He also played an important role in the emergence of the rock salt industry in Cheshire.
He effected the separation of Liverpool from the parish of Walton-on-the-Hill in 1699 and obtained from the Crown a grant to the Corporation of the site of the old castle, where he planned the town market.
He was the chief promoter of the construction of the world's first commercial wet Old dock 1708 and steered a bill through Parliament to authorise it.
[2][3] In 1723, having lost in speculation the fortune which he had inherited from his father, he retired from Parliament and was appointed collector of customs on the Rappahannock River in Virginia.
Many sources suggest that he went out to Virginia himself, and died in Jamaica in 1729, but Hayton et al.'s recently published volume in the authoritative History of Parliament series contradicts this, stating that he either never took up the post or exercised it through a deputy, and that he died in lodgings at Charing Cross on 28 December 1728.