Anfield/Breckfield, Liverpool

This view encapsulates the character of Anfield. On the left is the football ground, an impressive modern structure which dwarfs the surrounding houses; in the centre a row of houses on Walton Breck Road are empty and boarded up; on the right similar houses in Skerries Road have been refurbished and offer good quality accommodation in solid and appealing bay-fronted houses Anfield is known the world over as the home of Liverpool Football Club.  The area surrounding the ground, which falls into the modern wards of Anfield and Breckfield, is an inner-city suburb beset by economic decline and a lack of social cohesion, manifest among other things in a deteriorating physical environment and a faltering housing market.  Liverpool, which since the Second World War has lost population and jobs on a scale unprecedented among our larger cities, has been particularly hard hit.  Once known as the ‘second city of the Empire’, it had public and commercial buildings on a magnificent scale seldom equalled outside London.  Even its ‘ordinary’ streets of terraced houses exhibit a solidity and opulence which hint at the great wealth once generated by the port.

Anfield and Breckfield together form one of the areas targeted in the recent Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI) of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.  The scheme aims to revitalise the area by reducing excess housing, refurbishing selected existing properties and new building.  Inevitably many buildings will be lost in the process and the character of the area will change considerably.  English Heritage’s response to this and other HMRIs has been to urge consideration of the value of the historic environment, which has been shown to be a valuable resource in regenerating run-down areas. 

The scale of the difficulty in Anfield and Breckfield is illustrated by the 26 houses in Tancred Road, Anfield. Built around 1880, they are all currently empty and derelict In order to demonstrate the potential which may be locked up in ordinary-looking towns and suburbs English Heritage carried out its own survey of Anfield and Breckfield.  Looking at every street in the area, and collating documentary evidence of various kinds, we assembled an overview of historical evolution, identifying the main trends and highlighting the most important developments and individual buildings.  The area was essentially rural and agrarian until the end of the 18th century, but as Liverpool’s population grew the land was acquired, first for the building of genteel and spacious villas, which were taken up by merchants and bankers, then from the 1860s onwards for the construction of row upon row of terraced houses. 

The resulting suburban landscape, varied by thoroughfares lined with shops and studded with churches, schools and pubs, is both very familiar yet fast vanishing into obscurity.  The building types still seem commonplace to us, but the social and economic matrix which originally bound them together has been altered beyond recognition.  Looking carefully at the surviving elements of the historic landscape, and comparing them with historic maps, trade directories and other sources, we can reconstruct the social gradients that separated well-off villa areas from the substantial terraced houses of lesser merchants and professional men, made these distinct from the lesser houses of clerks and book-keepers serving Liverpool’s immense insurance and shipping sectors, and differentiated these in turn from the small ‘two-up, two-down’ houses of artisans, railway employees and the like.  We can also identify something of the manner in which a late 19th-century suburb worked – how it was provisioned, how the varied spiritual needs of the inhabitants were met, how (particularly after 1870) the children were educated and how the population was entertained in its leisure hours.

The King Harry public house, dated 1885, typifies the attractively detailed pubs and hotels that were scattered along the main thoroughfares of Anfield and Breckfield, varying both the scale and architectural tone of the surrounding houses This is not an argument for retaining everything that the past has bequeathed to us.  Much of the building stock in Anfield in Breckfield is in poor condition, its historical character eroded by the replacement of worn-out fixtures and fittings, or the demolition of anything from a single building to a whole street.  But there are parts where individual buildings of character, and sometimes larger groups of buildings and streets, retain a degree of historic integrity sufficient to make their retention worthwhile.  Some of these are already known – there are a number of listed buildings, for example – but others might well be overlooked without the historic overview that our survey of the area has provided.

The resulting report has been made available to a variety of professional users and community groups.  It is one of a number of strategies adopted to meet the challenges posed to the historic environment by the HMRI, and underpins generic advice prepared by English Heritage for all HMRI Partnerships.  View the policy guidance note 'Low Demand Housing and the Historic Environment'. It also aims to provide a model for the rapid assessment of historic areas elsewhere.  Much of our historic environment remains imperfectly understood, and methods which deliver rapid but dependable results and analysis are essential if we are to meet the challenges of continuing change.