Liverpool Communities - Welsh

 

A wintry scene over Liverpool and the snowy Welsh Hills on the horizon. Photo by Colin Lane

 

Liverpool-born, Ceredigion-resident Niall Griffiths once said, " Liverpool has always been called the capital of North Wales. For a lot of people there, Cardiff is a foreign city, it was Liverpool that was their city’."

In the early 1500s, Liverpool actually had a Welsh mayor, Dafydd ap Gruffydd, and by the late 1700s many migrants from North of Wales had travelled to the city looking for work and would often end up as sailors, dockers or canal-diggers. By 1813, around eight thousand (or ten percent) of Liverpool’s residents were Welsh, and by 1815 the city had its own Welsh town. Areas such as Vauxhall, Anfield, Everton, Dingle, and Wavertree were noted for their high migrant populations, and Welsh was the dominant language in these neighbourhood communities. By the 1830s, Welsh migrants were well established within Welsh firms in Liverpool. The most important symbol of the Welsh influence in Liverpool though is the area called the Welsh streets in Toxteth, next to Princes Park, about a 10 minute bus ride south of the city centre. These beautiful, wide, tree-lined Victorian terraced streets, named after Welsh villages and landmarks, include Wynnstay Street, Voelas Street, Rhiwlas Street, Powis Street, Madryn Street, Kinmel Street, Gwydir Street, Pengwern Steet, Treborth Street, Dovey Street, Teilo Street and Elwy Street. Ringo Starr was born in Madryn Street, before moving at the age of 4. These streets were built by Welsh building workers during the 19th century to house migrants from Wales seeking work, with the houses designed by Welsh architect Richard Owens, who also designed many terraced houses in Liverpool as well as churches in North Wales, and built by David Roberts, Son and Co. Estimates vary on the size of the city’s growing Welsh population, not least due to differing geographical definitions of Liverpool. Official census figures put the Wales-born population in the city to be near twenty two thousand in 1851 and 1871 although the actual figure is likely to be higher with some estimates putting the Welsh population at around fifty thousand in the 1870s, and others say it peaked at over seventy thousand as more poured in through the decades. Some suggest that one hundred and twenty thousand people moved from Wales to Liverpool and the surrounding area in the sixty years following 1851, although, of course, many would have returned to Wales after time. By 1900, there were around 90 Welsh chapels, churches and mission halls in the city. The founder of Plaid Cymru, Saunders Lewis, lived in one such Welsh community on Merseyside. He was born in 1893, just over the Mersey in Wallasey, and educated at Liverpool University. He has said, "The idea that because I was born in Liverpool I was born an exile from Wales is completely false… I’m pretty sure that there were about a hundred thousand Welsh-speaking people in Liverpool during the period of my boyhood. And I should say that at least half of those were monoglot Welsh speakers who could hardly manage a word of English… I wasn’t born in English England but in a totally Welsh society." The Welsh influence on Merseyside was so strong that the National Eisteddfod was held in Liverpool in 1884, 1900 and 1929 and also in Birkenhead in 1917. For the 1900 event, the choirs of the Welsh chapels on Merseyside joined together as one. So was created the Liverpool Welsh Choral Union, which survives to this day, with Karl Jenkins as its patron. Liverpool even had its own Welsh language newspapers.

Voelas Street in around 1911 (Image: Liverpool Record Office)

Through his collaboration with David Roberts, Richard Owens designed over 10,000 terraced houses in the city of Liverpool. Richard Owens had moved to Liverpool in the 1840s to study and established his first practice in Everton Village by the age of 30 before relocating to Breck Road two years later, then setting up shop at Westminster Chambers, Dale Street in 1883. The builder David Roberts was born in Caernarvonshire and moved to Liverpool in 1822. By 1828 he had established his own timber business, which steadily expanded over the next 30 years or so. By the 1860s, he was wealthy enough to invest in land and property and was one of a number of developers to construct houses on the West Derby Road Estate at this time, before leasing land for housing development in Toxteth.

 

The most well-known piece of Welsh architecture in the city is perhaps the Grade II-listed Welsh Presbyterian Church on Princes Street, commonly referred to as the 'Welsh' or 'Toxteth Cathedral'. It was constructed by Welsh builders from Cardiff and Swansea to accommodate Toxteth's growing Welsh population. Richard Owens was involved in authorising payments for site work on the church. Fellow Welsh builders Owen Elias and his son, William Owen Elias gave the first initials of their combined names to a sequence of roads either side of Goodison Park – Oxton, Winslow, Eton, Neston, Andrew, Nimrod, Dane, Wilburn, Ismay, Lind, Lowell, Index, Arnot, Makin, Olney, Weldon, Euston, Nixon, Elton, Liston, Imrie and Astor streets. Builders such as Elias and David Hughes were instrumental in extending the city to Kirkdale, Anfield, Walton, Everton, St Domingo, Islington and Kensington. The streets in these areas were often given Welsh names and many of the streets surrounding High Park Street, meanwhile, are named after Welsh rivers. In the latter part of the 19th Century, William Jones, who had built streets in Everton and Toxteth, became the first Welsh speaking mayor of Bootle.

Every Thursday in Liverpool was traditionally 'Welsh day', as it was the day people from North Wales travelled to the city centre by rail, coach and car to visit relatives and to shop and still a strong Welsh contingent on Merseyside remains. The 2001 Census put the Welsh-born population of Liverpool at a small-sounding 1.17%. But this is a big city. And to include those with Welsh heritage would increase the figure considerably.  Visit Pall Mall, where a plaque commemorates that that part of the city was once known as Little Wales and no matter what, Liverpool’s Welsh influence will always run through the city. 

see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2022/02/liverpool-communities-italian.html