Lynne McCarrick worked here 50 years ago - when it was home to Littlewoods Pools. “I remember I was walking up this driveway being filmed. “There was a voiceover: ‘This is 17-year-old Lynne Robinson.’ Robinson was my maiden name and my job at the time was to make the training videos for the staff. “I appeared in quite a few of them because they said I was photogenic.”

Lynne McCarrick in the 1960s

Lynne remembers the men who ran the Littlewoods empire - John and Cecil Moores. “It was a factory floor, but the Moores family didn’t want you to think of it as a factory. “Everyone was happy. Women were paid fairly well. Men were paid more of course, but you felt looked after. “We looked forward to our annual trips to Blackpool. Trains were reserved for us, and it didn’t cost us anything. “In fact, if I remember rightly, they gave us a little extra.”

The football pools still exist - though not under the Littlewoods brand. About 300,000 people play regularly, but there was a time when well over 10 million customers a week took part in the world’s oldest football gaming business. For some, filling in the coupons became a weekly ritual.

It all began in 1923 in Manchester, when John Moores started selling coupons outside Old Trafford football ground. At the time, Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald declared it a sinister means of spreading gambling fever, warning of “a disease which spread downwards to the industrious poor from the idle rich”. But despite the warnings, “the pools” as they became known exploded in popularity.

Famous Littlewoods winners included West Yorkshire factory worker Viv Nicholson and her husband, Keith, who scooped £152,319 in 1961. She vowed to “spend, spend, spend” her winnings - the equivalent of more than £3m today. The entertainer Bruce Forsyth handed over the cheque. Before he stepped down as company boss in 1982, Sir John Moores oversaw the UK’s largest and most profitable privately owned firm - with its retailing, mail order and football pools divisions.

Lynne McCarrick is joined on this early spring day by another Lynn - Lynn Saunders. Also a Liverpool native, she has spent the past three decades trying to showcase her city to the world.

Lynn Saunders circa 1990