The first houses in the Croxteth estate were in fact built in the immediate post war period to house skilled workers from Slough and Rugby who had been brought in to the English Electric and Napier factories on the East Lancs Road), and families from the dockland inner-city areas who had lost their homes through bombing and slum demolition. The second tunnel came much later. The first families arrived in 1951 to live in an estate that was without roads, pavements, shops, pubs or buses. However, in the wake of World War II during the late 1940s and early 1950s, massive residential extensions at Croxteth, alongside similar and indistinguishable development of neighbouring Norris Green, resulted in what together, are now regarded as the largest municipal housing estate in Europe.