History of New Ferry
Until the 19th century, the Wirral peninsula had remained a rural backwater. Its lack of raw materials and undeveloped transportation network meant that it was ignored by the Industrial Revolution taking place elsewhere in the country. Even the presence of Liverpool, one of the biggest and fastest growing cities of the 18th and 19th centuries, only two miles away across the Mersey, had failed to have an effect.
At this time, Lower Bebington was one of the bigger of Wirral’s townships with a population of about 300, three times that of Birkenhead. The majority of people lived in the immediate vicinity of St Andrew’s Church and the nearby junction of the Chester and Neston Turnpikes. In what is now New Ferry, just half a dozen houses were situated.
Unofficial ferries had been operated by fishermen as a means of earning extra income, from the New Ferry shore, for centuries. Records from the 14th century suggest that a man named Adam del Fere operated a ferry from here.
1764 seems to be the year in which the first “modern” reference to New Ferry is made, although it is a name that is likely to have been in common usage for some time prior to this date. The first occurrence of the name in an official record was in a legal action brought by the owner of the Rock Ferry who, apparently, considered that the entrepreneurial style of the New Ferry’s owners would cut into his potential profits. The name referred solely to the actual ferry itself and did not take in any part of what we today consider to be New Ferry.
19th Century
However, in 1817, steam powered ferryboats came into service on both the Eastham and Birkenhead ferries. Suddenly, everything began to change. With land on the Cheshire shore of the Mersey far cheaper than in Liverpool, Wirral was ripe for development. Now easily reached by ferry, the shipping magnates and merchants who had created a living hell in Liverpool were offered an opportunity to escape the consequences of their greed and to live in the clean air and rural peace she offered. Amongst their number were some entrepreneurs: men ready to take advantage of the cheap land and eager to make or increase their fortunes. By 1831, at Birkenhead a whole new town of 2,569 inhabitants had arisen. Following the coming of the Chester to Birkenhead railway and improvements to the Chester turnpike, by 1841 the population had grown to 8,223.
A number of the tranquility-seeking merchants bypassed Birkenhead, travelling further afield to take up residence in other local townships, amongst them Bebington and the New Ferry and Port Sunlight locality which had been an area of rough land, marsh and fields. In the wake of the merchants came other people:- shopkeepers, tradesmen, servants etc. to service their needs.
Lower Bebington village, clustered around its church and the junction where the important Chester and the cross-Wirral, Neston roads met, began to grow. Once combined, and after having descended the hill to turn northwards to go on to Birkenhead, a lane or track appeared to run eastwards to meet the Mersey. This lane followed the line of today’s Bebington and New Ferry Roads to where the unofficial ferry had operated over the centuries.
In the 19th Century, two Acts of Parliament were to totally change the traditional focus of importance within the township.
In 1833, permission was given for the re-routing of the ancient Chester Turnpike between Bromborough and Birkenhead. This resulted in the building of a bridge over Bromborough Pool and the construction of a new, shorter, more level toll road along the line of the present A41, New Chester Road. The Howey Lane Toll Gate, which stood 100 yards to the south of today’s Bebington Station, was moved to the new junction of Bebington Road and New Chester Road – on the site where the HSBC Bank now stands today.
The second Act, in 1837 permitted the building of the Chester to Birkenhead Railway Line. Designed by the famous George Stephenson, the railway was rapidly built. Bebington Station became the first station out of Birkenhead (Rock Ferry and Green Lane stations were built much later as the township grew).
Both these important civil engineering projects were completed by 1840. It was these, along with the coming of the steam ferryboat, which gave rise not only to Birkenhead, but also to New Ferry and, at the same time, lessened the traditional importance of places like Lower Bebington village.
Through the early decades of the 19th century the river ferry itself had a somewhat chequered history, at times going out of service. All of this was to change in 1865 when a local man, a sugar refiner from Liverpool named MacFie, built – at his own expense (£10,000) – a new iron pier at New Ferry. It used to project into the river from the cobbled car park by The Esplanade, where there was also a hotel (replaced by the Derwent Court residential home in the 1990s) and a row of shops (also replaced in the 1990s by some small modern houses).
From New Ferry pier, two steam ferryboats of the South End Ferry Company connected the rising Wirral settlement with South Liverpool via Harrington Dock. It was from 1865 that the name New Ferry became applied to a specific area bounded on the east and west by the River Mersey and the railway line respectively; to the north the rear of Stanley and Thorburn Roads; and to the south by Bromborough Pool - including land where Port Sunlight village would eventually be built from the late 19th century onwards. The ferry operated until 1922 in which year a Dutch ship, enroute to Manchester, ran through the pier demolishing two spans and putting an end to the ferry service.
The first newcomers to Lower Bebington were a few merchants and businessmen from Liverpool. Later, others came from Birkenhead and elsewhere. In the decade following the coming of the railway and the New Chester Turnpike, the population of Lower Bebington rose from 440 in 1831 to 1,187 in 1841. By 1900 it had reached 8,398. The development of New Ferry followed a pattern: the richer newcomers tended to settle in large houses with extensive gardens well away from the new junction, many even outside the township. Other, lesser, middle class newcomers settled in smaller, but still large villas, built closer to the centre. Some of these can still be seen in Stanley and Thorburn Roads.
This pattern of development continued to the point where, at the very centre, in the immediate vicinity of the Toll Bar in Woodhead, Olinda and Grove Streets, large numbers of poor quality, small, crowded, terraced houses were built. These were necessary to accommodate the workers who serviced the peripheral screen of larger houses and villas. At the junction, as the population grew, there arose a commercial centre to service the needs of rich and poor alike. In many cases, rather than their being purpose built, earlier, existing residential premises were converted into shops. New Ferry was becoming a natural, commercial centre.
The final factor in the establishment of the New Ferry District Shopping Centre came with the building of two local works. The first came in 1853 when Price’s Patent Candle Company built Bromborough Pool Village. The second and most influential development came in 1888 when William Lever bought land within the bounds of New Ferry and built his soap works and Port Sunlight Village. With its already well established road links, New Ferry grew to serve the needs of an extensive area to the north, south and west. New Ferry also became the terminus for part of Birkenhead’s tram system – the tram shed was in the red brick shed on New Ferry Road, behind Edge the Butchers.
The New Ferry shoreline was originally developed as a pleasure park, with bowling greens and tennis courts centred on the Great Eastern pub, so named after Brunel’s famous ship which was dismantled on the beach nearby.
In the mid 19th century, quarantine ships used to moor in the river off New Ferry, to cater for people with tropical diseases such as cholera, smallpox, chickenpox and leprosy. As a more permanent facility was required, the New Ferry Isolation Hospital was built and opened in 1875. Behind its high brick walls and railings were several wards, a laundry and houses for nurses and doctors. A flight of wooden steps led down the cliffs to the beach where patients were brought by ship – today you can just see the remains of a small stone jetty on the beach, whilst the broken stone pier cap lying upside down on the ground next to a red brick column on the edge of the woods at the end of Starworth Drive is all that remains of the surrounding wall.
To look after the community’s spiritual needs, St Marks Church appeared on New Chester Road in 1866. It is still with us today, but the Methodist Church that was built on the corner of Bebington Road and Boundary Road a few years later was demolished in the 1960s to be replaced with the flat roofed building which now houses Connexions. St Johns Roman Catholic Church (beside the Bebington Liberal Club) would not appear until the first few years of the 20th century.
By the last decade of the 19th century, a regular ferry plied the route between Dingle, New Ferry and Liverpool. New Ferry became something of a holiday resort. Throughout the summer months, boatloads of families came over the water to play on the riverside fields (Shorefields) and take donkey rides on the shore. A marquee was sometimes erected behind the New Ferry Hotel, which – like the four shops opposite it – did a flourishing trade with the trippers. When the pier was damaged in 1922 and the ferry service to New Ferry ended, the tourists and day-trippers also stopped coming here – resulting in The Esplanade and Shorefields pleasure park declining in importance.
20th Century
As New Ferry continued to grow, its facilities were gradually updated and improved. New Ferry Park, an abandoned building site, was landscaped with a bowling green, tennis courts and a garden for the blind with highly-scented flowers which had Braille name plates next to them. The Park Lodge was built at the main entrance, as a home for the park keeper. Grove Street School was built next to the park, replacing an earlier school building which had become too small.
In 1906, some cottages on New Ferry Road were demolished to make way for Hope Hall, which remained in use as a church until a few years ago.
By the 1930s, there was a housing boom. New homes appeared to the south of New Ferry, at Bolton Road East and the surrounding streets. Meanwhile, the Council was building houses on infill sites such as Grove Square, and all over the former pleasure gardens at Shorefields (Shorefields, Merseybank Road, Mayfields, etc). As compensation for loss of the gardens, the Council also built an open-air swimming pool – New Ferry Baths – in 1932. The pool closed in 1977, and in the late 1980’s was demolished to make way for the Wimpey housing estate.
Adding to the Lyceum Cinema which had stood at the corner of New Chester Road and Grove Street since the early part of the century (the site now occupied by Iceland), the Rialto Cinema was also built on Bebington Road in 1933. At the time, it was the most up-to-date cinema in Wirral and people came from all over Wirral to watch films there. It screened its last film in 1961, and was used for the next 30 years by a variety of clubs until being demolished in 2002 to make way for the new Aldi store. A third cinema was also built in the 1930s at the top of Beaconsfield Road – today the building is occupied by Andy’s Aquatics.
During World War 2, New Ferry and its shoreline played an important role in the national crisis. The Shorefields overlooking the river were host to an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, defending Liverpool and Birkenhead from attack by German bombers. Despite this protection however, during the 1941 Blitz, a bomb fell on some of the terraced houses in Egerton Road (those on the north side). The houses, only completed a few years earlier, were destroyed. Garages stood on the site until 2003 when new houses were finally built. Other bombs fell on the villas at the junction of the Dell and Rock Park Road – they were demolished and today there is just a grassy bank leading down to the Esplanade. Following the war, when the gun emplacements were removed, the Shorefields were covered with temporary pre-fabs for people whose homes had been bombed.
At the bottom end of Bolton Road East, behind the houses in Eccleshall Road, is a large mound (not the tip!). Underneath this is buried one of the fuel storage tanks that was part of the PLUTO system. A pipeline was laid from New Ferry, down the river to the sea, all around the coast of Britain and across to France, to supply fuel to the Allies when they invaded Europe following D-Day.
The New Ferry shoreline was also used to construct some of the landing pontoons used for the D-Day landings. They had to be towed around the coast and taken across the Channel as part of the invasion.
New Ferry Park still has its public air-raid shelters – although they are buried under the grass mounds next to the playground!
In the 1950s, rising car ownership saw New Ferry becoming a traffic bottleneck. The New Ferry bypass opened in 1960, starting at the Bolton Road junction but terminating at Thorburn Close. The bypass was extended to the Tranmere roundabout in 1976, after many of the decaying Rock Park villas had been purchased and sadly demolished. The Thorburn Close junction was removed and replaced with the underpass.
By the 1960s, the isolation hospital had closed down. Fearful of catching any of the diseases once treated there, contractors refused to demolish the complex – so, in 1963, the local fire department burnt the hospital to the ground. The site also disappeared under the second phase of Wimpey homes in the early 1990s (Scotia Avenue, Oakworth Drive, Ortega Close, Alvega Close).
The former bus depot was demolished in the 1980s to be replaced by the new Post Office. Bebington Road was pedestrianised in 1991. At the same time, Kwik Save (now Somerfield) arrived to demolish some derelict shops along New Chester Road and build their new store. Iceland moved into Kwik Save’s former unit.
21st Century
Today, following immense economic, social and demographic changes wrought during the course of the 20th century, New Ferry remains an important Local Centre. It is served by excellent public transport, an is attractive to national retailers such as Aldi, who built their new store here in 2003.
At the same time, housing prices have risen at the same pace as the national and regional trend. The housing stock appeals to first time buyers as well as young families and the retired, with good schools shops and amenities all around.
Until the 19th century, the Wirral peninsula had remained a rural backwater. Its lack of raw materials and undeveloped transportation network meant that it was ignored by the Industrial Revolution taking place elsewhere in the country. Even the presence of Liverpool, one of the biggest and fastest growing cities of the 18th and 19th centuries, only two miles away across the Mersey, had failed to have an effect.
At this time, Lower Bebington was one of the bigger of Wirral’s townships with a population of about 300, three times that of Birkenhead. The majority of people lived in the immediate vicinity of St Andrew’s Church and the nearby junction of the Chester and Neston Turnpikes. In what is now New Ferry, just half a dozen houses were situated.
Unofficial ferries had been operated by fishermen as a means of earning extra income, from the New Ferry shore, for centuries. Records from the 14th century suggest that a man named Adam del Fere operated a ferry from here.
1764 seems to be the year in which the first “modern” reference to New Ferry is made, although it is a name that is likely to have been in common usage for some time prior to this date. The first occurrence of the name in an official record was in a legal action brought by the owner of the Rock Ferry who, apparently, considered that the entrepreneurial style of the New Ferry’s owners would cut into his potential profits. The name referred solely to the actual ferry itself and did not take in any part of what we today consider to be New Ferry.
19th Century
However, in 1817, steam powered ferryboats came into service on both the Eastham and Birkenhead ferries. Suddenly, everything began to change. With land on the Cheshire shore of the Mersey far cheaper than in Liverpool, Wirral was ripe for development. Now easily reached by ferry, the shipping magnates and merchants who had created a living hell in Liverpool were offered an opportunity to escape the consequences of their greed and to live in the clean air and rural peace she offered. Amongst their number were some entrepreneurs: men ready to take advantage of the cheap land and eager to make or increase their fortunes. By 1831, at Birkenhead a whole new town of 2,569 inhabitants had arisen. Following the coming of the Chester to Birkenhead railway and improvements to the Chester turnpike, by 1841 the population had grown to 8,223.
A number of the tranquility-seeking merchants bypassed Birkenhead, travelling further afield to take up residence in other local townships, amongst them Bebington and the New Ferry and Port Sunlight locality which had been an area of rough land, marsh and fields. In the wake of the merchants came other people:- shopkeepers, tradesmen, servants etc. to service their needs.
Lower Bebington village, clustered around its church and the junction where the important Chester and the cross-Wirral, Neston roads met, began to grow. Once combined, and after having descended the hill to turn northwards to go on to Birkenhead, a lane or track appeared to run eastwards to meet the Mersey. This lane followed the line of today’s Bebington and New Ferry Roads to where the unofficial ferry had operated over the centuries.
In the 19th Century, two Acts of Parliament were to totally change the traditional focus of importance within the township.
In 1833, permission was given for the re-routing of the ancient Chester Turnpike between Bromborough and Birkenhead. This resulted in the building of a bridge over Bromborough Pool and the construction of a new, shorter, more level toll road along the line of the present A41, New Chester Road. The Howey Lane Toll Gate, which stood 100 yards to the south of today’s Bebington Station, was moved to the new junction of Bebington Road and New Chester Road – on the site where the HSBC Bank now stands today.
The second Act, in 1837 permitted the building of the Chester to Birkenhead Railway Line. Designed by the famous George Stephenson, the railway was rapidly built. Bebington Station became the first station out of Birkenhead (Rock Ferry and Green Lane stations were built much later as the township grew).
Both these important civil engineering projects were completed by 1840. It was these, along with the coming of the steam ferryboat, which gave rise not only to Birkenhead, but also to New Ferry and, at the same time, lessened the traditional importance of places like Lower Bebington village.
Through the early decades of the 19th century the river ferry itself had a somewhat chequered history, at times going out of service. All of this was to change in 1865 when a local man, a sugar refiner from Liverpool named MacFie, built – at his own expense (£10,000) – a new iron pier at New Ferry. It used to project into the river from the cobbled car park by The Esplanade, where there was also a hotel (replaced by the Derwent Court residential home in the 1990s) and a row of shops (also replaced in the 1990s by some small modern houses).
From New Ferry pier, two steam ferryboats of the South End Ferry Company connected the rising Wirral settlement with South Liverpool via Harrington Dock. It was from 1865 that the name New Ferry became applied to a specific area bounded on the east and west by the River Mersey and the railway line respectively; to the north the rear of Stanley and Thorburn Roads; and to the south by Bromborough Pool - including land where Port Sunlight village would eventually be built from the late 19th century onwards. The ferry operated until 1922 in which year a Dutch ship, enroute to Manchester, ran through the pier demolishing two spans and putting an end to the ferry service.
The first newcomers to Lower Bebington were a few merchants and businessmen from Liverpool. Later, others came from Birkenhead and elsewhere. In the decade following the coming of the railway and the New Chester Turnpike, the population of Lower Bebington rose from 440 in 1831 to 1,187 in 1841. By 1900 it had reached 8,398. The development of New Ferry followed a pattern: the richer newcomers tended to settle in large houses with extensive gardens well away from the new junction, many even outside the township. Other, lesser, middle class newcomers settled in smaller, but still large villas, built closer to the centre. Some of these can still be seen in Stanley and Thorburn Roads.
This pattern of development continued to the point where, at the very centre, in the immediate vicinity of the Toll Bar in Woodhead, Olinda and Grove Streets, large numbers of poor quality, small, crowded, terraced houses were built. These were necessary to accommodate the workers who serviced the peripheral screen of larger houses and villas. At the junction, as the population grew, there arose a commercial centre to service the needs of rich and poor alike. In many cases, rather than their being purpose built, earlier, existing residential premises were converted into shops. New Ferry was becoming a natural, commercial centre.
The final factor in the establishment of the New Ferry District Shopping Centre came with the building of two local works. The first came in 1853 when Price’s Patent Candle Company built Bromborough Pool Village. The second and most influential development came in 1888 when William Lever bought land within the bounds of New Ferry and built his soap works and Port Sunlight Village. With its already well established road links, New Ferry grew to serve the needs of an extensive area to the north, south and west. New Ferry also became the terminus for part of Birkenhead’s tram system – the tram shed was in the red brick shed on New Ferry Road, behind Edge the Butchers.
The New Ferry shoreline was originally developed as a pleasure park, with bowling greens and tennis courts centred on the Great Eastern pub, so named after Brunel’s famous ship which was dismantled on the beach nearby.
In the mid 19th century, quarantine ships used to moor in the river off New Ferry, to cater for people with tropical diseases such as cholera, smallpox, chickenpox and leprosy. As a more permanent facility was required, the New Ferry Isolation Hospital was built and opened in 1875. Behind its high brick walls and railings were several wards, a laundry and houses for nurses and doctors. A flight of wooden steps led down the cliffs to the beach where patients were brought by ship – today you can just see the remains of a small stone jetty on the beach, whilst the broken stone pier cap lying upside down on the ground next to a red brick column on the edge of the woods at the end of Starworth Drive is all that remains of the surrounding wall.
To look after the community’s spiritual needs, St Marks Church appeared on New Chester Road in 1866. It is still with us today, but the Methodist Church that was built on the corner of Bebington Road and Boundary Road a few years later was demolished in the 1960s to be replaced with the flat roofed building which now houses Connexions. St Johns Roman Catholic Church (beside the Bebington Liberal Club) would not appear until the first few years of the 20th century.
By the last decade of the 19th century, a regular ferry plied the route between Dingle, New Ferry and Liverpool. New Ferry became something of a holiday resort. Throughout the summer months, boatloads of families came over the water to play on the riverside fields (Shorefields) and take donkey rides on the shore. A marquee was sometimes erected behind the New Ferry Hotel, which – like the four shops opposite it – did a flourishing trade with the trippers. When the pier was damaged in 1922 and the ferry service to New Ferry ended, the tourists and day-trippers also stopped coming here – resulting in The Esplanade and Shorefields pleasure park declining in importance.
20th Century
As New Ferry continued to grow, its facilities were gradually updated and improved. New Ferry Park, an abandoned building site, was landscaped with a bowling green, tennis courts and a garden for the blind with highly-scented flowers which had Braille name plates next to them. The Park Lodge was built at the main entrance, as a home for the park keeper. Grove Street School was built next to the park, replacing an earlier school building which had become too small.
In 1906, some cottages on New Ferry Road were demolished to make way for Hope Hall, which remained in use as a church until a few years ago.
By the 1930s, there was a housing boom. New homes appeared to the south of New Ferry, at Bolton Road East and the surrounding streets. Meanwhile, the Council was building houses on infill sites such as Grove Square, and all over the former pleasure gardens at Shorefields (Shorefields, Merseybank Road, Mayfields, etc). As compensation for loss of the gardens, the Council also built an open-air swimming pool – New Ferry Baths – in 1932. The pool closed in 1977, and in the late 1980’s was demolished to make way for the Wimpey housing estate.
Adding to the Lyceum Cinema which had stood at the corner of New Chester Road and Grove Street since the early part of the century (the site now occupied by Iceland), the Rialto Cinema was also built on Bebington Road in 1933. At the time, it was the most up-to-date cinema in Wirral and people came from all over Wirral to watch films there. It screened its last film in 1961, and was used for the next 30 years by a variety of clubs until being demolished in 2002 to make way for the new Aldi store. A third cinema was also built in the 1930s at the top of Beaconsfield Road – today the building is occupied by Andy’s Aquatics.
During World War 2, New Ferry and its shoreline played an important role in the national crisis. The Shorefields overlooking the river were host to an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, defending Liverpool and Birkenhead from attack by German bombers. Despite this protection however, during the 1941 Blitz, a bomb fell on some of the terraced houses in Egerton Road (those on the north side). The houses, only completed a few years earlier, were destroyed. Garages stood on the site until 2003 when new houses were finally built. Other bombs fell on the villas at the junction of the Dell and Rock Park Road – they were demolished and today there is just a grassy bank leading down to the Esplanade. Following the war, when the gun emplacements were removed, the Shorefields were covered with temporary pre-fabs for people whose homes had been bombed.
At the bottom end of Bolton Road East, behind the houses in Eccleshall Road, is a large mound (not the tip!). Underneath this is buried one of the fuel storage tanks that was part of the PLUTO system. A pipeline was laid from New Ferry, down the river to the sea, all around the coast of Britain and across to France, to supply fuel to the Allies when they invaded Europe following D-Day.
The New Ferry shoreline was also used to construct some of the landing pontoons used for the D-Day landings. They had to be towed around the coast and taken across the Channel as part of the invasion.
New Ferry Park still has its public air-raid shelters – although they are buried under the grass mounds next to the playground!
In the 1950s, rising car ownership saw New Ferry becoming a traffic bottleneck. The New Ferry bypass opened in 1960, starting at the Bolton Road junction but terminating at Thorburn Close. The bypass was extended to the Tranmere roundabout in 1976, after many of the decaying Rock Park villas had been purchased and sadly demolished. The Thorburn Close junction was removed and replaced with the underpass.
By the 1960s, the isolation hospital had closed down. Fearful of catching any of the diseases once treated there, contractors refused to demolish the complex – so, in 1963, the local fire department burnt the hospital to the ground. The site also disappeared under the second phase of Wimpey homes in the early 1990s (Scotia Avenue, Oakworth Drive, Ortega Close, Alvega Close).
The former bus depot was demolished in the 1980s to be replaced by the new Post Office. Bebington Road was pedestrianised in 1991. At the same time, Kwik Save (now Somerfield) arrived to demolish some derelict shops along New Chester Road and build their new store. Iceland moved into Kwik Save’s former unit.
21st Century
Today, following immense economic, social and demographic changes wrought during the course of the 20th century, New Ferry remains an important Local Centre. It is served by excellent public transport, an is attractive to national retailers such as Aldi, who built their new store here in 2003.
At the same time, housing prices have risen at the same pace as the national and regional trend. The housing stock appeals to first time buyers as well as young families and the retired, with good schools shops and amenities all around.
