by JimN » 15 Sep 2018, 16:36
A BBC drama series from 2007 - "Lilies" - was set in Liverpool just after World War 1 (circa 1920-1922).
At that time, the area in which the central characters were living - Garston - was a completely separate municipality from the City Of Liverpool. It would have been a Lancashire urban district, like other areas nearby: Crosby, Litherland, Huyton, etc. Garston was, eventually, incorporated into the City of Liverpool: in 1926. Today, it is hard to imagine it ever having been anything but a (pretty far-flung) part of the city, but back then, both Garston and Wavertree were separate places with their own councils and town halls, and Speke (where the airport was later built, followed by a huge council estate) was a Lancashire rural district.
I am telling you this because... yes... you've guessed it... Garston residents in "Lilies" speak of living in "this city" and of their home in Liverpool. No Garston resident would have done that at that time. It's like living in Lambeth or Southwark and saying you live in Westminster.
Another gross error was the showing of a local corner pub in Garston. The pub was one of the Walker brewery chain, complete with the etched glass windows, etc. There were several hundred such Walker's pubs in Liverpool before the Sacking Of The City by its own council in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were very localised, predominantly in the Victorian parts of the city, within the Queens Drive ring road and essentially in the north end, the south end as far as Dingle (but no further south) and out into the eastern edges of the city towards Huyton. Other breweries operated in the southern post-Victorian suburbs of Aigburth, Cressington, Grassendale and Garston, mainly Greenall-Whitley, a Lancashire/Cheshire brewery with a minimal footprint in central Liverpool.
There were, then, no Walker's pubs in Garston. But I bet some production assistant thought they were being dead clever in locating the essential features of a Victorian Walker's pub for the studio shots. Right era; dead wrong company.