridges and supermarkets and cars changed everything.  

The market was a similar story, now mainly mobile phone unlocking services and vape shops, though Martin's Deli did advertise itself as "the home of the famous Kirkby sausage".  I can't actually find what a Kirkby sausage is; even the Echo wrote a piece entitled Have you heard of the "famous" Kirkby sausage? and they're always claiming that some minor shop on a back street is "iconic" or "unique" and has a queue of people out the door every morning.  The recipe must be a closely guarded secret because I can't find anyone who's talking about what's in it.  If I was a proper travel writer I'd have bought one and eaten it there and then - raw so I could taste the flavour - and then waxed lyrical about its stunning taste, but I'm not, so I didn't.  The Kirkby Sausage remains a mystery to me, unless you count that lad I once met who [that's quite enough of that].

A closed up bank building continued the 1950s look, no doubt soon to be demolished because nobody would want a shop that looked like that, while to the side two women rolled out of a different marble-clad former bank that had been converted into a pub.  It was ten past eleven in the morning.

I'd reached the new part of Kirkby town centre, the bit that they were especially proud of.  It consisted of a health centre, a vast Morrisons, and a few drive in takeaway restaurants - McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC.  Surrounding it was a huge car park.  It was not the model of regeneration I think anyone should aspire to.

I understand that hard-up councils get a supermarket offering to build in their town and leap at the chance of jobs and opportunities.  What it then does, however, is stop anyone from going anywhere else.  Birkenhead did something similar when it allowed a huge Asda to open on Grange Road - there was suddenly no reason to wander any further into the town, so nobody did, and everything started closing.  It's a massive Trojan Horse.  I found it profoundly depressing.  The precinct had been human-sized and pleasant - walk to a shop, walk to another shop.  Here you could park ten yards from the front door then get your dinner from Maccy D's on the way home without even leaving your car.  

Kirkby pleased me in many ways.  It had self-evidently had its struggles but the recent regeneration did actually feel transformative - it was more than a few new lampposts and some bushes, it was comprehensive.  I liked the Kirkby Centre, and I'll have to go back to see the artwork some time when it's not swarming with six year olds.  I hope that the new development on the former college site will bring housing and people and bustle to the town centre.  It's just a shame that there was that massive supermarket leeching off the hope to one side.  It didn't help that the Morrisons looked away from the precinct, showed it its back.  I do hope that the town gets back on its feet.  I want it to succeed.

3. Kirkby

 

Opened: 1848.  (Weirdly, despite owning half a dozen books about Merseyside's railways, I've not found a more precise date than that.  Kirkby was a tiny hamlet then so maybe nobody really cared.)

EDITED TO ADD: per a tip from Anonymous in the comments, the opening date was apparently the 20th November 1848, making Kirkby station a Scorpio. 

Line electrified:  2nd May 1977

Number of platforms: One.  There were two until 1970, when the platform towards Wigan was taken out of service to save a few bob.  This caused problems when the diesel services were replaced by electric ones, so a second platform was built the other side of the buffers and people wanting to get from Liverpool to Wigan trains walked down and under the bridge to board it.

This then caused even more problems when the line was extended to Headbolt Lane.  The Wigan service was cut back to there and now there's a stretch of single track after Fazakerley and before Headbolt Lane.  For the time being that's not too bad, but if the line is ever extended any further - to Skelmersdale, for example - that's a bottleneck.  The plus side is there's very little chance of that ever happening because this is the United Kingdom.  (Moral of the story: don't single track anything).

Points of interest: None.  Sorry.

Attractive Local Feature (ALF) Sign:  None. 

Original blog post: 21st November 2007

What's changed since then?  Kirkby's had a bit of a makeover to get some parking spaces and better interchange with the buses.  They also revamped the station building.  Before it was a little brick triangle.  It's been expanded and the ticket window moved to the exterior, meaning the station operative also gets a good view of the car park to help with security.

It's a marked improvement and makes the station feel a lot more like a place.  It's out of the town centre so it could feel like an afterthought but this makes it far more of a destination.

Proof of visit:

Light In The Darkness

When you turn out of Leasowe station, north of the level crossing, you pass between two large industrial concerns.  To your right is BristolMyersSquibb, the multinational pharmaceutical company, where employees are working on medicines to cure and alleviate any number of ailments.

To your left, is Premier Foods, which, as large lettering on the front of the building clearly informs you, is the Home of the Mini Roll.  

I will leave it to the reader to decide which business is providing the more valuable service to society.  All I will say is that I have never needed an anti-diabetes medicine, but I have eaten a Cadbury's Mini Roll with a raspberry jam filling, so as far as I'm concerned the Moreton Bakery wins.  They don't make Typhoo tea here any more, by the way, despite what that building says: various corporate takeovers and buyouts over the years led to Typhoo closing the factory in 2023.  They went bust shortly after, so there's karma for you.  

Reeds Lane continues for a while as a mix of open space and odd buildings.  The Birket, a small river that empties into the Wallasey Docks, runs through here, and combined with the proximity to the top of the peninsula it means that the land round here is often marshy or prone to flooding.  It'll seem like you're in a perfectly ordinary housing estate and then there's a patch of scrubland, unloved and unattended, though in the 21st century they're getting fewer and fewer as Wirral tries to build as many homes as possible.  I'm very much of the opinion that if people have lived in this part of the world for a thousand years but haven't seen to build their home on that bit of land there's probably a very good reason for it but then I'm not willing to put up with a small amount of annual flooding in exchange for a three bed semi with its own parking space.

I passed a shopping corner, the Tesco Express (est. 2022) unable to compete with the glittering sign of the Leasowe Local Store over the road, a store that promised "tobacco-drinks-vapes-groceries", and I think it's very telling that "groceries" is fourth in that list.  Beside it was a pharmacy without a branded sign, merely promising that it would "provide NHS services"; it used to be a Well, but given how pharmacy services in this country are constantly chopping and changing, it could be a Boots by the time you read this.  I'm not even sure what company provides my drugs any more, I just go in and see what tabard the girl behind the counter is being made to wear this week.

Leasowe is a good, stout, old-fashioned council estate, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment.  It was laid out by Wallasey Council starting in the 20s and 30s and it still carries the air of aspiration and hope.  The roads are wide and straight, the houses large, with gardens at the front and back and enough room on the side return for a garage or a porch.  There are grass verges, and greens.  I crossed one diagonally, a wide square of grass with children's play equipment at its centre.  It must be great to open your front door and let your kid go on the swings while you watch from a distance.

Of course, since this is 2026, most of the houses have been bought and sold many times.  (Bloody Thatcher).  Each home had its own distinct fencing, its own front wall, its own front door, as the new people sought to make their mark and make it a bit less... council.  Now and then there were homes that looked like they must've done when they were built - unencumbered by a double glazed front entry, the garden a stretch of grass that hasn't been paved over, a lack of any boundary barrier at all.  Everyone else was trying hard to be different, mainly by covering up the grass with tarmac and parking a couple of cars on it, though one house had a plastic lawn with a Mickey Mouse ears motif made out of white stones laid into it, so the imagination can take you anywhere.

St Chad's was opened in 1954, as a combination church hall and place for prayer, but it was quickly decided that this was undignified and money was raised for a proper church alongside it.  It opened in 1967, reeking of Swinging Britain, all concrete and stained glass.  It's lovely.

It's not ostentatious or over the top but it's just that bit special enough to be interesting.  I particularly like the bell tower.

St Chad's sits alongside a long avenue that forms the spine of the estate, at the point where Castleway North becomes Castleway South.  Again, it's a piece of elegant town planning, a central route lined with trees.  It's a community area, which is something we've lost from new housing estates these days.  Homes are rammed up against one another without room to breathe.

I continued along Twickenham Drive, past tight blocks of flats, three stories high with a central stairwell.  The entrance was enclosed with a glass front door for security these days but I liked their symmetry and their politeness.  They added bulk and density without being ugly.  There was a leisure centre here, too, as the residents of Leasowe were gifted with all the community facilities they could need.  (This sort of thing used to be a bone of contention for my mum when I was growing up less well-off on a private estate, while the council estate next door got multiple bus routes, a swimming pool, a market and a shopping precinct.  They also used to regularly have riots and sex workers on the streets and dead drug addicts being found in bin stores but she was still annoyed that their library was so much bigger than ours just because they were local authority).  

A noticeboard promised Unity in Our Community with flyers for energy saving advice and the name of the local housing association.  A faded poster pushed the Leasowe Fun Day, back on the 21st August (Bouncy castles and assault courses, face painting with the Hive, entrance through the Addy) and behind it was the Millennium Centre, a building whose name was modern for exactly one year and now seems hopelessly dated.  The Millennium Centre houses the library and council services and a Family Centre, one of those places for parents to get an hour's supervised contact with their children once a week to prove they're definitely not going to belt them any more.  Behind it were some newer houses, built on top of a different, long-demolished Council building; that had once been home to the Wirral Incontinence Laundry Service, so I imagine it must've smelt lovely round here when they had the machines on the go.

I followed the road round, past a house with a flagpole in its garden flying both the Union Jack and the England flag.  One good thing about living on Merseyside is we've been largely exempt from the flag-shagging madness which has gripped the nation over the past year.  Liverpool is, after all, "Scouse, not English", a city whose football supporters boo the national anthem at Wembley.  Nationalism gets a very short shrift round here, and its roundabouts and lampposts have been largely unadorned - the closest to home I've seen them is in Ellesmere Port, over the border in Cheshire.  If you want to go for that sort of nonsense you have to put up your own flagpole in your own garden and even then I've seen way more flags flying to commemorate Liverpool's 20th league victory than a tribute to His Majesty.

There was a small parade of shops here, including a Sayers, the Merseyside bakery that was thoroughly tramped underfoot by the mighty Greggs.  (For the record, I much prefer a Sayers sausage roll, though I admit there's a certain amount of nostalgia involved in that).  Opposite, Heron Foods occupied what used to be the estate pub, the Oyster Catcher.  

While the pub closed in 2016, it still lives on in a mural on the side wall, showing that nostalgia comes round quicker and quicker these days.  Also there, somewhat incongruously, is a hovercraft.  Scousers have long enjoyed trips to North Wales, spending holidays in Rhyl, Prestatyn and Talacre, but the Dee Estuary means that while it's an extremely short distance as the crow flies, you have to basically travel via Chester to get there.

The invention of the hovercraft suddenly opened up a new option.  In 1962, a summer service from Leasowe to Rhyl opened, skipping across the water in a straight line and cutting travel time hugely.  It's a brilliant idea, and hovercrafts will never not be exciting; I myself used the one from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight a few years ago and it was like being in an episode of Thunderbirds.  The wide beaches at Leasowe and Rhyl made them ideal spots to launch the service from.

Unfortunately, it was perhaps a little too soon to launch a hovercraft route.  The technology was still new and so there were technical problems - the sand would get in the engines, putting the craft out of service, and if the weather was bad it couldn't run at all.  The Irish Sea is famously short of millpond-like conditions, meaning it was an unreliable route to the seaside, so the passenger numbers weren't there on the days it did run - which turned out to be only 19 out of the scheduled 59.  It would've been lovely if it had succeeded.  To this day, it takes an hour to get from Leasowe to Rhyl by road, and even longer by train.  Perhaps Rhyl wouldn't be quite as sad as it is today if the hovercraft was turning up on a regular basis.

I disappeared back into the streets of the estate, past more open green spaces and builders laying down paving slabs over grassy lawns.  An electricity substation was accompanied by an abandoned fridge freezer and a shopping trolley; you don't really see shopping trollies outside of the supermarket car park these days, so it was somehow a delightful throwback.

I paused outside a block of flats and took a picture of the number of the block.  The address is housed in a light box, with the numbers on the outside, and I find them very charming.  I walked on, taking in the folding chairs around the front door, and the swing set in the garden.  How nice, I thought.  What a lovely little community.

Then I heard a strong, violent hammering.  It caught my attention and I saw a man behind the window of one of the flats.  He was pointing right at me and shouting.  There's a certain kind of noise Scousers make when they're really annoyed, when all you can understand is vowels and s's, and he was in full flow.  "uuuus AAAAY eeeee aaaarrrss DICKHEAD".  I understood that last bit.

I put my head down and hurried on.

A few seconds later I heard the noise again, the mass of vowels and the scream, and I realised that this time it was outdoors.  That he'd come outside and was in the street and hurling abuse at me.  I assume this man didn't like having his block of flats photographed for some reason.  He was taking it very personally.

I could've turned round and walked back to him.  Said, "hey, I'm just an architecture fan, and I liked your home.  If you're not happy having it photographed I'm fine with deleting it, that's no problem.  Have a great day!"  I did not do this.  I kept my head down and carried on walking and didn't look back.  In my pocket, my hand curled protectively round my phone.  The third volley of indecipherable fury sounded like it was closer to me, and I was ready to hear running footsteps, and prepped myself to use my iPhone as a club if I had to.  It would've been pathetic and I would've got my teeth kicked in and the phone would've been robbed but hey, you've got to have a plan.

He didn't chase after me any further.  I made it to the Leasowe Road, a long dual carriageway that shadows the coast, and I dashed across to try and put some traffic between me and him.  Only then did I pause and look back and make sure nobody was behind me.  

I've gone to some very dodgy places over the years for this blog.  Nationally infamous spots, both at home and abroad.  But I think this was the first time I genuinely thought I was about to get lamped.  I took a moment to swallow my heart and try and get it back into my chest then started walking again.

The Leasowe Road is a very long, very straight, very boring four-lane road that runs from Wallasey Village towards Moreton.  The most exciting thing about it is that you can get up a fair old head of steam on it if you're a man with a small penis.  There was one on the road that day, in a black car with tinted windows, who put his foot down and roared down the road as though it were Le Mans, the engine making a noise it almost certainly wasn't supposed to the whole time.  I was, needless to say, incredibly impressed.

Further along I encountered a man digging around in the bushes.  He was holding a gardening cane with a coat hook strapped to the end and pushing it at random into the greenery.  I couldn't work out what was going on.  Had he lost a gerbil down there and was hoping to trap it?  

Past the golf course - this part of the Wirral is 20% bunker - I encountered the entrance to the Leasowe Castle Hotel.  I have fond memories of this place, because one of my best friends was married here about twenty years ago, and I got astonishingly drunk and danced until my shirt was wet with sweat; there was also a buffet, and a buffet is the best food, and makes everything better.

Unfortunately the hotel closed suddenly last year, without warning, leaving staff unpaid and the building to rot.  This seems to be the 2020s way to close businesses; every other week there's a report of a bar or a restaurant where the waitresses have turned up on Monday morning and found the windows  boarded up.  Like everything in the UK today the hospitality industry is on a knife edge and it's entirely down to fate which side you'll fall on.

I took a wander up the drive for a look and it was sad and derelict.  Little memories of the hot day of the wedding came rushing back, the photos in the garden, the laughs in the bar, the picture I took of my friend Jennie smoking a fag where she looks ridiculously cool.  It's not really a castle, just a manor house with ideas above its station, that has been occupied and abandoned over and over for five hundred years, extended then demolished, useful then a drain.  It's currently on a downward slope but will no doubt swing back up again one day.

There was a sanatorium and hospital on the front here for decades, until medical science developed to the extent where a cure for tuberculosis was something better than "some sea air?"  Flats fill the spot now, looking over the marshes and grasses of the North Wirral Country Park, a spot of open land between the road and the sea defences here which mean you can walk from New Brighton to West Kirby without ever leaving the coast.  There are still concrete anti-landing craft defences on the shore.

I was heading for Leasowe Lighthouse, which is technically in Moreton, but I felt I had to visit to finish the area off.  You can see it looming up at you as you walk along the road, the end point you're aiming for, a white column of brick rising up over the flat marshlands.

There was, for centuries, only one way to reach the port of Liverpool from the Irish Sea, and that was to follow the coast of the Wirral between often hidden sandbanks.  As the port expanded, the chance of shipwreck expanded too, and so a system of lighthouses was built along the shore to warn off vessels.  The one at Hoylake is now a private home; the one a little further downstream was washed away in a storm and replaced by one on Bidston Hill.  The one at Leasowe was constructed in 1763 and originally had a brazier on the roof.  

Leasowe lighthouse was the first in the world to receive a parabolic reflector behind the light, put there by the Liverpool dockmaster, William Hutchinson.  He'd been experimenting with using mirrors to increase the visibility and he installed them here in 1772; suddenly the light was visible from 20 miles away, instead of five.  

It is, undeniably, an incredibly important building, locally, nationally, and internationally; it helped change maritime navigation and helped turn Liverpool into the world's most important port.  It's 2026, though, and nobody has any money for anything, so as a result it is cared for by dedicated volunteers, and only open a few times a year - the next one is on the 18th February, if you're in the area and have strong calf muscles that can carry you up to the top.  Alternatively they host abseiling days, if you really want to hurl yourself off a monument; you do you.

I took a seat at the base and had a drink of water.  When I'd last visited Leasowe I'd whizzed through, basing my entire visit around a very poor gag about Danger Lane.  This revisit really showed me what I'd missed back in those days when the station sign was the important part and the rest was irrelevant.  I'd experienced history, culture, and a little threat of physical violence.  Not bad for a Friday morning.