The English high street: St Chad's Parade, Kirkby – the new town that went wrong

Telegraph

01-04-2025

Christopher Howse is travelling the nation to speak to local people about their high street, including how it has changed and what they miss… This week, Christopher explores St Chad's Parade in Kirkby, Merseyside.
A surprising thing I found in Kirkby was a system for hiring artificial white funeral flowers, spelling out DAD or NAN. 'Do you get them back?' I asked the cheery woman looking after the Kirby Krafts stall in the covered market. 'Touch wood,' she replied.
In 2019, Kirkby, six miles from Liverpool, was voted the worst shopping destination in the country. A telling fact is that for 42 years from 1979, when Asda closed, Kirkby had no proper supermarket. Its hidden history is of frustrated hopes, decline, vandalism, demolition, corruption and broken promises.
Kirkby is 'a byword for the failure of postwar overspill estates', according to the Liverpool volume of the Pevsner Architectural Guide. Liverpool council had bought 4,000 acres to settle people from city slums. In 1951 the population was 3,000; by 1961 it was 52,000 (with 48 per cent under 15). It then declined by a third.
When Z-Cars, the police drama series, aired in 1962, its setting, Newtown, was loosely based on Kirkby, which one of the screenwriters described as a place where '50,000 displaced and truculent Merseysiders carry out a continuous war against authority and where crime and adolescent terror incubate'.
But in the 1960s jobs were easy to find on the Kirkby industrial estate, where 25,000 worked. Then in 1971, the Thorn Electrical factory closed. By 1981, Kirkby's unemployment rate was 22.6 per cent, second only to Corby, where the steelworks had shut down.
A local police superintendent reported in 1975 that 700 council homes a year were badly vandalised and 14,000 street lights had been destroyed in six months. 'Most shops have either bricked up their windows or covered them with permanent and unsightly metal grilles.' A celebrated photograph by Sefton Samuels from 1973 encapsulated it: children jumping on to mattresses from the balcony of a vandalised house.
The Kirkby ski slope represented a low point. Built in 1974 facing a turn-off of the M57, it was abandoned in 1975 as unsafe. Tons of earth and rubbish had subsided. Its architect was jailed for taking bribes from its builder, also jailed, as was a former leader of Kirkby council.
Most pitifully, Kirby was home to James Bulger, the toddler murdered in 1993, though he was abducted from a shopping centre in Bootle.
So with some trepidation I set off on the 20-minute rail journey from Liverpool Central, up the Mersey for a bit, past decayed docks and the brushed-steel look of the new Everton stadium. A scheme to build the stadium at Kirkby in coordination with Tesco was abandoned in 2009. But at least Kirkby is now home to Liverpool FC's training ground.
Past Fazakerley, birches fringe a golf course by the little river Alt, which joins the brook running through Kirkby. Viking kirks abound – Kirkdale, Ormskirk – but the middle k of Kirkby is silent.
I dodged showers as clouds scudded over the tall saddleback red-sandstone tower of St Chad's in its patch of woodland. Pevsner remarked: 'How much better the town centre would have been if that magnificent building, rather than standing in splendid isolation, had been made its focal point.'
The shopping street, St Chad's Parade, stands between neighbourhoods insipidly named Southdene, Westvale and Northwood. The 10,000 houses built in the first decade were low-rise, pleasant and functional. Most residents were glad to come to Kirkby, though in 1963, one woman told a researcher: 'They should have put the roughs in flats and the respectable ones in houses to look after gardens.'
From the late 1960s a fourth neighbourhood, Tower Hill, was built, for 10,000 second-generation residents. Its seven-storey maisonette blocks were badly constructed. A protesting resident's placard read: 'Let's have homes not fungus cells.' In 1982 most of the town seemed to turn out to watch 140,000 sticks of gelignite blow up the huge Ranshaw Court flats, after only 10 years of existence.
I found St Chad's Parade blustery. But a mother was sitting outside Costa Coffee with a cigarette and two young children eating something from bags from the Poundbakery opposite. At Costa it had cost me £6.75 for coffee and a bit of cake: not cheap. I sat near the mother outside.
With gusto, bold posters in the Poundbakery window challenged prices at the nearby Greggs (a chain that, like the boy on the burning deck, is often the last shop standing when all around have fled). Beside a giant picture of a sausage roll, the PoundBakery declared: 'Size matters: 37 per cent bigger than Greggs. Still only £1.'
I drank up and wondered if there was a loo. The cigarette mother kindly held the door as I manoeuvred my tray. Another lady told me the combination number for the lavatory. People here lack the methodical hostility often apparent in London.
Kirkby town centre is known locally as the 'Towny'. At one end of St Chad's Parade is the covered market and at the other a public library in a grim grassy square formerly a car park. The Parade is pedestrianised with modest shops under square-columned arcades. A bold bird had built a nest in one of the thin trees by benches in the middle.
It should be nice, but it's not. Like lockdown, it has a ghastly air of desertion. Of the 32 shops in the centre of the Parade, 10 are closed. Even the pawnbroker's is closed. A pair of security guards wandered by. Then came an old man with a matted beard, lashing out with his NHS crutch and shouting at no one: 'If there's one thing I hate it's f---ing lies.'
He must have had a hard time of it for decades, when Kirkby has repeatedly been promised regeneration.
A splash of colour in the Parade came from yellow melons, black grapes and orange 'tangies' outside the Banana Bunch greengrocer's. I breezily asked Jason, who runs it, how business was. 'Terrible.' He has traded for 30 years. He showed me a couple of pictures on his mobile of the Parade on St Valentine's Day this year at noon. One shot looks east, the other west. Not a single person is visible in either. Isn't the council doing anything? 'Nothing.'
'They need to get the rents down and fill up these empty units,' he said. 'People come along interested in opening a shop, and then when they learn the rents…'
A friendly-sounding woman from Greggs popped in for a swede, some carrots, sprouts and potatoes. Jason chaffed her on the prices at the PoundBakery. He was cheerful with customers but didn't see much of a future in Kirkby.
Only after a while did I notice there was hardly a non-white face. Only 3.3 per cent of Kirkby's population are not 'White British', compared with England's average of 25 per cent. A young woman outside had lived all her life in Kirkby: 'There are worse places.' I asked where people did their shopping. 'Morrisons,' she said, pointing eastward.
Morrisons opened in 2021, with its own bakery, butcher's and fishmonger's. The council bought the whole town centre and land for Morrisons for £43.8 million in 2019 from a developer called St Modwen after development stalled.
Morrisons sits in a big car park. People park, shop there and drive home without setting foot in the Parade. The car park is fringed by three takeaways offering drive-through service: KFC, McDonald's and Taco Bell. Neil, of Neil's Quality Meats, told the Liverpool Echo that customers said: 'We were promised a retail park, and got a fast food park.'
In 2015, as Tesco finally pulled out from plans for Kirkby, a nine-ton iron limbless tree was erected in St Chad's Parade where a colourful clock tower had stood. 'Why wud they pit sumthing so pointless an ugly in d Towny?' asked a resident on Facebook. The sculptor also produced a 16ft sculpture of an elephant paddling a Viking boat.
On the boat, inscribed roundels describe Kirkby. One gives memories from the years after the Second World War: 'We went to the Church Brook on school holidays – down to the brook to fish for tiddlers! A net made from Mum's old stockings in a stick … Then running up Mill Lane to hear Dick Barton on the radio and have some scouse.'
As I crossed the brook on my walk to the station I saw three supermarket trolleys lying in the turbid water. From their silt-filled baskets grew spring shoots of regeneration.