For most of its history Wallasey was a place of farmers, fishermen, and people the rest of the country preferred not to think about too hard. The peninsula's reputation for smuggling ran deep - tunnels and cellars beneath houses in the old village still survive from when contraband moved inland from quiet coves. Worse was the local trade in "wrecking": luring ships onto sandbanks with false lights and helping yourself to the cargo washed ashore. As late as 1839 the Pennsylvania and two other vessels were wrecked off Leasowe in a storm, and their cargoes and furnishings were soon found redistributed across the houses of local residents. Wirral folk songs from the period are remarkably frank about it. The Earls of Derby ran horse races on the sands at Leasowe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - the meeting was a forerunner of the modern Derby - but for the most part the world passed Wallasey by until the steam ferries came.

Steam changed everything. From 1815 onward, regular ferries across the Mersey made Wallasey reachable for Liverpool's merchants and sea captains. Egremont was developed as a residential retreat. Fort Perch Rock was built in 1829 to guard the river mouth. And from the 1860s, New Brighton on the northwest corner emerged as one of the busiest seaside resorts in the country, serving Liverpool and the Lancashire mill towns. The New Brighton Tower, completed in 1900, was the tallest in Britain - taller than Blackpool's - and at its base sat a ballroom that became one of the Merseybeat era's key venues. The Beatles played the Tower Ballroom on 12 October 1962 as the support act for Little Richard. They played the smaller Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard for the first time on 6 January 1961, one of their earliest gigs outside Liverpool itself. Wallasey was also home to the Undertakers, featuring Jackie Lomax, and to Phil Kenzie, who later played saxophone on records by Al Stewart and others.

Wallasey has an unusually long list of things invented or first attempted within its boundaries. The UK's first guide-dog training school - the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association - was founded here in 1931; a statue outside the Floral Pavilion Theatre marks the centenary. Dr Frank Stableford, a member of Wallasey Golf Club, devised the Stableford scoring system, first used in competition in 1932; it is now used in amateur golf around the world. The world's first passenger hovercraft service ran briefly from Leasowe to Rhyl in North Wales between July and September 1962. The Solar Campus building on Leasowe Road, completed in 1961 by architect Emslie Morgan, was the first building in the world designed to be heated entirely by passive solar energy - it was a secondary school. Local MP Ernest Marples, as Minister of Transport from 1959 to 1964, introduced parking meters, yellow lines, and seat-belt regulations to British roads. The town also has a quieter, gentler oddity: until 1969 the Wallasey Corporation buses lined up at Seacombe Ferry every fifteen minutes, and when the inspector blew his whistle, fifteen double-deckers would set off simultaneously in a Le Mans-style scramble across the borough.

Wallasey produced a remarkable roll-call of twentieth-century names for a town of its size. Eric Idle of Monty Python was born here in 1943. Charles Crichton, who directed The Lavender Hill Mob and A Fish Called Wanda, was born here in 1910. Wimbledon and triple-grand-slam tennis champion Fred Perry, born in Stockport in 1909, grew up here as a child. The science fiction philosopher Olaf Stapledon - whose Last and First Men influenced Arthur C. Clarke and a generation of cosmic novelists - lived in Wallasey. So did Malcolm Lowry, who wrote Under the Volcano. The cartoonist Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson's collaborator, was born here in 1936. Paul Hollywood, mountaineer Bill Tilman, comedian Deryck Guyler, opera singer Rita Hunter, and General Sir Miles Dempsey - commander of the British Second Army on D-Day - all came from the same set of merged seaside villages on the wrong side of the Mersey. Today Wallasey is mostly a commuter suburb, ferry boats still trundling between Seacombe and Liverpool Pier Head, the New Brighton beach quieter than it once was, the promenade still running its full seven miles around the headland.