About
Formby Heritage Centre is a small community museum on the second floor of a building on Chapel Lane, opened in 2023 after a long campaign by local volunteers and run under the banner of Imagine Formby, a community interest company, in partnership with the Formby Civic Society. It occupies a space known as The Attic, which doubles as a venue for local arts and literary groups, and it is exactly the kind of modest, hard-won, volunteer-staffed centre that most English towns of this size have wanted for decades and comparatively few have managed to open.
What gives it a subject far bigger than its floor area is the coast a couple of miles to the west. In the laminated silts of the Formby foreshore, exposed and re-buried by the tides, lie prehistoric footprints: human tracks of men, women and children, and alongside them the prints of aurochs, red deer, roe deer, wild boar, wolf and wading birds. They date to the Neolithic and later prehistory, and they constitute one of the most significant concentrations of ancient human footprints known anywhere in the world. Documented in detail from the late 1980s onwards, largely through the sustained work of a local researcher, they record individual people walking a particular shoreline on particular days several thousand years ago.
The centre's other subjects are more domestic and no less distinctive. Formby asparagus was grown commercially on the sandhills and carried a considerable reputation. Shrimpers worked the shallows with horse-drawn carts. A lifeboat station was established here in 1776, generally reckoned the first in the country and often claimed as the first anywhere. The pinewoods behind the dunes remain one of England's last strongholds of the red squirrel.
All of that sits in a single room reached by stairs, interpreted by volunteers, and open for a few hours at weekends. It is best approached as the interpretive front door to the coast rather than as a substitute for walking it. For a town whose most famous residents are squirrels, Formby turns out to have an unusually deep past, and the centre is the only place that assembles it in one room. Go on a Saturday, then walk west until you reach the sea.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Opening is Saturday 11:00 to 14:00 — a narrow window, so plan around it rather than dropping in.
- Check Imagine Formby's social media before travelling; Sunday opening has happened but is not consistently advertised.
- The centre is up a staircase with no lift. If you cannot manage stairs, contact the organisers before making the journey.
- Treat this as the front door to the coast rather than the whole visit — the dunes, pinewoods and footprint beds are two miles west and are the real subject.
- Formby station is a four-minute walk away on the Merseyrail Northern line, so this is very easy to reach without a car.
- Do not expect to see the prehistoric footprints on demand. They are exposed and destroyed by tides, and whether any are visible on a given day is a matter of luck and tide state.
- Ask the volunteers about the coast — several know the shoreline and its history in detail and will tell you where to go.
- There are no toilets or café in the centre itself, but Chapel Lane immediately outside has plenty of both.
Highlights
The Prehistoric Footprints of Formby Point
This is the centre's most internationally significant subject and deserves to be its headline rather than an afterthought to the squirrels. In beds of laminated silt on the foreshore, periodically uncovered and destroyed by the tides, survive the footprints of prehistoric people and animals — men, women and children alongside aurochs, red deer, wild boar, wolf and wading birds.
Recorded systematically since the late 1980s, they represent one of the world's largest known concentrations of ancient human tracks, and they capture individuals moving along a particular shore on particular days several millennia ago.
Each new exposure has to be recorded quickly, because the next tide may remove it.
Formby Asparagus
The sandhills behind the coast turned out to be excellent ground for asparagus, and from the nineteenth century Formby grew it commercially on a scale that gave the town a genuine culinary reputation, with the crop sent to Liverpool and beyond. The centre documents the growers, the fields among the dunes, the seasonal labour and the eventual decline of the trade as land use changed.
It is a good example of an agricultural speciality shaped entirely by an unusual local soil, and small-scale cultivation has since been revived on parts of the coast.
The season is short and the local crop still has its adherents.
The Formby Shrimpers
Shrimping was worked from the Formby and Sefton shore for generations, with carts drawn out into the shallows by horses and nets pushed through the water at low tide. It was cold, physically punishing and poorly paid work, and the potted shrimps that resulted were a Lancashire delicacy sold well beyond the coast.
The centre's photographs of shrimpers, carts and horses on an empty beach are among the more striking images in the collection, and they document a way of making a living that has now entirely disappeared from this stretch of shore.
The horses were as skilled as the men, and knew the tide.
The 1776 Lifeboat Station
A boat for saving life from shipwreck was stationed at Formby in 1776 under the Liverpool Dock Trustees, and it is generally reckoned the earliest lifeboat station in Britain and frequently claimed as the first anywhere in the world. The approaches to the Mersey were treacherous, traffic was heavy and growing, and the losses were correspondingly severe.
The centre covers the station's establishment and its long service, and the site of the old boathouse can still be traced on the shore, which makes this a piece of local history that can be walked to.
Claims to absolute primacy are contested, but the 1776 date is not.
Collections
The centre interprets the history and natural history of Formby and the Sefton dune coast through photographs, documents, maps, objects and locally produced display material. Its principal subjects are the prehistoric human and animal footprints preserved in the foreshore silts at Formby Point, the commercial cultivation of asparagus on the sandhills, the shore shrimping trade, the lifeboat station established in 1776, the red squirrel population of the coastal pinewoods, and the transformation of a scattered coastal parish into a railway suburb of Liverpool.
The holdings are modest in scale and community-generated in origin, and the centre functions primarily as an interpretive introduction to a landscape that lies a short distance to the west, rather than as a large collection in its own right.
The Formby Coast
Displays on the prehistoric footprint beds, the shifting dune system, the shrimping trade and the 1776 lifeboat station, covering the shoreline that has shaped the settlement throughout its history.
Village, Fields and Woods
Formby's asparagus growing, farming, the planting of the coastal pinewoods and their red squirrels, and the village's transformation into a commuter town after the arrival of the railway.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.