Perched on elevated ground to the north of Liverpool city centre, Everton is a suburb of north Liverpool in Merseyside, England. It borders Vauxhall to the west, Kirkdale to the north and Anfield to the north-east, and falls within the Liverpool Walton constituency. Historically part of Lancashire, Everton recorded a population of 14,782 at the 2011 Census.
Origins and Name
The place name has two competing explanations. The most widely accepted derives it from the Saxon word eofor, meaning wild boar that lives in forests. The other interpretation was put forward in 1830 by local historian Robert Syers, who argued that earlier residents called Everton ‘Yerton’ – a possible corruption of the Domesday Book entry Hiretun, recorded in 1086, which translates as higher-town or over-town, reflecting the area’s elevated position. Syers’ contemporary James Stonehouse lent weight to this reading around thirty years later.
From Rural Parish to Merchant Quarter
Everton is one of the oldest settlements in the region, counted among the six unnamed berewicks of West Derby alongside Liverpool itself. A survey from 1327 recorded just nineteen heads of household, suggesting a total population of roughly 95 people. Growth remained slow for centuries – by 1692 only 135 people lived there, and by 1714 that figure had barely reached 140. Until the late 18th century Everton was a small rural parish of Walton-on-the-Hill, where residents were mainly agricultural landowners and cultivators of modest means. That changed as Liverpool’s commercial prosperity grew. Wealthier merchants began moving outward, and Everton’s population climbed sharply: 253 in 1769, 370 by 1790, and over 900 by 1811. By 1815, the character of the township had shifted markedly, with large numbers of its residents listed as merchants or gentlemen not engaged in trade. Writing in 1869, James Stonehouse described the Everton of fifty years earlier as ‘a courtly place’ whose wealthy inhabitants were known locally as the ‘Everton nobles’. Robert Syers, in his History of Everton published in 1830, credited this merchant class with transforming what had once been little more than a neglected common into a prosperous township.