The popular walking tour of Toxteth Park Cemetery with historical fiction author JP Maxwell returned to the Smithdown Litfest on Saturday 29th August 2026.
The tour explored the final resting places of a wide variety of people from the area. This included the graves of historical figures such as James Dunwoody Bulloch, the Confederate naval agent who coordinated secret shipbuilding operations from Liverpool during the American Civil War; and John Hulley, the early Olympic pioneer and co-founder of the National Olympian Association.
The attendees heard stories of local people from Victorian artists to MPs, visited war graves and pauper plots, and learned about Titanic connections and unsung lives etched in fading stone.
This tour blended storytelling, social history and urban archaeology. It invited attendees to consider the relationship between death and place — how burial sites shape memory, and how stories shift as we walk among the dead.
JP Maxwell is the author of “Water Street” and “The Americans of Abercromby Square”, both rich with the hidden histories of Victorian Liverpool. His work brings historical figures vividly to life, revealing the transatlantic ties of war, espionage, and resistance that shaped the city.