ABSTRACT
Bootie was situated on the banks of the River Mersey to the north of its much larger neighbour Liverpool. It had developed as a separate county borough from 1868, but in economic and social terms it had become an extension of the larger city well before the inter-war years. One study described Bootie as 'an industrial offshoot of Liverpool at all times indistinguishable from it to the ordinary traveller'. Another investigation found that it had 'no clear line of division from Liverpool', and that as a borough it was hard for Bootie to 'maintain its own life and identity' .1 Along its waterfront were situated the Brocklebank, Langton, Alexandra, Hornby and Gladstone docks, which then formed the northernmost outposts of the port of Liverpool. 'The northern wall of the Gladstone dock is the northern boundary of the Bootie foreshore.' 2 Adjacent to the docks lived a community that was very similar in its occupational structure, religion and culture to the docklands community of the north end of Liverpool. There was some nineteenth-century deprecation of Bootie by its Liverpool neighbours. The borough was characterised as 'Brutal Bootie' - 'where the bugs wear clogs', but in reality the differences between north Liverpool and Bootie were insignificant.3
