A Shopfront to the Past: The Mystery of Bold Street Time Slips

Bold Street in Liverpool is a normal shopping street, much like one would find all over the UK. It boasts a strip of independent shops, bars, quirky cafes and restaurants with a cool bohemian-style vibe, all leading up to the iconic “bombed-out church” of St. Luke’s. But this particular street is known for another reason – it’s the epicentre of the Liverpool time slips, strange experiences where witnesses insist they have briefly stepped out of their own era and into another.

For decades, shoppers, police officers and passers-by have reported an unnerving pattern – familiar shops replaced by long-closed stores, modern fashions swapped for clothes from another age, the present-day city dissolving into an older version of Liverpool – only for them to snap back to reality moments later, leaving them shaken and bemused. These reported time slips in Bold Street and elsewhere, most notably the Moberly-Jourdain Incident at Versailles in 1901 and the Kersey Time Slip in Suffolk in 1957, occupy a curious corner of the paranormal world where – for now – they defy a simple explanation.

Are you ready to take a stroll down Bold Street to see where (or when) you end up? This is the very strange story of the Bold Street time slips.

Time travel, at least in the true scientific sense, is not entirely the stuff of fantasy, but it’s nothing like the movies. You don’t need a flux capacitor, a De Lorean, or a madcap scientist. Indeed, according to Albert Einstein, time in fact passes at different rates depending on speed and gravity. Time dilation is therefore both real and measurable. With today’s spaceflight speeds for example, the effect is tiny (typically microseconds to milliseconds over long missions), but in principle, at close to lightspeed, it could amount to much larger ‘one-way’ travel into the future. Turning the clock backwards though, is another matter entirely.

Theoretical ideas such as wormholes and closed time loops have fascinated physicists and science-fiction writers for decades, though it’s theorised they’d demand energy and technology far beyond anything we can currently conceive. Claims of devices that can ‘view’ or ‘tune in’ to past events, like the alleged Chronovisor, a TV that was said to broadcast real historical events, sit on the outer fringes of belief. Then there are modern folklore figures such as John Titor and Valiant Thor, whose stories of journeys from future timelines are more likely elaborate hoaxes than genuine cases of time travel.

Against this backdrop, time slips occupy their own strange niche. Reports in which people insist that their surroundings have momentarily shifted to another era. Witnesses describe streets, fashions and buildings from a different period (sometimes decades or even centuries in the past), only for everything to suddenly snap back to normal, leaving a vivid memory and a bewildering question: did something glitch in their perception, or did reality rewrite itself for a few brief moments?

What has happened in Liverpool? Time portal? A tear in the very fabric of time itself? Or something more sinister…

The most well-known Bold Street time slip accounts are focused on four people. Frank, an off-duty policeman, a young man named Sean, and two shoppers called Jane and Imogen.

Why no full names, you may ask? Well, it turns out that tales of time slips on Bold Street – and indeed elsewhere across the UK – have been doing the rounds for decades, but almost all of them rest on second-hand retellings, later interviews or anonymised testimony, rather than on-the-record accounts from the actual people themselves. They’re as much folklore as fact, snapshots of an ongoing idea of a seemingly bizarre Liverpool time portal, which has taken shape, gathered detail and grown in the telling, regardless of whether it can ever be confirmed or dismissed.

The most commonly-told version of this story, and the most well-known of all the Bold Street time slip reports, goes that sometime in 1996, Frank, an off-duty policeman (retired in some versions) and his wife were shopping in Liverpool. They split up for a short while, with Frank going into a music shop and his wife (called Carol in most retellings) into a bookshop. As Frank was walking to meet his wife, he noticed what was described as a ‘dead spot of quietness.’ At almost exactly the same moment, a small 1950s-style box van almost hit him on what was (in the 1990s) a pedestrianised thoroughfare.

Looking around, Frank realised that the bookshop, Dillons, had apparently become a women’s clothing shop called Cripps, and Bold Street itself looked like it had jumped back several decades. Shoppers wore 1950s clothes, the cars were vintage, and the general atmosphere felt completely out of step with the mid‑1990s city he knew.

In the middle of this bizarre retro scene, one detail anchored him to the present. He saw a young woman in modern clothes carrying a Miss Selfridge bag, clearly dressed for the 1990s rather than the 1950s. Frank followed her into Cripps and, in an instant, the interior snapped back to Dillons’ familiar shelves, as if the shopfront had never changed. He apparently asked her ‘did you see that!’ or something similar, and she replied that she had thought a new clothes shop had opened where the bookshop used to be. The experience lasted mere moments, but Frank allegedly continued to talk about it for years, convinced he had experienced one of the Liverpool time slips.

Another widely repeated account (reportedly from 2006) involved a teenager known as Sean, whose experience of a time slip in Bold Street reportedly took him back many decades into the past.

Sean was reportedly running from a security guard after stealing items from a shop near Bold Street, and ducked into Brooks Alley, a nearby narrow passageway. As he turned into the alley, it’s said the environment seemed to change around him, and he found himself in what looked like an older version of the same area. Panicking, he ran back out towards the street, passing period‑appropriate shopfronts and signage that later seemed to match the late 1960s, at least according to retellings that claim the details lined up with old shop names.

Meanwhile, the guard insisted that when he turned into the same alley, Sean had vanished into thin air. When Sean was later interviewed, he repeatedly gave the same account, and the historically correct names of the shops and their locations added to the story’s eerie credibility. The time slip itself felt brief to Sean – seconds or minutes at most – but it changed what should have been a classic cops and robbers chase into one of Bold Street’s strangest legends.

Another time-slip tale concerns a young woman often named Imogen, who went shopping on or near Bold Street and stepped into a store that, on paper, should not have been there. Some reports have suggested that this Bold Street time slip story comes from May 2011. The story goes that she went into a branch of Mothercare on the corner of Lord Street and Whitechapel to buy presents for her sister’s new baby and was surprised at how cheap everything was. She took her basket to the counter and attempted to pay with her debit card, to which she was told that the shop didn’t take cards. Slightly miffed but not frightened in any way, she put the stuff back and left.

When she told her mother what had happened, she was baffled and insisted the shop Imogen described had closed years earlier and that a bank (by chance the branch where her mother’s account was held) was there now. In some sort of mild disbelief, Imogen took her mother back to check, and sure enough there was a bank on that corner. Did another of the most often-repeated Liverpool time portal stories take Imogen back to the 1980s for a few minutes or is this just an expansion of the classic urban legend?

A story said to be from 2006 is centered on Jane, a student who was meeting a friend around 3pm at Liverpool Central station. She was running a few minutes late so as she was walking up Bold Street, she called her friend to let her know. Mid‑conversation, roughly halfway up the street, the call suddenly dropped, and she became aware that something about her surroundings had shifted.

Jane assumed she had walked onto a period‑drama film set, because people nearby were dressed in Victorian clothing. She later described seeing horses and carriages, mud and straw on the street, and oil lamps. One version of the story reported that she spoke to shopkeepers and passersby who seemed unfazed by her appearance, other reports said she didn’t interact with anyone. She’s alleged to have said that the whole thing probably lasted about a minute, and then she found herself back on the same spot in Bold Street. She met her friend, but was in a confused state and felt dizzy.

Explanations for the time slips in Bold Street range from grounded psychological ideas to full‑blown sci‑fi.

An Urban Myth on Steroids

For many observers, the Bold Street time slips read far more like modern urban legend than documented mystery. There’s no original statements, no police records, no local reporting you can point to and say “this is where it began.” Instead, the same handful of stories come up again and again, usually with soft details (“an off-duty policeman,” “a student,” “a teenager”) that can’t be checked or confirmed. Over time, this repetition has created an urban legend on steroids, one that defies investigation but captures the (often online) imagination. As the whole thing snowballs, the retellings become the source of the stories themselves, endlessly embellished, and reinforced by the street’s notoriety and people’s love of a good yarn.

Psychology & Memory

People might glance at a shopfront or street scene, misread what they’re seeing, and their brain fills in the gaps later. If you already expect something ‘old-timey,’ your memory can quietly lean that way too. In addition, if you’re tired, stressed, daydreaming, or on autopilot, a place can briefly feel unreal or unfamiliar. Afterwards, your mind may edit the story, adding details you’ve heard before from local stories about the Bold Street time slips from newspapers, TV, or social media.

Paranormal Portals

In metaphysical circles, Bold Street is described as having little ‘thin spots’ where the past and present briefly overlap, leading people to believe that there’s a time portal in Liverpool. Supporters say that because different people have reported similar things, they think something real is going on – not just coincidence, exaggeration, or local legend. The idea is that there are too many similar stories to ignore.

Underground Railway & Energy Explanations

A popular theory attempting to explain the Liverpool time slips links them to the underground railway setup nearby, especially the idea of the city-centre underground loop on Merseyrail’s network, which runs beneath central Liverpool not far from Bold Street. Enthusiasts speculate that this configuration might create unusual energy fields or “vortices” that distort time.

The Multiverse

Another option within the spectrum of speculation, some have suggested that people have genuinely stepped into a near-identical world where Bold Street looks like another decade. There are even claims that this is “a glitch in the matrix,” “entities are guarding something,” or “someone’s manipulating reality.” These types of explanations generally show up mostly in online discussions and podcasts.

How are the Bold Street time slips explained? Does the past stay in the past, or do some places – like Bold Street itself – suggest that time is more fluid than it seems?