St Helens owes its name to a chapel of ease, some 12 miles east of Liverpool, and its development into a major town to its rich underlying coal seams and to its water-courses which, forming the Sankey Brook, flow into the Mersey. St Helens was thus linked to the Mersey and England's first industrial canal was built and urban growth was triggered. ... like other Lancashire volumes in the Phillimore series, it is of excellent quality ... Lancashire Local Historian