Until the 1820s, what would become Egremont was simply the eastern edge of the Liscard township, an area of farmland sloping down to the Mersey. The earliest building of note was the Liscard Manor House, also called Seabank, built in the 1790s and home in turn to the influential Penkett and Maddock families. The area around Seabank later became the Mariners' Home, founded in 1892 by William Cliff for retired sailors of the Mersey shipping trade. By then Liscard had grown enough that splitting it into two townships made sense, and Captain Askew's chosen name was applied to the new northern half. The transition from farmland to suburb took place across a single generation, driven by the same Mersey ferry that would eventually give Egremont its pier.

Egremont Ferry was built in 1827, running between Egremont and the Liverpool waterfront, and at its peak it boasted the longest pier on Merseyside. The pier reached so far out into the river that passengers could board at any state of the tide, which mattered on the Mersey where the difference between high and low water is among the largest in Britain. For nearly 120 years the pier carried commuters and day-trippers, with the boats running every few minutes at rush hour. The end came in 1946, when a coaster lost control and struck the pier, causing damage that the post-war Mersey could not afford to repair. The pier was dismantled. The ferry stopped. What survives now is the wide promenade where the pier once landed, and the broad sweep of the foreshore at low tide where the pilings used to stand.

Tobin Street runs down to the promenade and marks the boundary between the Liscard and Seacombe wards. It is named for John Tobin, who owned the land along this entire stretch of the waterfront and gave it to the community on his death. His house stood in what is now Central Park, sitting derelict for years before being demolished in 2009. At the foot of Tobin Street, where the Egremont Ferry once landed, stood a building locally known as the Beehive. It began life as a police station, was gutted to its brick frame and tiled roof, and through the twentieth century housed a boat yard, a motorboat club, and a club called Davy Jones Locker that locals still remember without sentimentality. The whole cluster of buildings was finally demolished in 1983, leaving the promontory open.

One Egremont survives at sea, in a manner of speaking. The MV Egremont was a Mersey ferry named for the town, retired in 1975 and sold to the Island Cruising Club in Salcombe, Devon, where she was moored as a floating clubhouse and sail training base. Generations of teenagers learned to sail from her decks. In 2016 the ageing vessel underwent extensive repairs at Sharpness in Gloucestershire, but by then her time was nearly over. She was laid up and offered for sale. Whether she will ever return to active service is uncertain. The promenade in Egremont has no monument to her, but the families who still come to walk along it on Sunday afternoons sometimes remind their children that the boat they sailed on at a school camp in Devon was the same Egremont.

Today most of Egremont is three- and four-bedroom terraces and semi-detached homes, a working-class suburb that has held its character through decades of change in the rest of Wallasey. King Street is the local high street, a small shopping run with the kind of shops a residential area needs rather than one tourists would notice. The promenade is the great public room. It runs in an unbroken traffic-free pedestrian path from Seacombe Ferry to New Brighton, passing through Egremont on its way, with Wallasey Town Hall standing as one of the most visible buildings above the water. Stand on the promenade on a clear evening with the Liverpool skyline lit up across the river, the Royal Liver Building winking, the Three Graces glowing, and you understand why the captain who chose the name Egremont chose to build here.