The city proper, which is a metropolitan borough of Merseyside, forms an irregular crescent along the north shore of the Mersey estuary a few miles from the Irish Sea.

The first significant date in the history of Liverpool is 1207, when King John of England granted a charter for a planned new town there. The town’s medieval growth was slow, but in the 18th century it expanded rapidly as a result of profitable trade with the Americas and the West Indies and became the second most important port in Britain.

A major element in the general trading pattern was the Liverpool Triangle—the exchange of manufactured goods from the Mersey hinterland for slaves in West Africa who were in turn traded for sugar, molasses, spices, and other plantation crops in the West Indies.

The first dock in Liverpool was built in 1715. By the end of the century, four other docks had been established along the Mersey, so that the port outranked even London in dock space.