Just a few hundred members remain of an organisation that once had an outpost fighting poverty in every corner of Liverpool.
After opening its first Liverpool branch in Toxteth in 1879, the Salvation Army's message of saving the poorest in society spread through the damp, overcrowded slums of Victorian Liverpool. Within two decades, the London-born church had 15 branches in the city, including a traditional hall like "a big rectangle with big wooden beams", which opened on Walton Road in 1881.
By its peak in the 1920s, roughly 5,000 members were attending mass in Salvation Army halls in Liverpool. Others made use of soup kitchens, rescue homes for women fleeing domestic violence, or advice session on cooking, childcare and budgeting. David Taylor, the church's North West Divisional Commander stationed at Strawberry Fields, told the ECHO: "It was dramatic, it really captured something in the culture of the day. It was just such a popular thing."
