The History of Churchtown: Southport's Ancient Village

I've lived in Churchtown my whole life. Forty-one years. I walk past St Cuthbert's Church most mornings with Frank, and most mornings I don't really think about the fact that there has been a church on that exact spot for over 800 years. It's just part of the backdrop.

But when you start digging into what actually happened here — in this quiet village on the northern edge of Southport — the history is extraordinary. Vikings. Lindisfarne monks fleeing Norse raiders. A local innkeeper who left the village and founded an entire town. A gravestone that tells the story of a man held captive in North Africa for sixteen and a half years. This is a place with serious depth, and most of it gets walked past without a second glance.

Here's what I know about the place I've called home for four decades.

Before Southport: the Ancient Parish of North Meols

Most people think of Churchtown as a suburb of Southport. That's technically true today — but it's the wrong way round historically. Churchtown came first, by about eight centuries. Southport was built by someone from Churchtown, using Churchtown money, on land that originally belonged to a Churchtown family.

The area was recorded in the Domesday Book under its Scandinavian name, Otegrimeles — the Vikings who settled here around 940 AD left their mark on the language as well as the land. The sea came right to the edge of what is now the village. The remains of a fishing wharf were found beneath one of the main streets.

Before the Normans, before even the Domesday survey, the parish of North Meols was established here in 867 AD. The name means 'north sandbanks' — a flat, windswept coastal settlement on the edge of the Lancashire plain, entirely unremarkable to anyone who didn't live there.

The Monks, the Bones, and the Cross

In the 9th century, monks from Lindisfarne were carrying the remains of St Cuthbert around England, fleeing Viking raids. The story goes that they rested at North Meols and planted a cross at the stopping place. That act is considered the founding moment of the parish — and the church that grew around it, St Cuthbert's, still stands on that spot today.

There has been a church here since at least the 12th century. The first known rector, Adam the Clerk, served in 1178. The original stone church was built in 1571 and later destroyed by fire. The current building dates from 1730 to 1739, with the tower and spire rebuilt in 1850 and a major restoration in 1908-09.

It's a Grade II listed building now. On a clear morning with the light coming through the old yew trees in the graveyard, it's one of the more quietly impressive sights in the whole of Merseyside.

The Gravestone with a Story

If you walk through the churchyard at St Cuthbert's, keep an eye out for a gravestone with an inscription that stops you mid-stride. It reads:

“Here lies the body of Thomas Rimmer, mariner, who was held captive in Barbary 16 years 6 months and who died in January the Year of Our Lord 1716.”

'Barbary' refers to the Barbary Coast — North Africa. Barbary pirates were notorious for raiding European coastal villages and capturing people to sell into slavery across North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans were taken this way between the 16th and 18th centuries. Thomas Rimmer, a mariner from this village, was one of them. He survived sixteen and a half years in captivity and made it home. He's buried 200 metres from where I walk the dog every morning.

The Hesketh Family and Meols Hall

If Churchtown has a ruling family — and for centuries it genuinely did — it's the Heskeths. They are, as one local historian noted, 'relative newcomers' to the village. They arrived in Tudor times, which passes for recent around here.

Meols Hall, their family home, sits at the edge of the village green — you can see the entrance beside the Hesketh Arms pub. The hall is about 400 years old, surrounded by 2,000 acres of tenanted farms and 100 acres of park and woodland. The Hesketh family still own much of the land in and around Churchtown. Their name is on the pub, on the botanic gardens foundation story, on the memorial plaques inside the church. You can't really tell the history of this place without them.

The Botanic Gardens — opened in 1874 — were built on land bought from the Hesketh estate by a group of local working men who formed the Southport and Churchtown Botanic Gardens Company. They raised £18,000 and opened the gardens in 1875. P.T. Barnum — yes, that P.T. Barnum — was involved as an advisor during construction and donated his top hat for display in the museum.

The company eventually went bankrupt in 1932. There were plans to develop the land. Southport Corporation stepped in and saved the gardens, which reopened in 1937 and are now run by Sefton Council. The Victorian fernery — voted the best in England at one point — is still there.

The Fishermen's Cottages

Down Churchgate, the rooflines of the older cottages sit unusually low to the ground. The reason is practical and surprising: many were built using upturned boats. When a fishing vessel became too old or damaged for sea use, it was flipped over and used as a roof structure. The curved timber hull gave the cottage its shape.

Some of these cottages are still standing, most with Grade II listing. Combined with the thatched cottages on Botanic Road and the preserved village green, the whole central area of Churchtown sits within a Conservation Area — which is why it still looks the way it does, while everything around it was developed and expanded.

Churchtown Founded Southport

In 1792, a man called William Sutton left Churchtown and changed the geography of the entire coastline. Sutton was the landlord of the Black Bull Inn in the village — and he spotted an opportunity in the fashionable trend for sea bathing that was sweeping Georgian England.

He built a bathing house four miles south, at a place then called South Hawes: flat, sandy, exposed, and completely uninhabited. Locals thought he'd lost his mind. They called it Duke's Folly. They called him the Mad Duke.

By 1798 he'd built the South Port Hotel. A settlement grew around it. By 1809 a visitor described it as 'becoming a fashionable watering place.' By the railway age it had a line to Liverpool. By the Victorian era it was a full town.

Southport — all of it — grew from a decision made in Churchtown. The man who made it was a local innkeeper who knew the coastline, understood the market, and was prepared to build something in what everyone else dismissed as the southern hawes of nowhere.

The Eagle Comic

On Botanic Road, there's a plaque on an old bakery. That building was once the headquarters of The Eagle — the comic that launched Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, in 1950. The Eagle was edited from Churchtown. Generations of British children grew up reading a comic that was created in this village.

It's become a small shrine for a certain generation of grown-up schoolboys. If you know, you know.

The Potatoes

One more thing, almost too strange to include. In 1575, a ship ran aground off the Churchtown coast. Its cargo washed ashore. The cargo contained potatoes — and the claim is that this was the first place in England where they were grown.

Historians will debate the specifics. But the claim is local, documented in various accounts of the village, and odd enough to be worth mentioning. The potato may — possibly — have arrived in England at the end of a Churchtown beach.

Churchtown Today

The village green is still there, with the Bold Arms and the Hesketh Arms on either side — both worth a pint on any reasonable afternoon. The preservation order that covers Botanic Road means the thatched cottages survive. The stocks from 1741 are still standing by the church wall on St Cuthbert's Road. The church still has Sunday services.

It's the part of Southport that surprises people. Most visitors stick to Lord Street and the seafront, which are both worth your time — but if you're here for a day and you haven't walked up to Churchtown, you've missed something.

Forty-one years I've lived here. I still find things I didn't know.