Roads (continued):

Woolton Park: the private road 35 ft wide, was 'laid out' by the developers between c.1856 and 1858. At the Woolton Hill Road end the 1848 map showed a cart-track leading to garden or farm buildings of Gateacre Hall and the new road was sited just further up the hill. The first length to the earliest house, Woolton Tower, would have been needed first as an access road for building materials, especially large quantities of stone. The second house completed, c.1858, seems to have been Ashleigh, and for this a short extension would have served. But Riffel Lodge, The Riffel, Longworth and Highfield came in the next year - really all of them ? - and access from Church Road must have been required. And so the sinuous line of Woolton Park was completed.
Construction work involved stone boundary walls about 2 ft higher than the usual field boundaries, for privacy, and these were made of better worked larger stones and copings. Whether the engineering of the carriageway was also to a higher specification than usual for public works we cannot now see; the surface was of broken stone. The 1½ ft build-up against the now-blocked gateway below the Summer Hill Coach House may be from banking the curve introduced in the mid 1960s when the City Engineer brought the Private Road up to a standard acceptable for adoption.

Link to Woolton Mount: Access to Summer Hill and Mount Aventine was from a lesser private road, or shared driveway, part of which survives. There was a pedestrian link to the top of Woolton Mount, a development of 5 houses (3 detached and 2 semis) built - or at least inspired - by James Gore c.1840-46. The access to this from Acrefield Road is paved with sizeable blocks of Woolton stone, apparently original, and now unique in Liverpool.

2. Water

The Woolton Hill Reservoir at the highest point (in Reservoir Road) was built by the Liverpool Corporation Water Works in 1864-65 supplied from Dudlow Lane Pumping Station. So after about 1866 new houses, Baycliff and Holme Leigh etc., would be able to have a public piped water supply from their beginnings.
But the majority of houses in Woolton Park, being earlier, would have had to depend on their own individual draw-wells, and tanks which stored water collected from roofs. This system, depending on pumping by hand, must have limited the volume of water used and made baths and water-carried drainage a luxury if it was available at all in their first years. No doubt when piped water did become available they were soon connected.

continued . . .