Urban Growth 1845–1870

THE tap of bricklayers’ hammers and the scrape of their trowels were sounds very familiar to the inhabitants of St. Helens a hundred years ago. The population of the town itself, having probably doubled between 1830 and 1845, certainly doubled again between 1845 and 1870, increasing from some 12,000 to about 25,000. This was the number actually living within the boundary of the Improvement Commission ; another 20,000 people were by 1870 living outside the boundary but within the limits of the four townships of Eccleston (excluding part in the Prescot registration district), Parr, Sutton and Windle. ¹ Accommodation for these many additional families was provided in rows of brick cottages, repetitive, dull and uninteresting, though if within the town boundary built to certain minimum specifications laid down by the Improvement Commission. ² These monotonous new streets radiated outwards from the original nucleus of buildings. In the late ’forties the builders were hard at work between Liverpool Road and Westfield Street fitting as many houses to the acre as they could, and the same was happening in Parr to the south of the St. Helens-Ashton turnpike. ³ During the ’fifties they were running up cottages near the newly-opened factories at Pocket Nook and starting to obliterate Westfield, extending their operations as far as Duke Street in the north and Boundary Road in the west. In the ’sixties they developed the southern slope of Cowley Hill, laid open by the cutting of North Road a few years earlier, ¹ and eventually linked up with other builders who were striking south and west from Gerard’s Bridge. At the same time shops and offices, as well as private houses, were being built in Cotham Street, Claughton Street, Hardshaw Street and George Street, thereby extending the heart of the town northwards. Outside the Improvement Commission’s boundary, housing schemes were being pressed forward with equal vigour. The scattered hamlets in Parr were growing quickly and tending to merge ; more accommodation was required for the workpeople at the factories of Sutton Oak ; houses were springing up in some numbers just outside the boundary to the south of the town ; Alma Place and Alma Street, close to Kurtz’s works, bear the distinctive marks of the mid-1850s.