Liverpool and the World

The railway opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Lime Street became its principal Liverpool passenger terminus in 1836.

French sailors captured during Britain’s wars with France were imprisoned, exchanged, ransomed or released through Liverpool. The reviewed evidence does not support claims that they were sold as enslaved people.

Ninety child evacuees sailed from Liverpool aboard the City of Benares in September 1940, bound for safety in Canada. Only thirteen survived.

The City of Benares was torpedoed in the North Atlantic after leaving Liverpool in September 1940. This marker identifies the wider region, not a claimed wreck position.

Regular shipping routes connected Liverpool with Shanghai. After the Second World War, some Chinese seamen were sent from Liverpool to the Far East and discharged thousands of miles from their Liverpool families.

Liverpool’s shipping links brought Chinese sailors through Hong Kong. Post-war plans included recruiting cheaper replacement crews there while men based in Liverpool were pressured to leave.

Liverpool’s Goree took its name from Gorée Island off Senegal, a place bound up in European competition, West African commerce and the history and memory of the Atlantic slave trade.

A Liverpool newspaper advertisement dated 12 September 1766 offered eleven people said to have arrived from Angola for sale at the Exchange Coffee House.

An 1805 advertisement offered plantations in Demerara and Berbice together with enslaved people, directing enquiries to Jones and Davies at Goree in Liverpool. The marker uses the modern country containing those historical colonies.

Centuries of movement across the Irish Sea brought workers, famine refugees, clergy, reformers, journalists and political organisers to Liverpool, where their descendants became inseparable from the city.