The Spanish and Portuguese boarding houses of Charlotte Place, opposite the Salthouse Dock, were the first home for dozens of sailors and migrants arriving in Liverpool during the 1870s. At this time, six of the eight remaining properties were occupied by Hispanic families and an ever-changing array of boarders.

Charlotte Place in 1864. Numbers 31-45 run North to South

Charlotte Place, which lay within the square formed by Salthouse Lane, Mersey Street and Wapping, was not a prestigious location. It was dismissed as early as 1868 by a newspaper correspondent as 'tumble down' and '[spoiling] the appearance of' Wapping (Letter from 'Improver', Liverpool Mercury, 26 Mar. 1868: 6). After being sealed off to through traffic by the City Council from 1870-71, the short, L-shaped street was already in serious decline by the time its Hispanic residents arrived.

By 1871, only eight viable properties remained (marked in red on the 1864 map, left). At the time of the 1871 census, just one of these was occupied by a Hispanic family: Joseph (or José) Fernández, a Spanish sailor, and his Liverpool-born wife Jane were living at no. 43, with their three small children, Jane's sister Catherine, and a servant. José died in 1880, but Jane and her (now five) children were still at no. 43 in 1881.

Charlotte Place's Hispanic Community

José and Jane's home was an early hub for Hispanic migrants; the first of numerous Spanish marriages with Charlotte Place connections took place in 1874, when they witnessed the marriage of their lodger José Gabriel Basterra to Alejandra Rodriguez (Gabriel and Alejandra would go on to run their own boarding houses in Cleveland Square and Great Howard Street).

After Gabriel and Alejandra, at least eleven other Spanish couples who married at local churches - mostly St Peters, but also St Francis Xavier - gave Charlotte Place as their home address, as did many of their witnesses. Many of them eventually settled in Liverpool, becoming important members of the city's Hispanic community. By the night of the 1881 census, six of the eight remaining properties on Charlotte Place were occupied by Spanish families. Most were Basques, from the province of Vizcaya, and many of them were from the tiny fishing village of Ea (see right).

On the whole, the residents of Charlotte Place did not find their way into the city's public eye. One exception was in September 1880, when Antonio Fernández - keeper of the boarding house at no.33 - was found guilty of 'illegally removing a quantity of gunpowder' from the Spanish steamer Cecilio in the Morpeth Dock. Fernández appears to have been a leader of the scheme - his three co-defendants, who claimed to have been engaged only to carry three unspecified bags, quoted him as telling a witness,

"Go and get a drink for yourself. This is all right. It is only a few revolvers we are taking on board ship. You know we poor sailors don’t get too much money now, and we do a bit of trading on the coast. It will be all right. Come on board and I’ll give you more.” (North Wales Chronicle, 18 Sep. 1880: 3).

The offence was aggravated by the fact that the gunpowder was carried aboard the Woodside steamer Claughton, where a number of passengers were smoking. Fernández, who confessed, was fined the not inconsiderable sum of £10 plus costs.

The site of Charlotte Place in 1891.

The Charlotte Place Scandal

The end of Charlotte Place came rapidly. In 1880, it was sold to developers, who in turn sold the lease to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, who wanted to build a goods station on the site. It is not certain how much the street's Hispanic community - who numbered more than thirty people on the night of the 1881 census - knew about the company's plans for their homes. Certainly the lengthy discussions in the local newspapers about the project never mentioned the street's residents; they were more concerned about the LYRC's seizure of public land and the conflict of interest embodied in Mr Alderman Pearson, who was both chairman of the LYRC and a member of the Finance Committee that agreed to hand over the land, effectively to himself.

The last records we've found of Charlotte Place's Hispanic residents are during the summer of 1882; the marriage in July of Manuel Gómez da Silva and Simona Cafranga, both of no. 31, and the presence in August of Agapito Navea (no. 35) as a witness at another Vizcayan marriage. By this time, Charlotte Place must have been an unpleasant place to live. Apart from the constant threat of demolition, the air would have been thick with paint fumes from the factory owned by Isaac Jackson, who twice that year was given the maximum fine for air pollution. By 1891, the entire street was gone, leaving just an empty space on the map (left).