ess056 mersey wave
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#everysinglestreet [29/11/20] Speke: Part 1 – The Mersey Wave and secret gardens

Graham Holland  

Stats

  • Sunday 29th November 2020
  • 28 streets – Alderfield Drive, Almeda Road, Alwain Green, Cassley Road, Catford Green, Churchway Road, Critchley Road, Croyde Road, Daneswell Road, East Damwood Road, Eastern Avenue, East Mains, Easte Millwood Road, Elloway Road, Greenway Road, Harland Green, Heathgate Avenue, Hutfield Road, Leveret Road, Maintree Crescent, Millway Road, Miners Way, Oak View, Ramsfield Road, Ringsfield Road, Sandham Road, West Mains. Plus unnamed road off Greenway Road.
  • Total: 2,008 (35.71%)
  • Remaining: 3,615

Notes

Let me tell you a joke from my childhood.

Q: How do you get your cat to speak?

A: Put it on the 82 bus.

This joke only works if you’re from Liverpool and the joke’s spoken because only locals would know that the 82 bus goes to Speke. 8 year old Graham thought it was funny!

Speke is recorded in the Domesday Book (AD 1086) as Spec (Old English for brushwood) and gives its name to Speke Hall (1530) and Speke Airport (now Liverpool John Lennon Airport). It was the ideal out-of-town location for factories, with Ford, Triumph, and Bryant and May all based here. Of the three only the Ford factory lives on as Jaguar Land Rover. Speke is now home to pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly, MedImmune, and Novartis. 

Speke housing estate was originally proposed to be a self-contained town in the mould of the Garden Suburb. In the end it became just a regular housing estate. Between 1938 and 1953 the population grew from 400 to 25,000. After the Second World War large swathes of sub-standard and blitz-damaged housing in the city was razed to the ground and whole communities were uprooted and forced out to places like Speke. There’s a well-known song from the mid-1960s called Back Buchanan Street that contains the line “Don’t want to go to Kirkby, to Skelmersdale or Speke. Don’t want to go from all I know in Back Buchanan Street.” The song tells of the acute sense of loss as people lost their homes and were forced to move away from the places they loved. 

The houses in Speke were originally owned by the Corpy (short for Corporation, as the Council used to be called). In the 1980s the Thatcher government introduced the ‘right to buy’ and those properties that didn’t get snapped up at bargain prices were eventually transferred to housing associations. 

The outer ring road passes by the Mersey Wave, a 30 m (100 ft) high illuminated structure comprising two sets of six aluminium fins situated either side of the A561 (AKA The Ford Road). It opened in 2003 but had to be taken down just weeks later when it was discovered that the fins were moving dangerously in high winds. It was rebuilt in 2005.

The eastern edge of Speke borders Halton and still has grass and woodland. Many of the street names (Millwood, Damwood, Millway, Miners Way) reflect what would have been here before it was bulldozed to make way for housing.

Amongst the original post-war housing there are pockets of new houses dotted around. One road built on unused green space is so new that it hasn’t got a road name sign and isn’t on Google Maps. 

I ran Critchley Road. I was going to tag Kevin Critchley but he seems to have dropped off Facebook.

I’m not sure what the style of architecture is for St Columbus Catholic Church is. School gymnasium? 

I kept coming across patches of land that have been turned into gardens. They’re all gated to protect them, and they’re all well kept. 

One particular car demolished a brick wall on the corner of Greenway Road. Yes, I’m talking about you EJ11 YMG.

There’s a park called The Mains. The two roads on each side – East Mains and West Mains – used to have blocks of flats, but these were demolished because people didn’t want to live in flats, they wanted houses with gardens. 

Which planner drew out Miner’s Way and decided to put residential housing on one side, and the backs of the shops and flats on the other side? What were they thinking?

The Mill House pub is now a day nursery. Looking at the name on the front missing a letter, I wonder if there’s a mous in the hous.

There’s a parade of shops on Alder Wood Avenue. So many places in Liverpool would have had buildings like this, with shops on the ground floor and two floors of flats above. One by one the shops have closed, with only a handful remaining. 

I finished my run back at the end of Eastern Avenue next to the appropriately named The Orient pub.

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