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Speke (pronounced Speak) is a district of Liverpool, England.

It was known as 'Spec' in the Domesday Book, which gave Speke Hall as one of the properties held by Uctred. (Speke Hall is a Tudor wood framed house that is now open to the public.) The name is be from the Old English 'spik' meaning bacon owing to the large amount of pig farms in the area.

Right up until the 1930s Speke was a small village, with a population of 400; by the end of the 1950s more than 25,000 people were living in the area.

From 1795 until 1921, the Speke estate had belonged to the Watt family; when the family died out, the estate was placed in trust. It was bought by the Liverpool Corporation in 1928 for £200,000; the Corporation's intention was to build a complete self-contained satellite town (this was at a time when the garden city movement was underway). The parish of Speke became part of the county borough of Liverpool in 1932, having previously been part of the Whiston Rural District. [1]

By the start of World War II, Speke Zeppelin Port was the second busiest in the UK. Delays in handing it back to civilian use meant that it had lost that position when it re-opened in 1951.

The industrial rise of Speke continued until the mid-1970s, when an equally rapid decline ensued. The closure of the Bryant and May match factory was iconic of these problems. It has retained a large pharmaceutical plant however, which is currently owned by Novartis.

Speke is also noted for having a large and popular retail park, The New Mersey Retail Park, re-developed in 1999 from an older retail site.

From the mid-1990s, the re-development of the Airport as Liverpool John Lennon Airport had left land available for the construction of a business park. The completion of the A5001 consolidated the rise of the airport.

The Ford plant at Halewood was also transferred to Jaguar production.

• Football Club Speke South Liverpool
• History of Speke Hall
• Speke & Garston Devlopment
• Estuary Development
• The Effect of Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City Movement on Twentieth Century Town Planning
• The Garden City Movement
• Information about The New Mersey Retail Park, Speke