Clayton Square Was Liverpool’s Central Square Before Falling Into Disrepair
Cities are an odd thing to discuss when you think about it. Mention ‘London’ and you might well think about it as a city, when in reality it is countless small cities all stuck together.
Yes, there is such a thing as ‘central London’, but head to Ealing, Vauxhall or Tottenham and you’ll find somewhere almost the same size as Liverpool’s city centre.
When it comes to Liverpool itself, where would you say the ‘centre’ is? You probably wouldn’t say Clayton Square, yet there was a time when that was the focal point of the area before it fell to neglect.
A Location of Beautiful Buildings
Head into central Liverpool and look at the space between Boots and Tesco Metro and you’d be forgiven for wondering what is so special about it.
Nowadays, the answer is ‘not much’. In fact, Clayton Square is the name of a shopping centre in Liverpool, but there was a time when it was essentially the most important part of the city. There was once a city centre square there that boasted some genuinely impressive buildings, offering visitors a mix of late-Georgian and Victorian buildings that could’ve been something special.
Clayton Square, late 1960s and 2024
— Liverpool: Then and Now (@keithjones84.bsky.social) 24 December 2024 at 18:35
Instead, most of them were flattened in the 1980s in order to make way for modern shops and entirely nondescript buildings that lack any sort of personality. Rather than allowing the buildings to take the edge of the brutality of St John’s Market, the new-look buildings instead simply blended into it.
Gone was the fine-looking city centre square that was the focal point for much of what was happening in Liverpool in the post-docks era, replaced instead by a more modern area that lacked any sort of personality and would for decades.
Does a City Need a Square?
It isn’t outrageous to ask whether or not a city actually needs a square. What it is that a square offers, exactly, that means that Liverpudlians should mourn the loss of Clayton Square as somewhere to congregate and enjoy themselves?
In some ways, there is not much that a square can offer that makes a huge amount of difference when compared to the rest of the city; after all, Liverpool has the Albert Docks as somewhere that acts almost like a square would anyway. Yet many of the world’s best-known cities have a square.
@explorationatlas Leicester Square, London #london #leicestersquare #travel #europetravel #europecities ♬ Makeba – Jain
There are few people that wouldn’t know of Leicester Square in London, for example. Anyone who goes to New York knows that Times Square is a must-visit. Even Moscow boasts Red Square as a place for visitors to take themselves to when they are in the Russian capital.
There are numerous world-famous places in Liverpool that will offer tourists a place to head to and a reason to visit, but how nice would it have been to have protected the likes of Clayton Square rather than allow rampant capitalism to mean it has all but disappeared?
