Memories & Photos: 1920-1929

AERIAL PHOTO OF NEW FERRY PIER, NEW FERRY ROAD AND SHOREFIELDS    July 1920

In this fantastic aerial shot of New Ferry's river frontage, do you see all the people on the beach infront of the Esplanade just above the pier? In those days, the beach was mainly sand (where children played with buckets and spades!) rather than the mud it is today. The mud we have today comes from all the silt that has come down from the Manchester Ship Canal over many decades.

Towards the top of the picture you can see a solitary house near the cliff top. That was built at the end of what is today Shore Bank, and it was demolished several decades after the semi-detached houses in that street had been built.

Right at the top of the picture is Shorefields. The white bits are water filled pits from where clay had been extracted for making bricks. New Ferry was full of such flooded clay pits, including at where New Ferry Park is today. The ponds that you can see had fish in them which local fishermen liked to catch and throw back, whilst day-tripper promenaded between them and admired the views of the river from the cliff tops (as they do today).

To the top right of the photo, the large rectangular "field" was, in fact, originally an athletics track but later became football pitches. After the pier was smashed to bits by a drunken steamer captain taking his boat straight through the middle of it in 1922, and the owners of the pier decided not to rebuild it, the day-trippers from Liverpool stopped coming. The football pitches fell into disuse, so in the early 1930s, the Council decided to build new houses on it. These were Shorefields, Field Close, Pollitt Square and Merseybank Road.

Another point of interest for everyone - look at the line of houses to the left of New Ferry Road just to the right centre of the photo. The terraced villas all originally had trees in their front gardens - giving the street a lovely "green" almost countryside feel about it. Today, all the trees have gone and been replaced with hard paving/concrete for cars to be parked on the front gardens. Hardly a tree left  

Click the arrow slider to see an image of the same view today.