An "amazing" street where "everyone waves at you" has been left to "go to wrack and ruin".
Ducks and geese used to waddle with their chicks outside the "beautiful buildings" of Hartley's Village, a square of houses in the middle of an industrial estate in Aintree. Built by William Pickles Hartley for workers at his jam factory in 1886, the largest of the 49 houses went to the most senior employees, regardless of family size.
Now wooden planks and metal grates cover the Grade II listed factory's windows. Weeds grow through the red brickwork of the building, which has sat dark and silent since it closed in the mid-1960s. A recreation lake behind the houses is now fenced off, and the square amid the houses, once used for tennis and bowling, is now tarmacked. The houses are still inhabited, but people living here feel their community has been neglected, despite moments of hope in the past decade.
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Jean Cordwell has lived across the road from a row of houses with mock Tudor gables for 28 years. She loves the history of Hartley's Village, telling the ECHO: "I just think the cottages are lovely, especially those out there with the lovely fronts. They were the widows' cottages, apparently.
"They had one up and one down, that was it. Everything was done in the living room, kitchen stuff and everything. When they got taken over by Jacob's, who rented them off, they had a kitchen built on and a bathroom. And they have quite a long yard outside, so they can extend it if they want to. Most of them are privately owned now."
Marion Bastow, 62, has got to know "nearly everybody in the village now, nearly every single person apart from three or four houses" since she moved here in May 2020. Now the secretary of its residents' association, the army veteran who used to live in Nottingham thinks the area is "amazing".
She said: "It is a community, everyone waves at you. We met [resident's association chair] Alison and John, we made friends with them, we've dog sat their dog and they've dog sat my dog. We've made loads of friends from being out the back."
Her friend and fellow veteran Bernie Kehoe, who visits regularly, was struck by "how friendly everybody is even when you're a stranger around here, everybody speaks to me". She added: "There's a totally different community feel in Liverpool than anywhere else."
People make the community, and they're trying to save the physical environment. But speaking to residents, you get the sense they feel it's a losing battle. "Have you been down there? I wouldn't if I were you", Bernie said of the road around the corner from her friend Marion's house. She added: "It's full of potholes, the pavement's uneven, the road is horrendous."
Liverpool Council made Hartley's Village a conservation area in 2011 due to "its importance as an example of Victorian manufacturing philanthropy, comprising a purpose-built factory, model village for employees and land for recreation".
There are 36 such areas in Liverpool, covering 9% of the city area and protecting 19,000 properties. But because the roads of Hartley's Village are unadopted, the council doesn't maintain them at public expense, despite residents paying council tax.
Featured in the ECHO's Stop the Rot campaign, there was hope this area could be regenerated. Its landowner, Centaur Property Group, even spent £45,000 on building a heritage wall "in keeping with the village" since it was designated a conservation area, but residents have seen accelerated decline since.
Bernie said: "[The factory] would be such a brilliant building if there was just a bit of investment put into it. They're all derelict at the moment, which is a shame because you've got so many historic buildings in the city centre we spend a fortune on, but because this isn't in the city centre, they're not interested. It's not where the tourists go. It could be, if it was restored."
It's not just underinvestment and derelict buildings at the heart of the village's problems. People also pointed to schoolkids dropping litter on the street, delivery vans churning up potholes in the road, and punters at nearby venues blocking residents from parking outside their homes, as factors changing the character of these charming streets.
Judith Kiernan, 74, has lived in Hartley's Village for 43 years. She said: "When we first moved here, it was very, very quiet. There certainly wasn't this traffic going through because the bus company that's here now wasn't here. There's a lake at the back, and at one time we had geese and ducks that used to come up the street with their babies.
"It was lovely, we still had the trees, it was just quiet and nice, and the neighbours were lovely. Probably in the past 20 years, it's just got steadily worse. But really, I'd say in the past five to 10 years, it's gotten much worse."
Residents are trying to preserve the environment and breathe life into the community. The residents' association holds a monthly litter pick, it organised a coach trip to see the Blackpool Illuminations, and the paved-over green has been used for watching the Euros with tables, chairs and food under a gazebo in the rain.
Now the association has a bank account, it can apply for funding to help preserve the conservation area and "put it up to standard for the people who live here", according to Marion. But without investment, the task will be left to the people living here, who don't have the money to pull it out of what Judith describes as "a sad state of affairs".
Judith said: "It's really sad that whoever is letting it go to wrack and ruin, really sad. There's nothing we can do about it. We're trying, we've been trying for years, but we're just about keeping it respectable. It's not even respectable, to be honest."
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