A desire named Streetcar

Imagine you’re in Upton and you want to get down to Parkgate to watch the sunset over the marshes with a chippy or an ice cream. It’s about 7 miles. The bus journey – with two changes – takes you 1 hour and 50 minutes. Or maybe you live in Irby and fancy going across to the newly-thriving New Brighton village for a few drinks. A 20-minute drive takes over an hour by bus and train.

The Wirral is peppered with small villages that think of themselves as satellites of Liverpool, but if you don’t have a car or live along the coastal path, it probably takes you longer to get over the water than a commute from Manchester Victoria. If you live in Heswall or Neston, the nearest train station doesn’t go to Liverpool. It goes to North Wales. 

And so people tend to drive. Any shade of Range Rover, hot pink to gunmetal, will comfortably get you to Indigo Sun on a weeknight. But what if there was a more efficient, more economical, more egalitarian way for Birkenheaders to travel? Before electrified rail, before the motorised autobus, and before the car, this town had trams. 

In 1860, eccentric Boston businessman George Francis Train (really) founded his inaugural horse tramway company in Hamilton Square, launching the first street tram in Europe. Much later came Birkenhead Corporation Tramways, established in 1901 and closed in 1937.

Wirral Streetcar – announced in 2013 as part of Peel Group’s £4.5 billion Wirral Waters development – promised to recapture Birkenhead’s “pioneering past”  with a new low-cost, sustainable light rail service. The idea was to reopen and modernise the disused Birkenhead Dock Branch and Wirral Tramway, providing transport from Bidston Dock to Woodside Ferry Terminal and then linking it up seamlessly with the Merseyrail network. So where is it?