World of Glass, Chalon Way East, St Helens - 01744 755150 sthelenstic@yahoo.co.uk

The St Helens Borough covers roughly 30 km² over an area of soft rolling hills used primarily for agricultural purposes, mainly arable. The highest point in the Metropolitan Borough of St Helens, and the whole of Merseyside is Billinge Hill, 4.5 miles (7.2 km) north from the town centre. The town is landlocked with a stream running through, Mill Brook/Windle Brook running through Eccleston and connecting with the (disused) St. Helens Branch/Section of the Sankey Canal in the town centre.

St Helens is around 160 feet (50 m) above sea level. From the top of Billinge Hill the cities of Manchester and Liverpool are visible on a clear day as well as the towns of Wigan, Bolton and Warrington.

Carr Mill Dam is Merseyside's largest body of inland water, offering picturesque lakeside trails and walks as well as national competitive powerboating and angling events.

The Burgies are two slag heaps on the site of the old Rushy Park coal mine. They were created by the dumping of toxic chemical waste from the manufacture of glass. The chapel was noted as "consisting only of a 'challis and a lytle bell".

The chapel was at the crux of the townships on the major thoroughfare for traffic between the River Mersey and northern Lancashire, and also between the port town of Liverpool, and the landlocked Manchester townships. Windle itself is recorded on some maps as "Windhull" in 1201 suggesting the land had been occupied for at least 300 hundred years prior. Predominantly arable land, the area was also noted for its large swathes of moss, heath and bog land and was covered elsewhere in parts of the greater Mersey Forest (though the larger "Community Forest" was not established until much later).

As late as the start of the 19th century, St Helens did not exist as a town in its own right. It was formed from the townships of Eccleston, Windle, Parr and Sutton, townships of the parish of Prescot which became civil parishes on their own in 1866. Census figures from 1801 suggest the population of the township area to be 12,500 which by 1860 had reached 50,000. Incorporation as a borough was granted on the 2nd February, 1868 when Queen Victoria granted St. Helens a municipal charter. Twenty years later St. Helens became a county borough.

Until the mid 1700s the local industry was almost entirely based on small scale home based initiatives such as linen weaving. The landscape was dotted with similarly small scale mining operations, notably for coal and it's the coal to which the town owes its initial growth and development and (subsequently) the symbiotic relationship shared with the coal dependent glass industry.

The town was built both physically and metaphorically on coal: the original motto on the borough coat of arms was "Ex Terra Lucem" (Latin for "out of the earth comes light") and local collieries employed up to 5,000 men as late as the 1970s, whilst during the boom years of the British coal industry (1913 being the peak year of production with 1 million employed in UK mining) the St.Helens division of the Lancashire and Cheshire Miners' Federation (the local miners' union) had the largest membership (10%) of that federation. Owing primarily to the abundance of winnable coal reserves, the quality of local sand, the near availability of Cheshire salt and the transport revolution—first the Sankey Canal and then the railways from 1830 onwards—a glass and chemical industry was established in St Helens. The Sankey Canal was opened in 1757 to transport coal from the pits in Haydock and Parr to the River Mersey. An extension to the canal (the St.Helens section) was made in 1775 linking the canal to St Helens. In the 1830s, the St Helens and Runcorn Gap Railway was built for the same purpose.

The town served as a hub for the growth of Liverpool providing raw materials chiefly due to its location. Initially Liverpool petitioned for the extension of the turnpike road (The "Toll Bar" area in St. Helens still retaining the significant reference), but subsequently resulted in the creation of an entirely new waterway. The original concept was to make the Sankey Brook navigable, but its eventual result was a full man made canal linking St. Helens to the River Mersey and the city of Liverpool. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was finished in 1830 passing through the southern edge of the town at Rainhill and St Helens Junction, and furthering its economic development as a centre of industry.

Its clock tower originally had a steeple but this was destroyed in a fire in 1913. In the centre of the modern town centre, adjacent to the town hall, is the Gamble Institute, built in 1896 and named after Sir David Gamble, who was the first mayor and who also gifted the land for the building. Today, the Gamble Institute building serves as the central library and also houses other municipal offices and archives. Other buildings of note are the Friends' Meeting House, the Beecham Clock Tower - which is now part of St Helens College - and St Mary's Lowe House Catholic Church. The town, and old county borough, included the suburbs of Clock Face, Sutton and part of Windle.

The glass industry is no longer the major employer it once was, however it still employs over a thousand people in the town. The large Pilkington Brothers works, founded in 1826, dominates the town's industrial quarter and still produces all the UK's output of flat glass.

Major investment is currently transforming the quarter into a retail and communications hub with former industrial land being reclaimed for use as hotels, shopping areas and housing. The many coal mines on the outlying districts of St Helens, including Clock Face, Ravenhead, Sutton Manor, Bold, Wood Pit (Haydock), Lyme Pit (Haydock), Old Boston (Haydock) and Lea Green, were closed between the 1950s and early 1990s. The last colliery in the modern metropolitan borough and in the St Helens area of the South Lancashire Coalfield, was Parkside, in Newton-le-Willows, which was closed in 1992.

The origin of the name St. Helens stretches back to a "chapel of ease", dating back to at least the 16th century (earliest reference 1552), dedicated to St. Elyn.