From Low Hill, 1976
Gregson’s Well public houses
The Raven, corner of Low Hill and Phythian Street
Today, Low Hill is no more than a connecting street at the junction of Kensington and the new road works that sweep across Hall Lane towards Edge Lane. The emptiness of the landscape is the price we pay for getting across the city a few seconds faster.
It was not always so but these 1976 photographs capture the slow decline of a once busy area. The view from Low Hill shows the Royal Hospital in the final stages of construction and the wholesale clearance of the area between Brunswick Road and Erskine Street to create the Erskine Street Trading Estate. (A few prefabs can be seen below Belgrave Street).
On the corner of Low Hill and West Derby Road was Gregson’s Well public house – not to be confused with the Gregson’s Well pub facing it on Brunswick Road. Both have now fallen to the bulldozer – another piece of Liverpool history lost forever. (The Spinners ran a popular folk club in one of the pubs although I am not sure which one). They were both named after a public spring which survived until the early nineteenth century. The Raven public house, another substantial building, has also disappeared along with the surrounding buildings. It stood on the corner of one of Liverpool’s more unpronounceable streets – Phythian Street, which apparently derives from the Latin vivianus (meaning alive or living). Its later corruption to the surname Phythian suggests the street was named after a person (there were a number of Phythians in Liverpool in the early nineteenth century).
Liverpool has lost many buildings since the 1950s. Many are quite ordinary but they were an important link to the city’s past. Many had to go but the totality of loss has meant layers of history have been erased forever.
I drove through up Brownlow Hill, Paddington, Mount Vernon tonight for the first time in ages and I actually couldn’t believe how much this area had changed.
It was very strange, almost as if what was there before had never existed – great big chunks of history wiped away. It was almost unnerving, like suddenly losing your bearings and being lost for a few moments. The cityscape changing before your very eyes.
The terraced streets at the top of Wavertree Road are also in the process of being rubbled.
Great post Colin, thanks!
Yes, great post Colin, I love these 1970s pictures you have, a great quality of light.
I agree with Alwyn’s comments that seeing the city change is unnerving, and it is more disconcerting for me as I now live in mid-Wales so I only see the city three or four times a year. I wondered if we all have a mental image of how the city should be and we are more disconcerted by change because of it – especially because the city seemed static for so long and has undergone massive upheaval in the last 15 or so years. I think of Liverpool as essentially a Victorian city, at least a Victorian landscape; I wonder how much Victoriana will have to go to make me see the city differently? Will I absorb the new city or will I think of the new buildings as over-writing a Victorian city that has gone? This probably says as much about me as it does about Liverpool.
And Low Hill is named after a ‘low’, a Saxon burial ground, I think – has this ever been found? Perhaps one of our Saxon ancesters watched the Normans clear the cemetery and bemoaned the pace of change …
The spinners played in the Gregsons well at the top of radcliffe street
Is the Bears Paw still at the top there? before the road sweeps round onto Wavertree Rd.
The Bears Paw is still trading, I think, by St Mary’s (now All Saints) Church.
I spent my childhood years living in the ‘Old Fort’ pub on prescot street, it can just be seen in the photo of low hill. We watched the hospital being built and remember the workers coming into the pub just after 11am and staying all day [mum had allday opening well before it was legal! betty marsden is her name] I remember the ‘Maclean’ family [tony,[tuba] steven[weaver] paul and christine actually still lived in the slum houses on the left as you look down low hill, I think it was called prospect street/ vale? All our friends lived in the prefabs but dissapeared over night as they were moved to Newsham park. We had bonfires every night on the waste ground outside the pub [I was 10 in ’76. Went to Rathbone school and then the Collegiate. Life was great and growing up in Liverpool in the ’70′s was fab! I remember ‘tommy lees’ news agent top of london road and used to watch ‘Ray Clemence’ get his hair cut in Davids the hairdressers in prescot street and he always stopped to say hello and give an autograph.I believe Davis is still a hairdressers after all these years. We were pretty ferral as kids in them days but we were good kids just having fun. Love this website. Highly recommended. I made the video that i linked to youtube account by the way.