was a boy. In the 1920s the estate became a fruit farm and traded as Belle Vale Orchards Ltd. The Hall was demolished in 1929. John Irwin Sons & Co. Ltd had a jam factory on the site in the 1930s and 1940s. After 1960 the factory produced spam, initially as Blue Cap Foods and later as Newforge. The site of the factory is now occupied by Morrisons supermarket and petrol station which opened in 2003. Part of the estate grounds survived to become Belle Vale Park. The first church in the district was St Stephen's, Church of England, built between 1872 and 1874 in Belle Vale Road. It was initially used as a chapel of ease to Childwall church until Gateacre was made a parish in its own right in 1893 and St Stephen's became its parish church. It was designed by Liverpool architect Cornelius Sherlock who also designed Church Cottages next to the church. The cottages were built in 1880 by Sir Andrew Barclay Walker for his estate workers. The cottages remained part of the Walker estate until put up for auction in 1917. In the garden in front of the church there is a stone memorial cross inscribed with the names of those local men who died in the First World War and Second World War. The west window in the church was designed by Edward Burne-Jones for Morris & Co. and was a gift from Sir Andrew Barclay Walker in memory of his first wife who died in 1882. Over one-thousand prefabricated homes were erected on land around the hamlet, named Belle Vale Estate Gateacre on the plans, between 1945-1947, to provide affordable rented accommodation for people whose homes were destroyed in bombing raids on the city during World War II, making it one of the largest Prefab communities in the country. Its most famous former resident is Sir Terry Leahy, previously chief executive of Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket chain. Leahy is also President of the Belle Vale Prefab Project. From the mid-1960s the Prefab estate was cleared. It was replaced by new housing and a shopping centre by the mid-1970s. Our Lady's Roman Catholic church, initially built on the Prefab estate in 1949, relocated from across the road from the current location of Gateacre School playing field to Hedgefield Road in 1965. Hartsbourne, Lee Park and Naylorsfield, beyond the Prefabs, were mostly retained as