Bootle

Bootle is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton, Merseyside, England, and part of the Liverpool City Region, historically in Lancashire. Its closeness to the Irish Sea and to the industrial city of Liverpool made it grow rapidly in the 1800s, first as a dormitory town for wealthy merchants and then as a centre of commerce and industry after the railway arrived and the docks and shipping industries expanded, with Irish migration driving much of the population increase. Bootle Town Hall and other municipal buildings were built in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The town was heavily damaged by air raids in the Second World War, and the decline of Liverpool Docks led to unemployment and falling population by the 1980s, followed by large renewal projects. It had 51,394 residents in 2011.