Liverpool:
A Story of Britain
Sam Wetherell
Apollo
Few cities in the world are as famous as Liverpool, the home of the modern world’s most celebrated rock group and the legendary football team.
The city is equally notorious for its poverty, its ethnic and racial divides and, above all, its decline. Liverpool was once a major port, growing rich on slavery and global trade. In the 1980s, it was described as ‘obsolete’. Yet the city fights on.
This is the epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing, of industries 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 in 1981. It is the story of a city fighting against a descent into obsolescence.
For Wetherell, Liverpool becomes a prism through which recent British history is brought into a new focus. This is the fascinating history of a single, iconic city. But it is also a warning of what the future may hold for many more communities.
- Humane, distressing, and yet curiously optimistic, Wetherell deftly uses Liverpool as the lens through which to rethink Britain’s post-industrial decline.
Wolfson History Prize judges
An exclusive extract, read by Sam.
- History’s only lesson is the future is less certain and more open to possibilities than we can imagine. Good historical writing can be a source of profound hope during times of darkness.
Sam Wetherell
About the author
Sam Wetherell is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World at the University of York, specialising in urban and economic history. He is also the author of Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain, and has published articles for academic and popular audiences about the history of community arts, the development of urban policy, contemporary politics, climate change, deindustrialisation and football.
