Princelet Street apart, Cruickshank’s choices include five singular houses built for rich clients, and two examples of working-class housing. He treads cautiously around the slave trade-based wealth with which the Heywood family built a theatrical house-cum-bank in Liverpool in 1798-1800, trying to reconcile his appreciation of the architecture with the atrocities behind it. He describes the streets of two-up, two-down “bye-law” houses built in Toxteth, Liverpool, from the 1860s to the 1890s and the pioneer council housing of the Boundary Estate of 1890-1900, about half a mile to the north of Princelet Street. He tells how the latter, beautifully planned and designed though it was, did nothing for the destitute dwellers of slums formerly on the site, evicted when houses were demolished to make way for the estate.
