Ellesmere Port is on the south-eastern edge of the Wirral Peninsula, six miles (ten kilometres) north of Chester, on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal.

As well as a service sector economy, it has retained large industries including Stanlow oil refinery, a chemical works and the Vauxhall Motors car factory.

There are also a number of tourist attractions including the National Waterways Museum, the Blue Planet Aquarium and Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet.

The canal (now renamed) was designed and engineered by William Jessop and Thomas Telford as part of a project to connect the rivers Severn, Mersey and Dee.

There had been a loss of competitive advantage caused by steam engine-related economic advances (nationally, regionally and locally) during the first decade of the canal's construction.

Station Road, which connected the docks with the village of Whitby, also gradually developed and as more shops were needed, some of the houses became retail premises.

The main employer at this time was Burnell's Iron Works which had been set up at the end of the nineteenth century.

By the mid-20th century, thanks to the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894 and the Stanlow Oil Refinery in the 1920s, Ellesmere Port had expanded so that it now incorporated the villages of Great and Little Sutton, Hooton, Whitby, Overpool and Rivacre as suburbs.

The town centre itself had moved from the Station Road/Dock Street area, to an area that had once been home to a stud farm (indeed, the former Ellesmere Port and Neston Borough Council officially referred to the town centre as Stud Farm for housing allocation purposes) around the crossroads of Sutton Way/Stanney Lane and Whitby Road.

Opened as a components supplier to the Luton plant, passenger car production began in 1964 with the Vauxhall Viva.

In August 2012, Marks & Spencer opened their largest store (apart from Marble Arch in London) on a site near the Coliseum shopping park.

[14] There is one main tier of local government covering Ellesmere Port, at unitary authority level, being Cheshire West and Chester Council.

[15] Cheshire West and Chester Council has its main offices in the town, at the Portal on Wellington Road.

Whitby village lay about 1 mile (1.6 km) inland from the port, close to where the modern town centre later developed.

[19] The urban district was enlarged in 1910 to absorb the parishes of Netherpool, Overpool, Great Stanney, and Stanlow.

The area had been considered for inclusion in the new county of Merseyside, but it was decided instead to leave it in Cheshire as part of the new borough of Ellesmere Port and Neston.

There is a bus station in the town centre with frequent services to Chester, Liverpool, Runcorn, Elton, Helsby, Frodsham, Birkenhead and Neston.

Ellesmere Port railway station is on the Wirral line of the Merseyrail network and has a train service to Chester via Hooton and also Liverpool via Birkenhead.

The club's main achievements were playing in the Northern Premier League (The 7th tier in the English Football Pyramid) and reaching the F.A.

In 2009 Eddie Izzard and his run around the UK for Sport Relief saw him pass through Little Sutton village centre and Hooton.

[36] Construction began in January 2014 for the new multimillion-pound Sports Village in Stanney Grange which initially was to incorporate an Olympic sized swimming venue (now smaller), tennis courts, football pitches and other sport halls, and will be the new home of Cheshire Phoenix, the local professional British Basketball League team from the start of the 2015/16 BBL Championship season.