What’s ‘local’ in a port city? Our 2nd Archives session

Although our project is mainly focused on local food, both the Friends of Sudley Estate and the Friends of Everton Park were interested in finding out more about the international shipping heritage of the areas they work in. This interest also linked well with one of the things we really liked about the Mr Seel’s Garden plaque – the way it shows that the local and international dimensions of food production are always interconnected.

Our focus in this session was the Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry (see here for an overview).

We’d already begun to look at these a little in our last session and were looking forward to having more time to look at them in more depth.

We focused on the Bills of Entry for 6 different years: 1820, 1837, 1865, 1889, 1914 and 1939. Some of our findings included:

• Surprisingly not much tea was imported into Liverpool in 1820, instead it was mostly coffee.
• We also saw the way food preservation technologies changed over time from dried, pickled and canned to chilled and frozen foods.
• This happened quite quickly, so while we didn’t see much evidence of chilling and freezing in 1865 there was much more in 1889 (though we did find fridge being imported in 1865).
• There was also a high volume of trade with Ireland – it was very much Liverpool’s larder.

You can scroll down to see more comprehensive list of what we found just below.

Thanks again to the Merseyside Maritime Museum for hosting us and to Alex Buchanan from the University of Liverpool and Sarah Starkey for running the workshop!

Listing for Lampert and Holt Ltd. The shipping line owned by George Holt who also owned Sudley House.