At first sight, when my husband and I went canvassing in the run-up to the 1963 local elections, Granby looked agreeable enough, like a newly retired gent with years of good service behind him but a period of useful life still to come. The streets were wide and handsome, in the Liverpool merchant tradition. Many were tree-lined, though, for lack of pruning, lights burned all day in some houses. Victorian residences lined the major thoroughfares which were cut across by streets of smaller houses, each a replica in miniature of its grander neighbours. It still looked what it had originally been intended to be when it was rushed up in 1868 and 1869: an essentially respectable neighbourhood for those whose aim in life was to lever themselves up out of the down-town slums. True, at the Lodge Lane end, there was an intrusion of later bye-law housing, close-packed into straight street after straight street, but even there a code of respectability was rigidly enforced. There were more churches to the half-mile of Princes Avenue than would accommodate the entire population had they chosen to attend. For the sake of respectability, no factories, workshops, or public houses were permitted.