Introduction

On a fine spring morning in 2023, just before I set off to catch the Liverpool train, I had a brief chat with my neighbour, Tommy. He asked what I was working on, I told him about this book. He paused, looked at me quizzically, and with a tone of bafflement asked, “Why there?” He continued, “I drive past there every week and I watched it being built, and all this time I could never understand why they were building a theatre there”. Tommy is a paramedic, and for the last 14 years he has been driving around Merseyside, a metropolitan county in the Northwest of England that he knows like the back of his hand. I understood Tommy’s bafflement completely, for that was exactly my response when I first heard in 2016 about the Shakespeare North Playhouse that was going to be built in the small town of Prescot about eight miles from Liverpool. I can’t claim to know Merseyside like Tommy, but I do know it well, having grown up here and returning in 2015 after many years away. However, in the 21 years I’d lived in Crosby – a coastal town in north Liverpool at the point where the River Mersey joins the Irish Sea – Prescot was only a name to me: I’d never been there. That in itself was not unusual. Merseyside, centred on the city of Liverpool, covers an area of approximately 250 square miles and has a population of 1.4 million. It is highly urbanised, and much of the travel tends to be from outer areas to the centre and back again. My family and I had no more reason to journey across the post-industrial hinterlands of north and east Liverpool to visit Prescot when I was young than a Prescotian at the time would have had to visit Crosby. Now, though, things have changed: Crosby has Another Place – since 2005, 100 life-size iron figures by Anthony Gormley have stood on the beach staring out over the Mersey estuary – and Prescot, of course, has the Shakespeare North Playhouse (SNP), which opened its doors in July 2022 (Figure 1.1).