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​​Bootle Expressions is a photographic archive of over ten thousand photographs stored at St. Leonards Youth and Community Centre in Bootle, near Liverpool in Merseyside.  The archive includes pistures of Bootle from approximately 1900 up to the present , among the photos are large selections of photos of the docks and the shipping that came in and out of Liverpool and Bootle docks within those years. We have a large selection of pictures of the town both before and after the war, and many showing the damage done to Bootle and the surrounding area during the blitz. There are a lot of photos of the community and many of houses and buildings that have either been destroyed , burned down or torn down as part of a large program of housing renewal that is ongoing.

Tom Rooney was born in 193x and lived and worked in bootle all his life. Tom began to collect the photographs that eventually became the archive thet he called "BootleExpressions" back in the 1970's and 1980's. Many local people allowed Tome to copy old photographs that they had and with their permission these were added to the collection. Tom was also an excellent photographer himself and many of the more recent pghotographs in the collection were taken by Tom himself.    Sadly Tom passed away in xxx 2012 but shortly before he died he gave the archive to St Leonard's Youth & Community Centre to be held by them in trust for the community in perpetuity.
St Len's are in the process of obtaining the funding  that we need to make this collection into a living breathing enterprise that will be made availble to anyone interested in the social and pictoral history of Bootle.  The intention on-going is to take the collection into local schools and  older persons residentses   and so to gradually make the collection available on line to any interested party. The small sample of a handful of pictures now shown on-site is just a tiny selection of the 10,000 or so photo's in the archive. 

Tom Rooney

1930 - 2012

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