The Woodchurch refuses to die

If you walk down New Hey Road, one of the main branches through the Woodchurch estate, it’ll take you from the distinctive black-and-silver pyramid of St Michael and All Angels church to the capacious woods and green space that border Upton. You’ll pass three schools, a petting zoo, a tower block, playing fields and rows and rows of terraced houses. Some of the latter date to the post-war period, creations of HJ Rowse — more famous for Liverpool’s India Buildings, Queensway Tunnel entrance and Philharmonic Hall — who fulfilled his mentor CH Reilly’s vision for Woodchurch by designing handsome, traditionally English homes with a rural character. 

Unfortunately, the people who worship, live, work or play in these places do not always have a story harmonious with the idealism of Reilly and Rowse. Some sixty-five years ago, Karen Hawthorne was born on New Hey Road. “I have seen a school, four blocks of flats, the Pelican and the Stirrup pubs, [the swimming] baths and library disappear,” she says — and that’s mostly happened over the last few decades. “The youth club’s gone. The supermarkets in Hoole Road and Upton? Gone. Now I watch the grass be neglected on the estate, which they say is for nature — rubbish.” Even the ubiquitous sleeping policemen do not escape her criticism: “They serve no purpose but to damage your car.”

This narrative of decline, running contrary to Liverpool’s recovery since the 1980s, will unfortunately be familiar to many communities across Merseyside. But compared to some underfunded places The Post has written about lately — Southport, say, or Liscard — it’s hard to find a silver lining on the Woodchurch. There’s no Victorian pier to repair or shopping centre to keep ticking over, no multi-million pound investment due from local government or left over from the previous administration’s Levelling Up promises. 

“It isn't as bad a place as it's made out to be,” Karen says. “But it's not as lovely as it used to be. It is neglected.”

That’s been the case ever since I moved to its environs aged fourteen. After school, my mates and I would get off the bus in Upton Village. That, too, was different: with a Sayers, an Ethel Austin’s, a confectioners and a jeweller that would stand on his shop's front stoop and greet each person as they went by. Just before reaching St Mary’s, the Gothic Revival parish church at the end of the row of shops, some of us would turn left into Upton’s leafy suburbs, while the others would turn right towards the estate. 

As a newcomer, I wasn’t really conscious of the difference. Not until the following day, when a mate who’d turned right would recount a tale of getting “legged”: chased across the estate by a gang of older lads until he was safely home. My own crew lived in trepidation of “the WEBB” or Woodchurch Estate Boot Boys, who would gang-tag our roads and feud with other youths from the Ford or Noctorum estates. If there was any trouble in the village — a scrap in one of the pubs, or trouble at the kebab shop — it was usual to hear it blamed on a Woodchurch incursion. A few years later, when I was soundly thumped by four lads down Church Road on the way home from the pub, the police officer who attended the scene quickly deduced it must have been “them from the Woody.” 

Exposed to these tales and prejudices, it’s easy to build up a picture, fairly or otherwise, of a place to avoid. If I hadn’t had the evidence of my own friends, perhaps I’d have internalised that perspective. It isn’t as if the estate’s reputation has improved in recent years, either. Connor Chapman, the low-level cocaine dealer who killed Elle Edwards on Christmas Eve 2022, lived on Woodchurch’s Houghton Road. That same year there were four shootings around the estate, all thought to be gang-related. In 2024, Cocaine Inc. — a podcast documentary by Times journalist David Collins — dedicated a whole episode to the Woodchurch. If you listen to it, the picture that emerges is of a hardworking community menaced by drug-running criminals, members of a gang too chaotic to trouble real cartels but nevertheless a thorn in the side of Merseyside communities. Last month, a 16-year-old was charged with wounding with intent and possession of an offensive weapon after chasing a man into the Hoole Road Co-Op and seriously injuring him. 

Merseyside Police say EVOLVE Wirral, an initiative part-funded by the Home Office in the wake of Edwards’ murder, has made inroads into anti-social behaviour on the Woodchurch, as well as nearby problem spots like the Ford (now the Beechwood) and Noctorum, through community litter picks, free skips, a youth hub in a shipping container and environmental action days. “The last three years have seen a significant amount of activity in Woodchurch, Noctorum and Beechwood and Ballantyne to create positive change in these communities,” Ann Ainsworth, the vice-chair of Wirral council’s tourism, communities, culture and leisure committee, said this week.

This is all well and good, of course. So is the announcement from the city region combined authority of a new railway station to serve the estate. Upton councillor Jerry Williams, who grew up on the Woodchurch, told the BBC earlier this year that better connectivity will combat the "degree of isolation” felt on the estate. 

But speaking to people across the Woodchurch does not give the impression that these developments have resulted in a net positive. Karen’s point about the gradual — and, seemingly, inevitable — disappearance of public services, amenities, social hubs and sports centres stands. Woodchurch Library closed as part of the council’s £20 million budget cuts in 2022. Woodchurch Leisure Centre, a public swimming baths and activity venue since the 1960s, closed the same year. In both cases, locals who knew the value of the institutions came together to try and save them. The library was subject to a community asset transfer (CAT) attempt, while a group of campaigners called Woodchurch Wellbeing raised £83,000 to keep the swimming baths open. The CAT was unsuccessful, and in 2023 then-council leader Paul Stewart said the risks to transfer the leisure centre to the community were “too significant" after a council report called the group’s business plan “not viable”. 

One of Woodchurch Wellbeing’s directors, Lynn Howe, called the report “at worst a deliberate misrepresentation of our proposals” to “mislead and misdirect” the public and committee members. Whatever the truth, now the leisure centre is boarded up, its skylight smashed, with vegetation slowly overtaking it. I reached out to Woodchurch Wellbeing for a post-mortem, but they did not reply. Considering the painful subject and worse outcome, I don’t blame them. 

Regular readers of The Post will be familiar with Wirral Council’s financial problems and inner turmoil. Like many local authorities over the last 15 years, they’ve also had to conform to the brutal logic of austerity. But I can’t help but notice Upton and equally middle-class Greasby’s libraries are still open. And as one resident, who believed Woodchurch’s leisure centre had been deliberately allowed to deteriorate, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service in 2023: “If it was West Kirby baths, there would be uproar.”

The effects of these decisions have been felt across the estate. One woman who did not wish to be named — for the purposes of this article, we’ll call her Philippa — told me she can no longer get her son to swimming lessons. 

“I don't drive,” she says, “And he’s autistic, so if he’s especially tired after swimming it can be challenging getting him home. But if [the baths] were still open around the corner, this wouldn't be a barrier.” Thanks to assistance from generous grandparents, I’m able to take my toddler swimming at Foxfield School on New Hey Road, but this isn’t an option for Philippa. “They’re triple the price,” she says. 

As for the library: “Both my husband and I work for libraries, so that felt a bit personal when [Woodchurch’s] closed,” says Philippa. She used to take her boys every week — first as babies the the Bounce & Rhyme sessions, then just to read when they were older. But now, their connection to reading, learning and social interaction has been made much more difficult by the cuts. “Upton has a lovely library, but it's a bit too far to walk after school,” she says.

A sense of abandonment by authorities and isolation from the rest of Merseyside is detectable across the estate. But there’s another side, too. Like Karen, Philippa is keen to say that the Woodchurch is better than its reputation. “I have good neighbours,” she says. She also mentions the community shop on Hoole Road, round the corner from where she lives, which hosts a food bank on a Wednesday, and the Carrbridge Centre in the shadows of the leisure centre’s ruins, which “does a lot for children in the holidays.” That’s the WEBB1 Fusion project — an attempt to reclaim the WEBB acronym for “Woodchurch Estate Bounces Back” — which offers activities for children, young people and families.

I hear this sentiment echoed when I reach out to an old school friend, one of those who used to turn right at St Mary’s Church. He says it has a better community spirit than any other place he’s lived, something the titanic fundraising and organisational efforts of groups like Woodchurch Wellbeing are evidence of. 

Maybe something of this ethos was baked into the estate’s original design. CH Reilly, who disdained suburbs like Upton for their “narrowness of outlook” and “anti-social spirit”, intended the Woody to be redolent of “the English Village Green and the small squares of the country town, where children can play and neighbours see one another and retain the friendliness of the little streets and slums.” As one local councillor back then put it, “The whole idea of Professor Reilly’s Plan is to foster community spirit.” But I’d much rather attribute this to the resilience of the Woodchurch’s residents, whose care for their home has withstood decades of neglect. 

Something else they don’t tell you about the Woodchurch is how beautiful it is. Per Reilly’s vision, many of the terraces are attractive — white stone like fisherman’s cottages, or abounding with mock Tudor gables bearing their year of construction. Sometimes, just after dawn, I walk across the big open meadow at the end of New Hey Road to the sad morning symphony of grasshoppers, when you can see drooping between the maidengrass festoons of spiderwebs brocaded with sunlit dewdrops. Garlanded with oak trees, hawthorn, wild cherry and rowan bushes that soften the nearby motorway’s roar to a gentle lowing, this small outcrop of wilderness recently hosted an Irish Traveller encampment, but even the few scraps of litter left behind don’t sully it. And although not within the estate’s boundaries, at the other end of Church Lane are the woods, paths, streams, ponds and fishing lakes of the Arrowe Country Park, a vast swathe of green space tamed out of the Wirral’s ancient forest. 

This is all deliberate: HJ Rowse wanted to make every effort “in the planning of the [Woodchurch] to provide prospects of the attractive rural surroundings from every possible point.” But if the Woodchurch’s location, prettiness, layout and — to a small degree — civic pride may be attributable to its far-seeing architects and town-planners, perhaps we should heed the other major element of Rowse’s scheme: shops, baths, an assembly hall, a cinema, a library and a clinic “for the social life of the community.” 

Even the exceptional resilience Woodchurch’s population has shown can only solve so much in the face of chronic underfunding and social problems. Right now, the whole estate is a battlefield. And not between police and youths or rival gangs. On one side, the ever-ripe potential of people who care deeply about their neighbourhood and their children’s prospects in it; on the other, the sullen entropy of deprivation, seeping through every street like mildew stains. 

Last year, I was walking through Upton Village when I saw distant flames flickering high into the dark November sky above the old Ethel Austin’s — now a girl’s dance studio and fashion boutique. My first mindless instinct was fear, until I remembered it was the 5th. (In my defence, as a Catholic from a half-Protestant family, I’ve always felt ambivalent about Guy Fawkes Night.) My wife and I followed the orange tongues, she pushing the pram and I holding the dog’s lead, deep into the Woodchurch estate. A great scent of smoky wood, damp leaves, ozone and sulphur from the fireworks grew stronger until we came to the bonfire: a massive and brilliantly controlled blaze surrounded by food trucks and stalls. And the crowds were, almost without exception, families: excited kids writing their names in the foggy air with sparklers or sitting atop their dad’s shoulders. 

Not until I spoke to Philippa, also there with her boys, did I realise that this was organised by locals, in lieu of the council-hosted ones discontinued for — you guessed it — funding reasons. 

The delight of scenes like this goes some way to countermanding despair. But the more I think about the estate, the wider the aperture between what people get and what they deserve becomes. For better or worse, you could probably find a half dozen places like the Woodchurch on Merseyside alone, and hundreds across the country, and all of these have people living in them who simply refuse to allow their neighbourhood to go to the dogs. Whether mere willpower can prevent that is an experiment local and central authorities seem determined to run.