Centre for Customs and Excise Studies

The History of Southport: How a Sandbank Became Merseyside's Coastal Town

By Terry | Southport Guide

Southport did not exist 250 years ago. There was sand, there was sea, there were scattered farms on the edge of Martin Mere, and there was a coastline that nobody had thought to build a town on. What happened next — the transformation of a stretch of Lancashire dune coast into one of England's most recognisable Victorian seaside resorts — is one of those stories that tells you a great deal about how Britain works: entrepreneurial, accidental, shaped by railways and money and the specific human desire to stand near the sea and eat something.

I have lived in Southport my whole life. My family have been here for generations. I know the town the way only long-term locals know a place: the streets that used to be different, the buildings that are no longer there, the things the guidebooks get wrong. This is the honest account of how Southport came to be, and what that means for the town it is today.

Before Southport: The Landscape That Came First

To understand Southport, you need to understand the land it sits on. The Sefton Coast — the stretch of coastline running from the Mersey estuary north through Formby to the Ribble — is one of the most unusual coastal environments in England. It is defined by sand dunes, by the constant battle between the sea and the land, and by a flatness that extends miles inland. Martin Mere, which occupied much of the area east of the coast, was one of the largest natural lakes in England for most of recorded history. It covered tens of thousands of acres, was largely impassable by foot for much of the year, and shaped the settlements that grew around its edges in profound ways. The villages of Churchtown, Crossens, Banks and Birkdale all developed on slightly raised ground at the margins of the mere. The coast itself was inhospitable: shifting dunes, no harbour, exposure to westerly weather coming in off the Irish Sea.

What the area did have was fish. North Meols — the ancient parish that Southport would eventually grow within — had fishing communities stretching back to the medieval period. The settlement at Churchtown, now the northern village that I live in, is the original heart of this parish, with its church dedicated to St Cuthbert dating to the twelfth century. This was the local centre of gravity for centuries before Southport existed. If you want to understand where Southport comes from, Churchtown is the answer: older, quieter, and largely unchanged in its basic character from what it was three centuries ago.

The draining of Martin Mere, which began seriously in the late seventeenth century under the direction of Thomas Fleetwood and continued through the eighteenth, fundamentally changed the agricultural potential of the area and set the conditions for the population growth that would eventually fuel a seaside resort. By the time the resort began to develop in the 1790s, the landscape east of the dunes was already being transformed from wetland to farmland.

The Founding Myth: William Sutton and the Original Hotel

Every town has a founding story, and Southport's is better than most. The traditional account holds that in 1792, a man named William Sutton — a local innkeeper or, depending on which source you read, a horse dealer — built a small bathing house on the shore south of

Churchtown. He is said to have funded this by rowing visitors across a tidal creek that separated the coast road from the beach, charging a penny a crossing. From this modest beginning, he constructed what became known as "Duke's Folly" — a rough-hewn hotel on the sand that his neighbours considered an act of pure madness.

The site of this original building is disputed, and the precise details of Sutton's enterprise have been embellished over time. What is clear is that by the end of the eighteenth century, there was a functioning place of accommodation near the shore, and that visitors began to arrive — initially for the sea bathing that was fashionable among wealthy Georgians as a cure for almost any ailment, and subsequently for the general pleasures of the seaside.

The name "Southport" itself appears in records from the 1790s, a made-up marketing name for a place that needed to distinguish itself from Churchtown. It is a good name: it tells you what the place is (a port, or at least a coastal town) and where it is (south — though south of what exactly is somewhat ambiguous). The name stuck, and within a decade, "Southport" was appearing on maps.

The early resort was basic by any measure. The beach was wide and flat, the bathing good, the air fresh, and the accommodation improving year by year as investment followed demand. By the 1820s, Southport had a nascent promenade, a handful of hotels and lodging houses, and a growing reputation as a pleasant place to spend a week if you could afford it.

The Railway Changes Everything: 1840s

The history of Victorian seaside resorts is, in very large part, the history of railways. Before the railway arrived, seaside towns were accessible only to those wealthy enough to afford the time and expense of private coach travel. The railway democratised the seaside — or at least, extended it considerably down the social scale — and Southport benefited from this as much as any town in England.

The first railway connection to Southport came in 1848, with the opening of the line from Liverpool via Waterloo. The impact was immediate and transformative. Day trippers could now reach Southport from Liverpool in under an hour at a fraction of the old cost. Weekend visitors multiplied. The town's population, which had been growing steadily if unspectacularly, accelerated sharply.

What followed was the classic Victorian resort building boom. Hotels spread along the seafront. Boarding houses filled every available plot. The infrastructure of a proper resort — bandstands, reading rooms, assembly halls, garden walks — appeared with remarkable speed. The Promenade, which runs along the seafront, was formalised and extended. The first pier was opened in 1860.

The pier deserves a moment. At 1,108 metres, it remains England's second longest pier today. When it opened, it served a practical as much as recreational purpose: the beach at Southport is so shallow that ships could not approach close to shore, and the pier extended out to where the water was deep enough for small vessels to dock at high tide. The pier was, in this sense, the functional heart of the resort's connection to the sea — even if the sea itself was often a considerable distance away even from the pierhead, a function of the extraordinary tidal range and shallow gradient of the Ribble Estuary.

Lord Street: The Making of a Boulevard

If there is a single physical element that defines what Southport became in the Victorian period, it is Lord Street. The wide, tree-lined boulevard running north-south through the town centre, with its famous glass and iron canopies on the eastern side of the road, is one of the most distinctive streetscapes in England. It is not quite like anywhere else. The scale is generous, the architecture eclectic but coherent, and the canopied walkways give it a covered arcade quality that is genuinely unusual in a British street.

Lord Street's development as the principal commercial street of Southport took place primarily between the 1850s and the 1880s. The canopies — a distinctive feature that protects shoppers from the rain while walking along the eastern pavement — were added piecemeal by individual shopkeepers and building owners rather than as a planned scheme, which is why they vary slightly in design and height along the street's length. The effect, however, is of a planned boulevard, and it is this impression that has led to comparisons with the grand streets of continental Europe.

The most persistent Southport legend about Lord Street holds that Napoleon III, who spent time in England during his years of exile before becoming Emperor of France, was so struck by Lord Street that he used it as inspiration for Baron Haussmann's redesign of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s. This story is extremely difficult to verify and may be more local pride than documented history. What is certainly true is that Lord Street, at its Victorian peak, was one of the finest shopping streets in the north of England, and that the grand hotels, banks and department stores that lined it spoke of a town with considerable money and ambition.

Victoria Park, opened in 1865, extended the public amenity of the town beyond the seafront. Named for the queen who was on the throne for most of Southport's formative period, the park provided formal gardens, a bandstand, and the green space that a growing town needed. It would later become the permanent home of the Southport Flower Show, first held in 1924 and continuing to this day as one of England's most prestigious horticultural events.

The Edwardian Peak and the Twentieth Century

By the turn of the twentieth century, Southport had achieved something close to its maximum ambition as a Victorian resort. The Promenade was well-developed, the pier functional, Lord Street busy, the parks maintained, and the hotels full for much of the summer season. The town had also developed a strong residential character alongside the resort economy: it was, and increasingly prided itself on being, a place where professional and business people from Liverpool and Manchester chose to live.

This residential character has always distinguished Southport from the more purely working-class day-trip resorts of Blackpool and Morecambe. Southport attracted a certain kind of visitor and a certain kind of resident — aspirational, respectable, keen on good air and good order. Birkdale, the southern suburb that developed from the 1870s onwards, grew almost entirely as a high-quality residential district, with large detached and semi-detached houses on wide, quiet streets. Royal Birkdale Golf Club, founded in 1889, reflected this residential character precisely.

The twentieth century was less kind to Southport than the nineteenth had been. The rise of cheap foreign package holidays from the 1960s onwards devastated the British seaside resort industry. Towns that had been full of summer visitors found themselves competing with the guaranteed sunshine of Spain and Greece, and losing. Southport's decline was less catastrophic than that of Blackpool or Morecambe — the town's residential base gave it economic resilience that purely tourist-dependent places lacked — but it was real and visible. The post-war decades saw a familiar pattern: hotels converted to flats, boarding houses closed or declined in quality, the seafront amusement economy contracting, and civic investment struggling to keep pace with maintenance needs. The Marine Lake, constructed in 1887 as an ornamental water feature with a purpose-built lake for leisure activities, fell into disrepair. The pier sustained storm damage on multiple occasions. The seafront funfair survived in various forms but never recaptured the quality of its Victorian predecessor, Pleasureland, which at its peak in the mid-twentieth century was a major regional attraction.

The 2023 Flooding: A Watershed Moment

In October 2023, parts of Southport were flooded in the kind of event that the town had not experienced for decades. The flooding was significant and affected residential areas as well as commercial premises. It was a stark reminder of Southport's geographic vulnerability: a low-lying town on a silting estuary, built substantially below the level of the highest tides, dependent on sea defences and drainage systems that date in their original conception to the Victorian era.

The 2023 floods were not a freak event in a historical sense — Southport has always been vulnerable to flooding, and the records of the town's history contain many references to storms and inundations over the centuries. What made them significant in the contemporary context was their scale, their impact on people's lives and properties, and the questions they raised about the town's long-term resilience in a period of accelerating climate change.

The response from Sefton Council and national government has included increased investment in flood defences and drainage infrastructure. The Marine Lake Events Centre (MLEC) project, which will replace the ageing Marine Lake facilities with a new events and conference venue, was conceived partly with flood resilience in mind. The ongoing debate about Southport's future — how to regenerate the economy, how to manage the coastline, how to maintain the town's character while adapting to change — is inseparable from the question of flooding and sea level rise.

Southport Today: What the Town Has Become

Southport in 2026 is not the Victorian resort it once was, nor is it the declining seaside town of popular imagination. It occupies a more interesting and more complex position: a substantial town of around 90,000 people with a strong residential economy, a recovering tourist sector, a significant events calendar, and a growing awareness of its own distinctive character. The town's relationship with its Victorian heritage is increasingly positive. Lord Street, which went through difficult decades of vacancy and decline, has recovered substantially. The fabric of the street — the canopied buildings, the wide pavements, the tree planting — has been maintained and in some areas improved. Independent businesses have returned alongside chains. The Atkinson, the cultural centre on Lord Street housing a gallery, theatre and local history collection, has established itself as a genuine anchor for the town's cultural life.

The events calendar has become central to the town's identity in a way that goes beyond simple tourism. The Southport Flower Show, the Air Show, the Fireworks Championship, the Comedy Festival, and the Food and Drink Festival collectively bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to the town each year. These events exploit something Southport has always had: space. The wide seafront, the large parks, the flat beach — these are assets that work for large outdoor events in a way that more constrained town centres cannot replicate.

The Open Championship's return to Royal Birkdale in July 2026 — the 154th Open, and Birkdale's tenth — will be the largest single event in the town's modern history. The economic impact is projected to exceed £100 million, and the global television audience will expose Southport to a wider international awareness than the town has had at any point since its Victorian peak. Whether that awareness translates into lasting increased visitor numbers depends on what those viewers find when they look the town up.

Churchtown, where I live, remains what it has always been: the original settlement, the historic heart, the bit that surprises visitors who assume Southport is only its seafront. The medieval church, the pub, the botanical gardens, the sense of a village that predates the resort by centuries — these are as present today as they have always been.

Year	Event
	Park
1954	The Open Championship first held at Royal Birkdale
2023	Significant flooding affects residential and commercial areas
2027	Marine Lake Events Centre (MLEC) due to open
2026	The Open Championship returns to Royal Birkdale (12–19 July)

Further Reading and Sources

• Gareth Lloyd, Southport: A History (Carnegie Publishing, 2003)
• Sefton Council Local Studies and Archives
• The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport — local history collection and archive
• Historic England listing records for Lord Street and Southport seafront buildings
• British Newspaper Archive — Liverpool Mercury and Southport Visiter historical editions Terry writes the Southport Live news section at Southport Guide. He has lived in Churchtown his whole life.

© Southport Guide / Churchtown Media. For educational use and citation, please link to Southport Guide.