The epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War: a story of decline and of those fighting against it
A HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR
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 major 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 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 when corporations discovered they could 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 in 1981. It is the story of a city fighting against a descent into obsolescence.
Liverpool also becomes a prism through which recent British history is brought into a new focus. It 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.
"Wetherell cleverly projects a diagnosis for Britain's post-industrial decline through the prism of Liverpool's hidden social histories." - Stephen McGann
"bracing and provocative... Wetherell doesn't pull his punches" - Financial Times
"It is not an overstatement to say that this book will change the way we think about the history of modern Britain." - Emily Baughan, author of Saving the Children and 2024 BBC New Generation Thinker
"Sparkling... should be read by anyone with and interested in the recent history of Britain, and where on earth we go from here" - The TLS
"Staggeringly good... the most thoughtful and creative history of modern Britain for a long, long time." - Bill Schwarz
"An account that sets out to demolish a slew of myths" - London Review of Books
"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 Merseyside’s 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
"[A] fascinating and quietly iconoclastic book" - History Today
"a pacy and compassionate ode to Merseyside" - Boston Review
"not only a fascinating dive into the history of Liverpool, a city whose rise and fall impacted the whole world, but also a prism through which we can try to understand our own complex times" - The New European
"Wetherell draws hope from Scousers’ resilience and solidarity in adversity, their support for each other, their belief in collectivism and their memorialisation of the dead. [This book] will be demanded in Liverpool’s public libraries and discussed in The Grapes and Ye Cracke." - The Literary Review
"Liverpool becomes an original and compelling lens through which Sam Wetherell reassesses our industrial, maritime and social history, and provides an arresting account of Britain’s decline and fall." - Will Hutton, author of This Time No Mistakes