Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain

The epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War, from its promising rise to its disastrous decline.

Few cities in the world are as famous as Liverpool, the home of the modern world’s most celebrated rock group and of a legendary football team.

The city is equally notorious for its poverty, its ethnic and racial divides and, above all, its decline. For Liverpool was once a great port, growing rich on slavery, on trade with the Americas and the British Empire’s outposts in Africa and Asia. In the 1980s, it was described as ‘obsolete’, yet the city stubbornly refuses to die.

This is a brilliant, elegantly written history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they should shift goods in containers and dispense with human workers, of industries like car manufacturing mushrooming and disappearing, of huge new suburbs being built and neglected. It is a moving and horrifying narrative of casual racism – Chinese sailors deported en masse in the aftermath of the war, systematic discrimination against the city’s Black population – and of resistance, culminating in the Toxteth riots of 1981. The de-industrialisation of the city under Margaret Thatcher’s government, the various attempts to renew and gentrify the devastated waterfront, and the bizarre interlude of Militant control of the local council are all described unforgettably by Wetherell.

Liverpool becomes a prism through which recent British history is brought into a new focus. Sam Wetherell sharply criticises the obscenity of accepting human and urban ‘obsolescence’. In his words, his book is ‘also the history of the former shipbuilding economies of the north-east of England and the west of Scotland, the former coal-mining communities of South Wales, Yorkshire and the Midlands and the former car-making towns of Coventry and Luton. It is the story of Rotterdam, Marseille, Detroit, Baltimore and West Virginia’.

This is an epic history of a single, iconic city. It is also a warning of what the future may hold for many more communities.

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