First of all an apology for getting the date of my last post out by 30 years and many thanks to John Brassey for his excellent and detailed correction. I had dated the photograph on the superficial basis of the girl in the foreground (not very clear admittedly). What I did not realise was that the rather elaborate bell tower above the porch was only erected in 1926 as a memorial to the men of the parish who died in WW1. The date makes much more sense of the children’s playground – which is very much in keeping with its new date rather than being some forward thinking by the City Council in 1900.
I am avoiding dating today’s images of old Walton Village. I would hazard a guess at the 1910s looking at the lady on a bicycle but I could be out by a decade. It is hard to picture Walton as a semi-rural retreat – and by the 1930s it had certainly been overtaken by the outward sprawl of Liverpool – but it had retained a picturesque area around the parish church. Of course Walton has a long history (being named in the Domesday Book, unlike Liverpool which was not mentioned, and the parish church was in control of Liverpool until the consecration of St Peter’s church in 1699) and survived as a separate township until 1895 when it was incorporated into Liverpool. Sadly, most of the charm of old Walton has disappeared apart from the fine church and the facing seventeenth century Old School House.
I remember seeing an exhibition at the Walker in the 1980s of the work on Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French master photographer. There were three or four images of Liverpool he had taken during a visit in 1962, including a fascinating photograph of workmen in the semi-circular graveyard of St Mary’s church. Why he wandered out to Walton is a mystery – although he was part of a team documenting northerners. He wasn’t impressed: “Writing about the same people of the North at work amounts to the same as writing about them at play. Their looks are not so different neither are their clothes. There is no exuberance on their faces nor gestures. They are hard at it but in a resigned sort of way. Their vacationing seems just an occupation as any other.” Perhaps he should have returned the following year, when Liverpool became the centre of the cultural universe.

More...