The place-name scholar Eilert Ekwall proposed that Maghull comes from the Celtic word magos, meaning a plain or field, joined to the Old English halh, meaning a corner or nook - together meaning, roughly, 'flat land in a bend.' The bend is the River Alt. The original settlement, recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Magele, sat on a ridge of higher ground at what is now Red Lion Bridge, with the floodplain of the Alt below. A church existed here by 1100; the chapel still stands, the oldest ecclesiastical building in Merseyside still in regular use for worship. Two centuries before Liverpool was recorded, Maghull was already a community.

In 1770 the first sod of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal was cut by the Honourable Charles Lewis Mordaunt at a spot in a rock cutting 400 metres east of Halsall Hill Bridge. By 1774 the canal had reached Maghull and given the town its second connection to Liverpool. The Red Lion public house was built to serve the canal trade. Quarrying and clay extraction followed. By 1849 the railway had arrived too, with a station on the Liverpool, Ormskirk and Preston Railway, and in 1933 the A59 road was driven straight through the town as Northway. Each of these arrivals - canal, railway, dual carriageway - prompted another wave of expansion, until by 1971 Maghull had the largest population of any civil parish in England, and the Sefton suburban grid had absorbed what had once been farmland.

Maghull's notable residents read like a quietly impressive cross-section of post-war Britain. John Lennon lived briefly with relatives at Cedar Grove during family difficulties. The Beatles played a one-off show at the Albany Cinema on 15 October 1961, with Ken Dodd top of the bill and Arthur Scott as compere; the building is now a Lidl. The Sugababes' Heidi Range went to Maricourt High School. Les Pattinson and Will Sergeant of Echo and the Bunnymen both attended Deyes High School, as did members of Teardrop Explodes, the Wild Swans, the Farm, Bad Manners, and Apollo 440. The novelist Rafael Sabatini lived on Station Road. The astronomer Isaac Roberts called Maghull home. So did the Brookside actor Bill Dean. The list is not exhaustive; the impression is unmistakable - this is the kind of Liverpool commuter town that, while never claiming the spotlight, has fed it for sixty years.

In 1939 the Irish Republican Army blew up the swing bridge at Green Lane on the canal, in an action whose strategic logic was never fully explained. During the Second World War three German bombs fell on the town, and a single house on what was then Park Lane was destroyed. American and Polish army units were stationed locally, alongside camps for displaced persons; Maghull became a nightly refuge for up to 6,000 people fleeing the heavily bombed docks at Bootle. The Park Lane tuberculosis sanatorium and a hospital built to treat shell-shock victims were later combined to form Ashworth Hospital - a high-security psychiatric facility that has, since the war, treated some of the most challenging patients in the British system, including the Moors Murderer Ian Brady. The hospital remains part of the town's identity and one of the country's three high-secure psychiatric institutions.

Maghull sits at approximately 53.517 degrees north, 2.945 degrees west, in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton about seven miles north-northeast of Liverpool city centre. Liverpool John Lennon Airport (EGGP) is approximately 12 nautical miles south-southeast. The town is bisected by the A59 (Northway) running north to Ormskirk, and the M57 and M58 motorways begin at Switch Island immediately south of the town. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal runs through old Maghull as a visible curving thread between the suburban blocks. Best viewed 2,000 to 4,000 feet AGL.