Aubrey Street in Everton was once home to dozens of families
Everton Water Tower used to sit on the corner of Aubrey Street and Margaret Street in Everton (Image: Liverpool Echo)
For those of us with sentimental dispositions, taking a walk around the streets of our childhood is a bittersweet pleasure. It’s a chance to check out your old haunts, retrace your footsteps and see what has become of your family home.
But for many people in Liverpool, trips down memory lane can only be done in the imagination, because their childhood streets have been wiped off the map. One such place is Aubrey Street in Everton, which was once home to dozens of families, but is now only part of the history books, having been demolished in the late 1960s.
Looking at old photographs of Aubrey Street, it is striking just how grand and characterful many of the buildings were. Houses were typically three stories high, with large bay windows and spacious living areas.
The street had a dance hall called Pepper’s, which also doubled up as a boxing club, where the famous boxer Nel Tarleton used to train. It also had a church (St Chrysostom’s – later rebuilt on Queens Road) a recreation ground, and a covered reservoir. The reservoir’s grade II listed water tower is the last vestige of the area as it once was, and still stands proudly on the city’s skyline. The tower was built in 1857 when the surrounding area was still fields and farmland.
Phillip Aspinall, 69, lived on Aubrey Street when he was a child, and has fond memories of growing up in Everton in the late 1950s and early 60s. He lived in a bedsit opposite the water tower with his mum and stepdad, and his mum’s family all lived nearby.
Speaking to the ECHO, Phillip said: “My first address was Atwell Street, which is still there. I lived there with my mum and ninny and grandad, then we moved to Aubrey Street when I was three.
“It was great waking up in the morning – I used to look out at the water tower and the buses going past. It was a very quiet area then, because there weren’t many cars. You had to have a few bob to run a car. In the bedsit where we lived, there was an old woman called Mrs Bushell who lived on her own. She was a bit fierce, and I was always a bit scared of her.”
He remembers using a shared bathroom in the house, but other former residents of the street recall living in homes with no bathrooms at all. Writing on Facebook, one man said there was “one toilet on the ground floor between all five families. We had to go to Margaret Street baths once a week for a bath as most families did.”
When Phillip was three, the family moved to Croxteth, before returning to Everton a few years later to live in Baines Place, just off Breck Road, where he could still enjoy views of the old water tower on Aubrey Street. He recalls a strong sense of community in the area, helped by the fact that most people had family around to support them.
“All the extended families then tended to live by each other,” he said. “They all congregated. You were in and out of your cousins’ houses all the time. You’d just walk down to your auntie’s or your ninny’s house. I’d do it all the time.”
Aubrey Street was demolished in the late 1960s, along with a number of other nearby streets after a compulsory purchase order was approved by the government in 1966. According to contemporary newspaper reports, some of the 500 houses approved for demolition in the area were deemed “unfit for habitation”, while others were pulled down merely “in the interest of good planning”.
Many families were uprooted and moved elsewhere in the city or to new towns like Kirkby. This was common practice during the 1960s and 70s, when vast swathes of the city were bought up and demolished.
Phillip says he was around 12 when the demolition of the area began and he thinks it had a profound impact on many local people. “The demolition fragmented the extended family to some degree,” he told us. “Some families didn’t do well with it, because they had to move away from their families, which a lot of people didn’t like.”
“It’s always a nice romantic notion when you see photographs of old houses and you think, I wish we had them now. But the fact is they were pretty dilapidated. Some people were happy to move to a nicer, better house with a bathroom and a little front garden.”
During that decade, so high were the numbers of people affected that the ECHO ran a regular feature called ‘The Helping Hand’, which assisted readers who had been told they had to move out of their homes to make way for new developments.