The John Tiernan memorial lecture: An Excursion to Liverpool in 1845. Speaker John Pinfold.

In 1845 an anonymous traveller left Bristol by train for Liverpool. Arriving in the town (Liverpool was not yet a city) he wrote by hand a journal describing his stay in the form of six circular walks and two local excursions. Remarkably, and by a series of largely unknown transactions, these memoirs ended up in the hands of John Pinfold who has edited the account and published the resulting text. The routes taken by our guide can still be followed by any visitor to the city. Many of the landmarks are still in existence. Many were lost, either to the unsympathetic vigour of the Victorians, to the Blitz or to the modernising zealotry of the 1970s.

Our speaker, John Pinfold: After thirty years working in academic libraries and archives in London and Oxford, John Pinfold is now an independent historian based in Shropshire. He has written extensively on the history of horse racing, including a history of Aintree racecourse (2015)  which has come to be regarded as the standard history of the course. A regular contributor to the Liverpool History Journal since 2016, with articles on topics ranging from the treatment of Hungarian and Polish refugees in Liverpool in 1851 to Egerton Smith’s early animal rights campaigns, he has also edited a new edition of the memoirs of slave trader Captain Hugh Crow (2007).