Town in Merseyside, England
Birkenhead
Birkenhead gave New York the idea for Central Park, gave the world the 'women and children first' rule, and built a Confederate raider on the Mersey.
Key information
- County
- Merseyside
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Cammell Laird shipbuilding, Birkenhead Park, Hamilton Square, the Mersey ferries and tunnels
- What locals are called
- Birkonians
- Famous people
- Dixie Dean, Wilfred Owen
- Football clubs
- Tranmere Rovers (Prenton Park)
About Birkenhead
The park that New York copied
Walk into Birkenhead Park and you are standing in the original. Opened in 1847 and designed by Joseph Paxton, it was the first publicly funded civic park in Britain, paid for in part by selling off land around its edges for villas. In 1850 the American landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted paid a visit and was struck by what he saw: winding paths, sunken carriage drives, lakes and bridges that made a flat site feel like open countryside. He later co-designed Central Park in New York, and the family resemblance is hard to miss. The park is still the green heart of the town, with its Grand Entrance arch, boathouse and Swiss Bridge intact.
Monks, ferries and a very old priory
Long before the shipyards, Birkenhead was a quiet spot on the Wirral shore with a Benedictine priory founded around 1150. Its surviving medieval buildings are the oldest on Merseyside. The neighbouring St Mary's tower belongs to a much later church, opened in 1821. The monks are said to have run a ferry across the Mersey to Liverpool, which is how the town's long relationship with the river began. Woodside remains Birkenhead's historic ferry landing, though its terminal has been closed for refurbishment since 2022, with Mersey Ferries services using Liverpool Pier Head and Seacombe in the meantime. Under the water, the Mersey Railway tunnel opened in 1886, and the Queensway road tunnel followed in 1934, opened by King George V. At the time it was the longest underwater road tunnel in the world.
The yard that built Ark Royals and a rebel raider
Birkenhead's reputation was forged on the waterfront. William Laird set up an ironworks here in 1824, and the yard that grew from it, later Cammell Laird, turned the town from a hamlet into a shipbuilding powerhouse. In 1862 Lairds launched the CSS Alabama, a Confederate commerce raider that went on to sink dozens of Union merchant ships in the American Civil War. Later came the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal in 1937 and the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, launched in 1939. There was tragedy too. In June 1939 the new submarine HMS Thetis sank in Liverpool Bay during trials. Of the 103 people aboard, 99 died, and the disaster shocked the nation.
Where 'women and children first' got its name
In 1852 the troopship HMS Birkenhead, built at Laird's yard, struck a rock off South Africa and began to break up. The soldiers on board stood in formation on deck while the lifeboats took off women and children. More than 400 men died. It became known as the Birkenhead Drill, and it helped plant the idea of 'women and children first' in the popular imagination. A ship launched on the Mersey ended up lending its name to a rule of the sea. Another Birkenhead first came on the streets. In 1860 the American entrepreneur George Francis Train opened a horse-drawn street tramway here, the first in Britain.
Georgian grandeur on Hamilton Square
Hamilton Square is Birkenhead's showpiece, a grand Georgian square laid out in the 1820s and 1830s, said to have been planned around the ambitions of Laird himself. Its terraces of fine stone houses face a central garden and are packed with listed buildings. At one end stands the Town Hall, finished in 1887, with its clock tower and sweeping steps. It is now used for civic functions and events, while the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Oxton holds the town's maritime collections and is a favourite with locals. The square sits right above its own Merseyrail station, so a few minutes' ride puts you in Liverpool.
Dixie, Owen and Tranmere
Birkenhead produced one of football's great goalscorers. William 'Dixie' Dean was born here in 1907, and in 1927-28 he scored 60 league goals for Everton in a single season, a record that has never been beaten. The poet Wilfred Owen grew up in the town and attended the Birkenhead Institute. His war poems, including 'Dulce et Decorum Est', are among the most powerful ever written about the First World War. The local club is Tranmere Rovers, who play at Prenton Park. They reached the League Cup final in 2000, losing to Leicester City, after a famous run that took in several top-flight scalps.