Home Run

The first thing you see when you step out of Walton station is a wall.  Five metres high, with a rounded top.  The distinctive exterior of a prison.  This is Liverpool Prison, or, as it was known before the modern world decided to suck all charm out of everything, Walton Gaol.  The main prison for the Merseyside region, famous and infamous, home to 1300 people and not somewhere I ever hope to see the inside of.

Prison frightens me, as I think it does for anyone who's never so much as shoplifted a Mars Bar.  One of my most persistent fears is that I'll be accused of something I didn't do and end up serving time for it.  A friend of a friend was once accused of molesting some kids he'd babysat for as a teen.  It got all the way to trial before being thrown out by a judge who was baffled by the lack of evidence; he was entirely innocent, of course, and it turned out his accusers had made similar allegations about other people in the hope of getting compensation.  Still, imagine getting that close to being locked away, tarred as a criminal, put in the nonce wing; vulnerable, scared, and entirely innocent.  At least if you've done the crime there's a slight edge of "it's a fair cop".  I shuddered slightly as I walked by.

The traditional, Victorian, HMP Slade gates are now hidden behind the wall, and a new entrance has been built in the corner of the complex.  Colourful images of the city skyline welcome visitors like it's a theme park; in reality, it's an awful place to be, regularly condemned for its conditions, overcrowded, and in need of comprehensive redevelopment, if not demolition.  There's a real problem with drug use and the small signs pinned to the walls advising that flying drones is illegal don't seem to be as off putting as you'd expect, strangely.  

I turned south onto the Southport Road, one of those fine avenues that are all over Liverpool.  Long straight lanes constructed to allow trams to run with ease, but completely devoid of them in the 21st century.  Semis with paved over lawns were the norm, with the households' other cars parked on the pavement.

A side road took me between two expanses of municipal green.  The Stuart Road Playing Fields straddled the road, wide lengths of playing fields laid out for the betterment of the residents.  There probably should've been a leisure centre here, but instead there was an "Activity for All" building.  It seems to be a sort of indoor football pitch with a cafe attached.  Looking at their website, it's a community interest company, doing stuff the council used to, which is the modern way I suppose.  My main objection is that it uses the American spelling of centre on its exterior.

I walked round the side of it to get access to a leisure facility I've never seen before in the UK.  The playing fields are home to the Liverpool Trojans who proudly proclaim they're the oldest baseball team in Britain.  As such, they've got a diamond laid out behind the "center".

That's an actual baseball diamond, sitting in a park in Bootle.  It's fascinating to think that there are leagues and games going on for these sports all over the UK with a small but loyal following.  I actually don't mind baseball; it's the most tolerable of America's big sports, with a proper history and style to it, and like all the best sports you don't need hundreds of dollars of equipment to play it - just a bat and a ball.  It also helps that it's basically Posh Rounders, and we've all played rounders at school, so it's that little bit more comprehensible than whatever nonsense happens during an American Football game.  Also, and this is very gay indeed, but I really like baseball shirts.  They're very appealing.

I took the opportunity to stand on the Home Plate like I was [quickly googles "famous baseball player" here - who was the one who was married to Marilyn Monroe?] Joe DiMaggio and take a selfie.  Look at me, I'm doing a sports.  Then I turned back and walked through the car park to the street, attracting the attention of a wiry gentleman and his mate in a car with the engine running.  They watched me as I left, examining me for possible narc giveaways, but then concluded I was simply a fat loser and left me to it.

The houses along Stuart Road get a great view of the playing fields, and it was clear that many of the owners had spruced up their homes with extensions and attic conversions and the like.  One household had left a pair of unwanted bar stools on the pavement for any passers by to claim, so if you like black leatherette, head there now.  A carpet van was parked on the lower stretch, hazards flickering, while the workmen manfully carried an enormous length into a house that didn't look big enough to accommodate it.

On the back streets behind, there were terraces of Victorian redbricks, two up two downs.  Occasional new builds gave away the locations of bomb sites.  Outside a sheltered housing development, there were two workmen, one in his forties merrily carrying a single bag to his van, while behind his teenage apprentice staggered under the weight of a load of tools.  He helpfully opened the back of the van and waited for his protégé to catch up.

The Breeze Pub is, per Google, "temporarily closed;" the Facebook site hasn't been updated since January last year and half the sign is missing, so expect it to be converted to bedsits any day now.  It's a terrible shame when a pub closes of course but looking around it was a miracle it had lasted this long.  A real back street boozer, no gastropub menu, reliant only on local patronage, not a destination in any way.  Society has changed, as has what we want to spend our disposable income on, and for all the trumpeting about "save the British pub!" if nobody wants to use it then is it really good to preserve it?  If it were up to me I'd have put all the WH Smiths under preservation orders and insisted on government money to force them to go back to the orange cube logo and selling records but this is the problem with capitalism; the market dictates.

A series of bollards across the road discreetly demarcated the old city from a new development.  Walton Hospital was a famous neurology centre on Rice Lane for a century, but consolidation of the services in the area plus a need to expand saw it move to Fazakerley - sorry, Aintree - Hospital in the 90s.  The empty site has since been converted into a twist of cul-de-sacs and town houses with neat little driveways and Ring doorbells.

The railway line ran across the back here.  A couple of bridges crossed it, taking you to undeveloped scrubland, ready for enterprising homebuilders to sweep in at some point, but also the site of a never-was station.

The plans for the Link and the Loop back in the 70s were incredibly ambitious, with underground loops meeting at a new six platform station called Rocket, a below ground University stop, and new halts all over Merseyside.  One proposal was a new station called Breeze Hill, between Kirkdale and Walton.  It shows up on some early "proposal" maps, sometimes as a replacement for Walton and Rice Lane - allowing interchange between the branches - and sometimes as an extra station to fill the gap.

It never happened, of course, and I can't really see it ever having had much demand; it would've cannibalised the stations either side if it was an infill.  It's not really a huge gap, and there's not a density around there to justify it.

It is, however, fun to imagine where it might have been, and this cutting behind the old hospital seemed like a prime candidate.  No expensive tunnelling necessary, next to a useful amenity, space to encourage new development.  I wandered onto the bridge and snapped a photo of what might have been in a world where Merseyside got everything it ever wanted.

Back onto the road, and round the front of the Walton Hospital, now converted into apartments of course.  It's still a prominent local landmark and pleasingly preserved, even if the clock is wrong.  

There's still some medical provision on the site.  Clock View Hospital is a mental health centre, catering for acute cases, and housed in a pleasing modern building.  I shuffled past, once again hoping never to see the inside of it.  Next door was a block of housing association apartments with inset balconies.  Strangely, each balcony had a glass screen at the top and bottom, with only a narrow gap around it to let fresh air in.  It negated the principal of a balcony, to me, and if anything reminded me of Hannibal Lecter's cell in The Silence of the Lambs, with its perspex front and air holes to let you smell Jodie Foster's L'Air du Temps.  It's an unfortunate association given the building across the way.

I was on Rice Lane proper now, a road that gives its name to a station I'll be visiting another time.  There's a huge Sainsbury's, and a former pub, and a small curved building which houses a pizza delivery firm.  It's a surprisingly elaborate building, considering its humble occupant, and that's because it was originally built as the entrance booth to the Liverpool Zoological Gardens.  

Where there's now a housing estate and car park was, for a period in the 19th century, a space for chimpanzees and elephants.  It was a disaster almost from the start, with the owners constantly adding new attractions to try and pump up visitor numbers (a concert hall! a camera obscura!).  It gained a reputation for prostitutes, though, which meant it definitely wasn't a place to take the family on a quiet afternoon, and finally closed in 1865 after thirty two years.  The pizza place is the only remnant of the old zoo.

The road's lined with retail units with flats above, though more and more were being converted into ground floor residences too.  The Revival 7 tea room carried the Royal coat of arms over its door, though the wording underneath was Recognised by HRH, a delightfully vague term.  I'm imagining the Queen being driven along the road in her limo on the way to Aintree Racecourse and pointing at the shop out the window - "oh a tea room, how nice" - and that was it, Royal patronage.  

I turned off into a side road.  Victorian villas that would be getting high six figures elsewhere in the city looked dirty and unloved; multiple bells by the door told the story of their conversion.  As I rounded the corner, a man was hefting a wardrobe down his driveway to his waiting car.  I felt like I should've offered to help him, but I've recently been suffering from terrible back spasms - I spend way too much time slapping on Deep Heat patches and grimacing at the dinner table.  Don't get old, folks.

Between the side walls of two houses was a tiny public footpath, which I eagerly took.  I love delving into the backs, the off grid routes.  This one takes you over the top of the Kirkby branch of Merseyrail...

...and drops you neatly at the back of Walton station in time for your train.  I'd completed a loop, or, if we're going to use baseball terminology, I'd rounded all the bases.  I think.  I don't actually care enough to check if that's right.

This entire trip was paid for by Ko-fi donations.  Once again, thank you for your support!

4. Walton

Opened: 2nd April 1849 as Walton Junction; this is the first station after the split between the Ormskirk and Kirkby lines.  This was renamed to Walton in 1970 but they have to add (Merseyside) in official references so it's not confused for Walton-on-the-Naze or Walton-on-Thames.

Line electrified: 1913

Number of platforms: Two

Points of interest: There's one road into the station.  About halfway down, it splits in two; one goes down to a small car park and the Liverpool platform, while the other branch goes upwards to the station building at the top.  The Ormskirk bound platform is accessed through the ticket office and across the footbridge.  That's not very interesting, is it?  Ok, how about there used to be some railway cottages on the Liverpool platform, wedged in the V of the junction to Kirkby.  They're gone now, so that's not very interesting either.

Attractive Local Feature (ALF) Sign: None.

Original blog post: 24th July 2007

What's changed since then?  Nothing much, so far as I could tell.  This was the very early days of the blog so I wasn't really taking pictures of the stations, relying on my "amusing" commentary instead, but aside from the flat station sign being replaced for a cube and possibly the new shelters I couldn't see anything that would've changed in twenty, or maybe fifty, years.

Proof of visit: 

Everything Old Is New Again

I'd been to Kirkby exactly twice before in my life.  The first time was at the turn of the Millennium, when I came here for a job interview at Knowsley Borough Council; I didn't get the job, and my main memory of the place is the bus exchange, where I loitered while I waited for my appointment.  The other time was when I collected the station, and back then I walked out, took a photo, and walked back in.  

This was the first time I was walking to the town centre without being a bag of nerves, and it meant I could look around and see Kirkby properly.  I imagine there's a certain amount of sniggering going on out there among local readers, something along the lines of why would you want to?, but I was open-minded, and to be honest, it looked like one of a hundred other English towns I've visited over the past couple of decades.  Rows of houses, semis and terraced, small blocks of flats, the odd cottage that pre-dated the construction of the estate and now looked out of place.  

I was walking along one of those "shared spaces" they have for pedestrians and cyclists.  I hate those.  A white line down the middle of the pavement to divide you from people on bikes, but nothing to say who should be on the left or the right.  It's not infrastructure, it's paint.  Dig up the pavement and put in a proper cycle lane with a kerb either side - there was certainly enough room.  Of course that costs money, but at least people might use it.

I passed a woman walking an incredibly odd looking dog - it was like a black labrador, except it had the legs of an Irish Wolfhound; it looked like it was on stilts - and a house with a Liverpool FC themed number plate.  Five stars were arranged neatly across the top line, and then, above the Liver Bird, they'd added a sixth, slightly off centre.  

Millbrook Park - sorry, Millbrook Park Millennium Green - appeared on my left, a long stretch of lawn and trees curving around a small brook.  There was a helpful notice board to welcome you to the park, but I'm afraid it was covered with bollocks - not graffiti, nonsensical copy that actively irritated me.  There were Tips to make the most of Millbrook Park Millennium Green  which included:

• TALK: this is a great place to meet friends

as well as

• DAYDREAM: this parks [sic] offer a perfect setting to rest, unwind or enjoy a picnic

Thanks for the hints, guys!  I wouldn't know how to use a park without them.  Perhaps you could advise me on how to use the paths - I put one foot in front of the other, right?

St Chad's Church, one of those older buildings that dated from the 19th century (though there's been a church here for hundreds of years more) sat amidst a neatly landscaped park, and then there was a huge roundabout to signal the entrance to the town centre.  This gave me my first look at the All-New Kirkby.  Originally built after the war, Kirkby was a place for Liverpool residents who'd lived in slums to move to; it was a New Town, even if the Government refused to designate it as such.  It carried with it that hope of a new, healthy, exciting future, a 20th century where people can live somewhere designed for them.  Town planners tried to make it a place where the residents would thrive.

The problems started almost immediately.  People were moved here before facilities were opened.  Communities were broken up and scattered.  Kirkby became the home of Z Cars, the slightly dodgy northern town riddled with crime, and then the 1970s crashed into Merseyside.  Joblessness rose, drug addictions followed, poverty swept across the town and kneecapped all of those hopes that the city had imbued in its child-estate when it built it after the war.

For years, the town has been undergoing regeneration of one kind or another.  The 2000s have, however, brought real concerted efforts to remake Kirkby.  At first this involved a new stadium for Everton alongside a Tesco superstore.  There was considerable opposition to this, both from the locals and from Everton fans, who noted that it would mean moving the club outside the City of Liverpool. Kirkby is Liverpool, to me, the same way Bootle or Birkenhead or New Brighton are, but that's because I'm an outsider who doesn't understand the passionate disdain each part of the city region has for one another.  All the Merseyside boroughs count as Liverpool as far as I'm concerned, the way Tower Hamlets and Brent and Enfield are all London.  Those plans failed when the Government refused to support them, so Everton, eventually went off to the docks, while Tesco simply wandered off.

The council joined up with a different developer, who helped to construct a new retail offering on the north side of the town centre, while the local authority demolished an office block and a swimming pool and a library, moving them to newer facilities elsewhere.  Then that developer partnership went south, and it's only now that a huge patch of land just south of the main precinct is getting developed - though I'm not sure what they're building.  There was going to be a Lidl and a cinema as well as new houses, but looking around I can only find evidence that the houses are going ahead; the Lidl will almost certainly appear at some point, but it all seems to have gone quiet on the cinema front. 

On the plus side, the bus exchange has been vastly improved since I last saw it, so there's that.  It now backs onto a new Civic Square, constructed on what was a car park for the council, which has some large Instagram friendly chairs with wings positioned around for tourists to use as backdrops in their photos.  Kirkby being overwhelmed with tourists, of course.  Still, you can't argue that it's not an improvement on a car park.

I was headed for the Kirkby Centre, the replacement for the civic centre that sat on one edge of the square.  It's home to the library and the Kirkby Gallery, which the website informs me is "one of the best contemporary art galleries in Merseyside and the North West of England" - a bold claim, given that Merseyside is also home to the actual Tate Gallery.  I scampered up the stairs and found a pair of closed doors to the gallery, but a helpful sign informed me that this was because they were keeping the heat in.  That wasn't all they were keeping in.  I pushed it open a couple of inches and was confronted with the noise of over-excited primary school children in the middle of some kind of art experience.  Everywhere I looked there were red jumpers.  I backed away.

Instead I went into the library next door, which does have a piece of art of its own: a fibreglass and resin sculpture by William George Mitchell.  It was commissioned for the original library and then ported over to this one.  Its 1960s aesthetic doesn't quite fit with the more pared down practicality of 21st century municipal - it's like wandering into an Amazon distribution warehouse and finding a Chagall on the wall.  It needs to be surrounded by architecture as brave and interesting as it is.  At least they kept it, though; it would've been easy to chuck it in a skip for being outdated.

I checked the stacks for James Bond books - not a single Ian Fleming, shame on you Knowsley Libraries - then walked back out and into the shopping precinct.  Like High Streets all across Britain it had seen better days.  A central square was surrounded by Iceland, Max Spielman, B&M, and a closed Sayers with a logo they haven't used for at least thirty years.  Charity shops and vaguely council-looking outlets occupied many of the storefronts.

There was also, though closed now, a Benetton.  A bit of scouting around on the internet revealed it lasted three whole years, from 2022 to 2025, and I am absolutely astonished.  Benetton is one of those brands I thought was high-class and expensive - I always think of Victoria Wood saying "I don't always buy anything in there but I do like to go in and unfold things" - so the idea of it being in one of the poorest parts of Merseyside next door to a Pound Bakery is baffling.  Mind you, the only branch in the Liverpool city region is in Allerton, not Liverpool One as you'd expect, so who knows what's going on there.  

The shopping centre reminded me a little of Coventry.  The same Fifties/Sixties aesthetics, the same long straight lines of construction, the simple yet clean look.  It was a precinct built for an era of small local shops and mum walking into town a daily run for groceries, before fridges and supermarkets and cars changed everything.  

The market was a similar story, now mainly mobile phone unlocking services and vape shops, though Martin's Deli did advertise itself as "the home of the famous Kirkby sausage".  I can't actually find what a Kirkby sausage is; even the Echo wrote a piece entitled Have you heard of the "famous" Kirkby sausage? and they're always claiming that some minor shop on a back street is "iconic" or "unique" and has a queue of people out the door every morning.  The recipe must be a closely guarded secret because I can't find anyone who's talking about what's in it.  If I was a proper travel writer I'd have bought one and eaten it there and then - raw so I could taste the flavour - and then waxed lyrical about its stunning taste, but I'm not, so I didn't.  The Kirkby Sausage remains a mystery to me, unless you count that lad I once met who [that's quite enough of that].

A closed up bank building continued the 1950s look, no doubt soon to be demolished because nobody would want a shop that looked like that, while to the side two women rolled out of a different marble-clad former bank that had been converted into a pub.  It was ten past eleven in the morning.

I'd reached the new part of Kirkby town centre, the bit that they were especially proud of.  It consisted of a health centre, a vast Morrisons, and a few drive in takeaway restaurants - McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC.  Surrounding it was a huge car park.  It was not the model of regeneration I think anyone should aspire to.

I understand that hard-up councils get a supermarket offering to build in their town and leap at the chance of jobs and opportunities.  What it then does, however, is stop anyone from going anywhere else.  Birkenhead did something similar when it allowed a huge Asda to open on Grange Road - there was suddenly no reason to wander any further into the town, so nobody did, and everything started closing.  It's a massive Trojan Horse.  I found it profoundly depressing.  The precinct had been human-sized and pleasant - walk to a shop, walk to another shop.  Here you could park ten yards from the front door then get your dinner from Maccy D's on the way home without even leaving your car.  

Kirkby pleased me in many ways.  It had self-evidently had its struggles but the recent regeneration did actually feel transformative - it was more than a few new lampposts and some bushes, it was comprehensive.  I liked the Kirkby Centre, and I'll have to go back to see the artwork some time when it's not swarming with six year olds.  I hope that the new development on the former college site will bring housing and people and bustle to the town centre.  It's just a shame that there was that massive supermarket leeching off the hope to one side.  It didn't help that the Morrisons looked away from the precinct, showed it its back.  I do hope that the town gets back on its feet.  I want it to succeed.