From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edge Hill is a district of Liverpool, in Merseyside, England.

The area was first developed in the late 18th/early 19th century. Only a few of the Georgian houses of the time still survive. The terraces of the Victorian era have also largely been demolished and though some modern housing has been built the area still has a depopulated appearance with many vacant lots and derelict pubs and shops.

Its most famous resident is perhaps Joseph Williamson (1769-1840) a tobacco magnate who was responsible for much of the building in the area during the early 1800s. He is most famously remembered as the 'Mole of Edge Hill' due to his fascination with employing hundreds of men to dig a network of tunnels beneath the Edge Hill area. Part of the tunnel network is now open to the public as a tourist attraction.

In the early Nineteenth Century, it was the site of three railway works. Both the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and the Grand Junction Railway initially set up workshops there, along with the London and Birmingham Railway However the latter soon moved to Wolverton in north Buckinghamshire. With little room to expand as business grew, the Grand Junction Railway moved its locomotive production to Crewe in 1843 followed by the Liverpool and Manchester when the two railways merged in 1845.

Edge Hill station was built in 1836. There was a "Moorish Arch" with a stationary engine hauling trains up and down from Crown Street Station until locomotive-hauled trains were able to cope with the gradient. The station retains its original buildings but is very quiet owing to the sheer lack of population or industry in the area.

Formerly all trains stopped at Edge Hill at the entrance to the tunnel to Lime Street, giving rise to "getting off at Edge Hill" as a euphemism for coitus interruptus.

Edge Hill was the site of huge railway marshaling yards until the 1960s, sorting trains to and from the docks via the Victoria Tunnel and Wapping Tunnel tunnels to Park Lane and Waterloo goods stations on the dockside.

The stables in Smithdown Lane once housed Roy Rogers' horse Trigger in his retirement.

• Williamson's tunnels