Liverpool Lime Street History – How it Got the Name #Liverpool
If you’ve arrived in Liverpool from elsewhere at any point, it is entirely possible that you have done so on a train and that Liverpool Lime Street Station has been your first port of call.
It is a location filled with history, not just because of the station but also because of the street after which it is named. Not that Liverpool in general has any shortage of history, of course.
From the docks at one end of the city through to the likes of St George’s Hall at the other, history seeps out of every pore of Liverpool and Lime Street is no exception. Its history is a rich and fascinating one to tell.
The Street Itself
The street that would later become known as Lime Street was laid out in 1790 and was initially outside of the city limits. It was where some lime kilns owned by a local businessman named William Harvey were located and by 1804 they were causing problems for a local infirmary.
Doctors complained about the smell, resulting in the kilns themselves being moved elsewhere but the name that it was given in their honour remained intact. Even so, it was still in a marginal part of the city, which all changed in 1836 when the railway line arrived and it became something of a central hub.
Less than 20 years later and St George’s Hall was opened, confirming Lime Street’s status as an important part of Liverpool. At the corner of William Brown Street, a column for the Duke of Wellington, imaginatively named Wellington’s Column, was built in order to denote one end of the street.
It has seen countless major buildings opened on it over the years, from the North Western Hotel, which opened in 1871, through to the Futurist Cinema, which operated between 1912 and 1982. In 1925, the Empire Theatre opened there, replacing a theatre that had stood on the same site previously.
The Railway Station
When railway travel first came to the north-west, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway had its original terminus at Crown Street, Edge Hill. It was soon apparent that another station was needed, however, with this one required to be much closer to the centre of the city.
During the October of 1833, therefore, construction began on a new purpose-built station on Lime Street, with land having been bought from Liverpool Corporation for £9,000. A twin-track tunnel was built, taking the trains from Edge Hill to Lime Street, allowing the transportation of material needed for the construction before the station was officially opened.
The station was officially opened to the public in 1836, even though there was another year’s worth of building still to do on the site. It boasted four large gateways, two of which were intentionally without a function.
The track was a steep uphill one, meaning that trains would be detached and the passenger carriages sent from Edge Hill to Lime Street by gravity, controlled by brakemen who were located in a brake van. A steel engine would haul the carriages on the reverse journey using rope. The system came to an end in 1870, from which point the trains came into and left the station courtesy of conventional means.
The Expansion of Lime Street
As far as the public were concerned, Lime Street Station was a success almost immediately. Within just over half a decade, the railways had undergone such a rapid growth that the original station needed to undergo a rapid expansion.
Originally, a plan was to put an iron roof in place that would have been similar to that of Euston Station in London, but the station committee soon approved another plan that saw a single curved roof erected. It was carried out at a cost equivalent to around £2 million in today’s money, being completed by 1849 and with some aspects of it still in place today.
By 1867, even further expansion was required, seeing an additional 200 feet span added to it and setting a record as the largest such structure anywhere in the world at the time. Another, parallel train shed was added in 1879, which saw each structure taking just three days to build thanks to the dry construction techniques that were used.
In 1921, the Railways Act saw the majority of railway companies being grouped together and resulted in Lime Street passing into the ownership of London, Midlands and Scottish Railway. Interestingly, the first Mail Train sent by the Post Office departed from Lime Street.
In the years since, the station has undergone several different changes and alterations. In 2017, for example, a wall collapsed that cut off Lime Street from Edge Hill and major repairs needed to be carried out. Partly as a result of that, work began that year that saw a £340 million remodelling programme carried out to improve Lime Street’s signalling as well as installing new platforms.
The previous layout of the station was complex and presented operational issues, whilst the new one made it much simpler for train drivers and signallers to understand what is happening.
The post Liverpool Lime Street History – How it Got the Name first appeared on Scouse Not English.
More...
