Qualla: Maghull

Maghull: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0. Frank Hornby invented Meccano at his house in Maghull. The Hollies, on Station Road, became the first building outside London to be awarded a Blue plaque - because the man who lived in it had taken a few perforated metal strips and a handful of nuts and bolts and made the most influential construction toy of the twentieth century. He went on to design the Hornby Railways and Dinky Toys empires from the same Sefton commuter town. He is buried in St Andrew's churchyard, alongside his wife and daughter, a few hundred yards from the railway station that runs the line his model engines once mimicked.

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Image: Mike Pennington | CC BY-SA 2.0

Maghull: A Flat Land in a Bend

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emma White, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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, ...

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Image: Emma White | CC BY-SA 2.0

Maghull: The Canal Arrives

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Bradley, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 pu...

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Image: John Bradley | CC BY-SA 4.0

Maghull: Liverpool's Quiet Hinterland

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lalivlon, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 bi...

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Image: Lalivlon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Maghull: Wartime and Ashworth

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emma White, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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. Ameri...

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Image: Emma White | CC BY-SA 2.0