Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain

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Few cities in the world are as famous as Liverpool, the home of the modern worlds 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 Empires 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 citys Black population and of resistance, culminating in the Toxteth riots of 1981. The de-industrialisation of the city under Margaret Thatchers 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.

Reviews

This book is a persuasive argument for Liverpool as a lens through which to understand British history. The trajectory of this extraordinary port city, as a major node in the ignominious networks of slave trade and colonial commerce, a palimpsest of immigrant communities including the oldest Irish, Black and Chinese populations in England, a site of working-class revolt, a testing ground for Thatcherite policies, and a troubling example of 'managed' obsolescence. Wetherell demands that we see Liverpool as a prophecy of what might befall us all in Britain. * Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade *
In his absorbing and richly detailed new book, Sam Wetherell tells a Liverpool story which highlights Merseysides unique qualities while at the same time showing how the recent past of one particular city might foretell the future of Britain as a whole. * Alan Allport, author of Britain at Bay *

Author Bio

Sam Wetherell is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World at the University of York, specialising in urban history, Black British history, and the histories of culture and art-making. He is the author of Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain, and has published articles about the history of community arts, the development of urban policy and the environmental challenges of de-industrialisation.