Prescot, Lancashire
Historical Description
Prescot, a town, a township, and a parish in Lancashire. The town, 2 miles NE of Hnyton, 8 E by N of Liverpool, and 196 from London, has a station on the L. & N.W.R. and a head post office. It is a seat of petty sessions, and publishes two weekly newspapers. A large watch factory was opened in 1890, turning out about 2000 watches per week, also a factory for the manufacture of electric light and telephone cables. The manufacture of watch-tools, files, hour and minute hands, &c., for the supply of all English watchmaking centres, is carried on. The town consists of the township of Prescot and parts of Eccleston and Whiston, and is governed by an urban district council of nine members. Acreage of township, 270; population, 5839; of the ecclesiastical parish, 6790. The church is in mixed architecture; comprises nave, aisles, chancel, and western tower and spire 156 feet high; and containsabeautiful monument to W. Atherton, Esq., and several other monuments. The Roman Catholic chapel is a fine stone edifice in the Gothic style. There are also Congregational, Free Gospel, and Wesleyan chapels. The grammar school is in two departments, lower and higher, and has £180 a year from endowment Markets are held on Saturdays; fortnightly fairs for cattle from Shrove-Tuesday till the first Tuesday of May; and a fair on the festival of Corpus Christi and lasting until the following Saturday. There are a parish room, public assembly rooms, county police station, a fire brigade, almshouses, and other charities. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Liverpool; net value, £570 with residence. Patron, King's College, Cambridge.
Administration
The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.
Ancient County | Lancashire | |
Ecclesiastical parish | Prescot St. Mary | |
Hundred | West Derby | |
Poor Law union | Prescot |
Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.
Church Records
Ancestry.co.uk, in association with Lancashire Archives, have images of the Parish Registers for Lancashire online.
Directories & Gazetteers
We have transcribed the entry for Prescot from the following:
- Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Prescot (St. Mary))
Land and Property
The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Lancashire is available to browse.
Maps
Online maps of Prescot are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Lancashire newspapers online: