ABSTRACT
THE town of St. Helens is most widely known nowadays as the home of the glass industry. This was not always the case, however; the origins of large-scale glassmaking in southwest Lancashire are comparatively recent. It is true that the Romans made glass at Warrington 1 and foreign glass-makers were at work in the Bickerstaffe area at the beginning of the seventeenth century. 2 But it was not till Liverpool began to be a considerable transatlantic port almost a hundred years later that the industry became of any consequence in the Merseyside region.
