Across the road from a derelict cinema on the corner of a busy junction, black gates lead to a tree-lined courtyard filled with bluebells, snowdrops and crocuses in spring.
The sandstone chapel and its "peaceful" graveyard look like they've been plucked from the countryside and plonked in the middle of Liverpool, but much of southern Lancashire was a forest 1,000 years ago. Even after King John ordered its clearing and invited people to settle around a sheltered inlet - or pool - on the Mersey in 1207, he kept this area just a few miles south of Liverpool as a 2,000 acre Royal park where he could hunt deer.
Within four centuries, it had fallen out of use and a group of 20 families settled in the woods around what's now Park Road, one of the busiest roads in the city. Back then it was isolated, a perfect place to escape the strict rules of the Church of England and practice religion in peace.
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Leslie Gabriel, 73, whose family has been involved with the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth for generations, told the ECHO: "There was nothing here really. There was the castle in Liverpool, and Speke Hall, and the chapel, and a couple of things which are no longer here. That was it."
By the early 1600s, the land was owned by Sir Richard Molyneux, a former Mayor of Liverpool and the first Earl of Sefton, who "wasn't particularly interested in what was happening here". As the families cleared trees and farmed the land, they needed a school to teach their kids, so they laid the foundations of what became the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth
They invited a 15-year-old, Richard Mather, to be their schoolmaster. When the sandstone chapel was built six years later in 1618, the "super intelligent and well-respected" man became the community's minister. Built without stained-glass windows or statues of Jesus, and with only a plain pulpit nestled among the wooden seats, its design reflects the Puritan values of its founders.
For years they risked jail by breaking rules of the Church of England, which dictated church attendance, the priest's dress code, and the book they could use for worship. Eventually Church inspectors caught Mather out and he fled across the Atlantic to New England, where his descendants founded Yale University and played key roles in Harvard College and the Salem witch trials.
This link brings visitors long distances to visit the church today. Leslie said: "We get lots of American visitors. We had one from Colorado just a few months ago, proudly showing his lineage, a direct 12-stepped descendant of Richard Mather."
Other significant members of the church were the Rathbone family, who produced two Lord Mayors of Liverpool, and the astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks, who was the first to observe the transit of Venus across the sun on November 24, 1639.
The area around the Ancient Chapel lost its rural character as Liverpool's port grew and the city encroached on the countryside. Now when you walk out its gates, you see rows of Victorian terraced houses and the derelict Gaumont cinema across the road. Lidl and Tesco Extra are a few hundred metres up the road, and there's no shortage of churches area around Princes Park and Sefton Park to the north and east.
Leslie, whose great grandad was a minister at the chapel, said: "The other churches started building whopping big cathedral-like churches on every street corner. I personally think, why is such a big church being built there when there's a great big church built two blocks away, and another one two blocks away? A lot of these are now in ruin.
"Even though this place was very plain, it had a lot of very wealthy and intelligent and philanthropic people coming here. There would have been other people who will have thought, 'Well that's a bit small and and tatty, we can do better than that'."
Despite the rounds of destruction and redevelopment of the land and buildings around it, the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth has survived with its informal services. But its congregation, unitarian for more than 200 years, is dwindling in size.
It has some congregants in their 50s, and one in their 30s, but for the most part they're 70 or older. One by one, they pass away. After the work he, his father and others have done to maintain the chapel, Leslie is sad to see it fading away.
But, he said: "You can't be too upset by it, because it's life and everything evolves. I mean, I'm happy with why the chapel is here, what it represents, what it's done and what is it has enabled people to do and to think, and how certain things have been progressed. I don't think that should be imposed on anybody."
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