Southport is named after a hotel, not a port that never existed
In the 1790s an innkeeper nicknamed the Old Duke put up a bathing house and then a hotel among empty dunes on the Lancashire coast. He called it the South Port Hotel, though there was no port. Locals mocked it as the Duke's Folly, but the name stuck and a whole resort town grew around it.
William Sutton ran the Black Bull Inn at Churchtown and spotted that the new canals could bring visitors. In 1792 he opened his bathing house at South Hawes, a few miles from the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, just as fashionable people were abandoning inland spas for sea bathing, which doctors then recommended for aches and pains. When a widow from Wigan built a cottage nearby for lodgers in 1797, Sutton built his hotel and arranged transport from the canal. Trade boomed. The hotel stood until 1854, when it was pulled down to ease traffic at the end of Lord Street.
The canal gave the town a head start over rivals on the coast that had to wait for railways, and by 1820 it drew more than 20,000 visitors a year. It cultivated a more refined image than neighbouring Blackpool, with wide, tree-lined Lord Street and Victorian planning. Its pier, begun in 1859 and opened in 1860, is often called the first true pleasure pier and is the second longest seaside pier in the British Isles.
The area is far older than the resort. The Domesday Book records a settlement called Otergimele with 50 huts and some 200 people, and some local names are Viking. Much of the parish was nearly surrounded by water until 1692, when Thomas Fleetwood cut a channel to drain Martin Mere, leaving rich farmland behind.
The coast has seen drama. On 9 December 1886 lifeboats set out in a storm to reach the cargo ship Mexico, and 28 lifeboatmen were lost, the worst such disaster in UK history. In 1926 Henry Segrave set a land speed record of 152.33 mph on the sands. Today the dunes shelter natterjack toads and sand lizards, and Royal Birkdale has hosted the Open.
Source: Southport
