Town in Merseyside, England
St Helens
St Helens gave the world the glass in nearly every window, the pills on every Victorian shelf and a rugby league side that keeps winning.
Key information
- County
- Merseyside
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Glass-making, Pilkington float glass, Beecham's Pills, rugby league
- Famous people
- Sir Thomas Beecham, Johnny Vegas, Keiron Cunningham
About St Helens
The town that made the world's windows
Look through almost any modern window and you are probably looking through a St Helens idea. In the 1950s the Pilkington glassworks perfected float glass, in which molten glass is poured across a bath of molten tin to produce a perfectly flat sheet. Alastair Pilkington led the work, and the process was announced in 1959. Before that, glass-making had been the town's trade for well over a century. Pilkington Brothers began in 1826, and the furnaces made St Helens a place where whole families worked for the same firm. Float glass is now used across the planet, which is a lot of fame for a Lancashire town on the Sankey Brook.
Coal, copper and the canal that started a trend
The town is named after a medieval chapel dedicated to St Helen. Its growth came from what lay underneath and alongside it: coal, sand and a handy waterway. The Sankey Canal opened in 1757, and it is often called the first true canal of the Industrial Revolution. It carried coal to the Mersey and fed the copper smelters, chemical works and glassworks that sprang up along its banks. A few decades later, in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway crossed the Sankey Valley on a nine-arch viaduct nearby, one of the first great railway structures anywhere.
Pills, podiums and Sir Thomas Beecham
Glass wasn't the only thing St Helens exported. Beecham's Pills, a famously popular laxative, were made here, and the fortune they created was a world away from the factory floor. Joseph Beecham's son Thomas, born in the town in 1879, became one of Britain's great conductors and founded the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The Beecham name is still part of the story of the town, as a reminder that its industries made fortunes as well as bottles.
Saints: a rugby league religion
Ask what St Helens is famous for and most locals will say rugby league. St Helens RLFC was founded in 1873 and the Saints are among the sport's most successful clubs, with long runs of trophies and a Super League title four years running from 2019 to 2022. The old Knowsley Road ground gave way in 2012 to a new stadium at Langtree Park. Outside it stands a statue honouring Keiron Cunningham, the hooker from the town who became one of the Saints' most loved players. Match days draw the whole town into red and white.
A giant girl's head on a pit site
One of the most unusual things in the area stands where a colliery once did. Dream is a pale, 20-metre sculpture of a girl's head with her eyes closed, made by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa on the former Sutton Manor Colliery site and unveiled in 2009. It was made from white dolomite and stands on a hill that was once a coal tip, so a landscape that was dug out for fuel now has a quiet face looking over it. It is the town's best-known modern landmark, and it makes a fitting symbol for St Helens: industrial roots, with something unexpected on top.
Famous faces from the Saints' hometown
The comedian and actor Johnny Vegas, whose real name is Michael Pennington, is from St Helens, and his rubbery, gloriously gloomy persona has carried the town's name onto television for decades. Alongside him in the town's roll of fame are the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and rugby league hero Keiron Cunningham. Glass, pills, pit heaps and rugby: it is a mixed list, but all of it is very St Helens.