The Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley is a metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England. It comprises the towns and districts of Kirkby, Prescot, Huyton, Whiston, Halewood, Cronton and Stockbridge Village; Kirkby, Huyton, and Prescot being the major commercial centres. It takes its name from the village of Knowsley, though its headquarters are in Huyton. It forms part of the wider Liverpool City Region.
The borough was formed on 1 April 1974 by the merger of Huyton-with-Roby Urban District, Kirkby Urban District and Prescot Urban District, along with most of Whiston Rural District and a small part of West Lancashire Rural District, all from the administrative county of Lancashire.
According to the 2011 census, 80.9% of people in Knowsley describe themselves as Christian, the highest proportion in any local authority in England and Wales.[1]
It is known for Knowsley Hall and Knowsley Safari Park.
Knowsley was formerly a collection of villages, some dating back to 650 AD. The Earls of Derby have their ancestral home in the borough at Knowsley Hall, the surroundings of which today house the popular visitor attraction of Knowsley Safari Park.
Knowsley experienced rapid population expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, resulting from the combination of industrialisation and migration, including a significant amount of overspill development from Liverpool. By 1971, some 194,600 lived within the area which would become Knowsley. However, over the next two decades general economic decline – particularly in manufacturing – contributed to a significant fall in population to around 154,600 by 1994. Subsequently, a population stabilisation strategy helped to stem this decline. The strategy was focused on house building and marketing the borough to secure inward investment.[4] Record house building and strong growth in inward investment yielded the borough's first small rise in population in over 25 years in 1995. The population stabilised at over 154,000 for most of the rest of the nineties.