Getting Off at Edge Hill

Tunnels, more tunnels and the search for a lost identity

Written for The Liverpool Post, 18/01/23

There’s a euphemism for getting interrupted during sex: getting off at Edge Hill. So called because Edge Hill train station is the penultimate stop on your way into Lime Street. It’s a disappointing experience for all involved, the tease of something good that never delivers.

Being in Edge Hill can feel like that. It isn’t empty, but it doesn’t quite shine like its neighbours in Toxteth, Wavertree, Kensington or the city centre. Jenny Porter, director of Metal, an arts organisation based out of the train station, says the area feels almost like “a no man’s land.” Of Merseyside’s 80 train stations, only eight are used less frequently — despite the euphemism, getting off at Edge Hill is an act seldom undertaken. It wasn’t always like that though, once upon a time this ground beneath my feet was, to some extent, fertile soil for industrial greatness.

Walking around today though, you’d probably not feel like you were standing on the shoulders of industrial giants. Edge Hill is a quiet residential area with a lot of identikit new-build houses of the noughties “aspiration” ilk, mixed in with assorted Georgian townhouses, Victorian terraces and mid-century social housing. Then there’s some schools, transport links and a mid-sized Tesco. Handy if you’re partial to a meal deal, but not quite enough to get the heart pumping.

There used to be a clearer community here. The early 20th century through to the post-war period saw significant economic growth. It was a kind of 10 year old’s fantasy; large biscuit and toy factories, locally run department stores on the bustling high street of Wavertree Road, and one of Britain’s first 10-pin bowling alleys. But in the 1960s things went into reverse; a familiar tale of slum clearances, declining industries and lost communities.

By the early 2000s there was barely a biscuit in sight. The housing market in the area was deemed to be failing and Edge Hill became a target of the Blair government’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder scheme, led by John Prescott. 784 houses between Durning Road and Marmaduke Street were razed, making way for 400 new builds. Some said it diversified an area that had an overabundance of one type of housing, others felt the brutal scythe of gentrification had been swung right down on their working class community.

But that’s a familiar enough tale. The winds of change, the disenfranchisement of those already there. It’s rinsed and repeated not just nationally but internationally, and frankly, we’ve heard it all a million times. But Edge Hill’s story isn’t just one of a small community that shrinks and grows, it’s also a story with national importance going back two centuries. Kenn Taylor’s 2011 pamphlet, A Brief History of Edge Hill, created as part of an archiving project by Metal, tells that story.
 

Much of the more eccentric side of the area’s legacy rests on the shoulders of a tobacco magnate and philanthropist known as the “mad mole of Edge Hill” (or the somewhat grander “King of Edge Hill”): Joseph Williamson. Arriving on Mason Street in 1805, Williamson never left. Once settled into his new town, he set about doing what anyone might, ordering his army of workers to start digging an enormous labyrinthine maze of tunnels (the now-famous Williamson tunnels) for no apparent purpose. No one really knows why Williamson did it, some speculate that he wanted to give his workers something to do, others believed he was simply a fan of tunnels.

As Taylor notes, however, “Edge Hill’s real contribution to world history would include tunnels of a different kind”. Opened in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester railway was the first inter-city passenger railway in the world, connecting the biggest port in the North West to the biggest industrial centre. Its Liverpool terminal was at Crown Street, where the park now is, and its rail yard where the trains were kept was at Edge Hill.

When the railway opened, locomotives reaching Edge Hill would be detached from their trains. “Loaded passenger coaches would then be cable-hauled by winding engines to Crown Street through a railway tunnel and returning coaches would then run back down to Edge Hill by gravity, Taylor writes. To the modern mind that might sound like pretty standard 19th century engineering, but that railway tunnel was the very first in the world of its kind, the precursor to all the tubes and subway systems around the globe. It was, in its small way, truly revolutionary.

Edge Hill would become a national rail hub, where passenger and freight trains were built, stored, and maintained. Over time, much of that operation was moved more centrally in England, to places like Crewe. But though the current station here might have about as much buzz as Ann Widdecombe’s birthday bash, the original was a key part of the country’s industrial story.

During the Second World War, Edge Hill was a target of the blitz, as somewhere with nationally important infrastructure, and the basement of the Edge Hill College (the first non-denominational teaching college for women, which had had strong ties to Suffragettes) was used as a large communal bomb shelter. On one November night in 1940, a bomb landed directly on the building, crushing the shelter below, and causing the gas main and central heating system to burst, killing 166 people in what Winston Churchill described as “the worst single incident of the war”.

By that point though, the actual college was no longer in Edge Hill at all. Only the building was bombed. In the ‘30s it had been moved to a much larger space in Ormskirk, but kept its name, which has led to ‘Edge Hill’ often being more associated with the West Lancashire town than the area of Liverpool. It’s the kind of cruel trick of fate this area has had to endure; as though not content with taking away its sense of community and its biscuit factory, history has conspired to try and pinch its bloody name too.

History is history, though, so goes the cliche, but as I stand back at the station waiting to get on, there’s little around to distract me from reflecting. Things seem to struggle to stay in Edge Hill, and not just railway users. Maybe that’s the real story of the neighbourhood’s past, a place where important things have been incubated but not retained.

Even the new houses that are coming to define today’s Edge Hill are really an external commodity, parachuted in by a central government scheme that never had a chance to be fully completed. When power changed hands in both Westminster and Town Hall in 2010, then-council leader Joe Anderson announced an “urgent review” into the Housing Renewal Pathfinder scheme, saying there was “inertia” in providing adequate housing. Meanwhile, the coalition government cut funding for the scheme entirely, before backtracking and creating funds to complete already-underway work. Perhaps poor John Prescott experienced getting off at Edge Hill in his own way.

Other local schemes and partnerships have tried to fill the gaps, but in typical fashion, are more closely associated with nearby neighbourhoods. The much-publicised £1 houses scheme was one plan and homes on streets like Arnside Road were amongst the first sold, before the scheme expanded city-wide. But the successes of that plan are generally thought of in relation to the Granby Four Streets in L8, or houses off Smithdown, or in Anfield.

But even if it’s quieter, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for new communities to sprout up, Porter says she is “sensing a real desire to come together to do good work for the community.” She points to things slipping over the boundary into Edge Hill, community work from Love Wavertree, and things happening at the top of Lodge Lane. The edges of these areas are porous, or at least they can be.

Metal themselves have been a part of community building, hosting regular events in the train station before COVID thwarted them, showcasing their arts and heritage work, as well as collaborations with local people and partners, offering free tickets to local residents. They’ve created a garden, designed by local school children, and host a gardening club in partnership with asylum charity Human Eyes, where vulnerable people new to the area can care for plants and build friendships.

The full picture is still emerging, but Edge Hill today has potential, signs of organic new life emerging. There's a planning notice for a new shop on Wavertree Road, and the chippy that had shut on Durning Road reopened under new management with an incredibly high quality menu. Baby steps. Porter says Edge Hill is now “completely unrecognisable” from when she started working in the area, and with that, comes opportunity. It may not have the noise and verve of its neighbours, but its past and present are vital parts of Liverpool’s wider story.

It is a kind of microcosm of Liverpool. To understand Edge Hill’s tale is to understand much of the city’s. A history of innovation, a key role in the whole country’s industrial growth, then decline as industry dissipated and suburbs swelled, followed by mixed-to-botched attempts at redevelopment. But in mirroring these wider trends, often due to forces from far beyond its borders, does it lose some of its uniqueness, does it become just those trends? The kinds of new-build houses that have refilled the area in the last decade are far from unique, but then, nor were the terraces that came before, it’s the things that people do in them that make a place. After decline and rebuild, Edge Hill is just about growing again. Getting off at Edge Hill might seem like a tease, but it’ll get there in the end.