Just under 100 years after the visit of Celia Fiennes in 1698, John Manners, Duke of Rutland, echoed her words in his enthusiastic description of Liverpool following a visit in October 1797. Liverpool was still a ‘little London’, but it was a lot less little than it had been in 1698. Just four years after the duke's visit, the population was counted for the first census and found to be 77, 653, over four times larger than in 1750, an astonishing rate of expansion. Such rapid growth could only be achieved by very considerable immigration, from all the north-western counties and from Scotland and North Wales, and also from Ireland, though this Irish immigration was not yet as vast or as desperate as it was to be in the nineteenth century.

Liverpool's association with the African slave trade was reflected in the appearance of a few black faces. Some of these were there of their own accord or that of their parents, the children of some of the wealthier slave sellers in West Africa being sent to Liverpool to learn the language and the customs of their main customers. Numbers were fairly small, perhaps 60 or 70 at any one time, but there was a larger community of black men serving aboard the ships which used the port, mariners recruited in both West Africa and the West Indies. Some of these sailors were free men, but most were probably slaves, such as the ‘stout negro young fellow, about twenty years old’ who was offered for sale in the local newspaper on 24 June 1757. ‘He has been employed for twelve months on board a ship and is a very serviceable hand.’

Visitors to Liverpool rarely mentioned the blacks in their midst, but there were plenty there, mostly young men or women or children employed as household servants, though a few had a trade, such as cooper or barber. Numbers are not known but there were certainly a few hundred black people in Liverpool by 1800, maybe a few thousand.