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In 1982 a Daily Mirror reporter wrote:

They should build a fence around [Liverpool] and charge admission. For sadly, it has become a ‘showcase’ of everything that has gone wrong in Britain’s major cities.¹

Liverpool seems to be the only city in Britain – apart from London – about which other Britons have definite opinions. It is seen as a city of problems where the people themselves are allegedly part of the problem. In 2004 the Spectator ran an editorial claiming that many Liverpudlians had a ‘deeply unattractive psyche’ and that, amongst other misdemeanours, this led them to deny responsibility for ‘drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground’ at Hillsborough in 1998.² This version of events had been discredited fourteen years earlier by Lord Taylor’s report, but, in his eagerness to condemn Liverpool and its inhabitants, Boris Johnson, the Spectator’s then editor, preferred populist prejudice to hard evidence. By contrast, this book, through a rather more thorough exploration of Liverpool’s modern history, seeks to explain why the city has become the object of so much interest in Britain and elsewhere in recent decades.

In the clamour of argument about cities, city life and city people that has continued unabated since the eighteenth century, Liverpool’s prominence is recent. In the nineteenth century Manchester and Salford were believed to exemplify the worst horrors of industrialisation, while the London working classes were regarded as the most turbulent and threatening. For much of the twentieth century Glasgow was seen as a nightmare of overcrowding, urban dereliction and violent crime. Each of the cities just mentioned represented the anxieties characteristic of a particular period. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries it was Liverpool’s turn to be presented as containing a distilled essence of ‘the British problem’. And it was Liverpool’s misfortune to acquire this symbolic status at a time when television technology reached maturity and when the popular press had become ever more stridently propagandist.

Liverpool has had the high statistics of unemployment, the numerical and visible evidence of an impoverished city treasury, a sufficiently large number of deserted factories sporting sun-faded ‘For Sale’ boards, the slogans of disaffection and demoralisation spray-painted onto boarded-up shop-fronts in suburban council estates. But in themselves these are not sufficient reasons for focusing on Liverpool. There are other large towns with more people out of work, towns with worse housing conditions, other towns with higher strike rates and many cities far worse for street and violent crime. The attraction of Liverpool for the news media is not that the city has more of the ‘bad’ things than anywhere else, it is the amalgam of problems and the general familiarity with the place and its people through the products of popular culture – music, football, soap-operas, comedians.

Liverpool has also provided a series of incidents, events and personalities that have seemed appropriate to the time and the moment. The car industry arrived in the 1960s, when the industrial relations of car-making were everywhere undergoing upheaval. Simultaneously, the docks – more important to the life of the city than any other industry – were being transformed by the container revolution, which generated labour unrest wherever it was introduced. Cars and docks were enough, when combined in one city, to give Liverpool a reputation for trade union militancy that it had never had before and has scarcely deserved since then.

While locally-led labour disputes gave working people some public prominence through extensive media coverage, everyday working-class life in the home and at work found its way into films, onto the stage and, most critically, became a popular location for television drama. Liverpool in the 1960s was home for a new generation of working-class playwrights whose scripts were acceptable in Sir Hugh Greene’s BBC and Sidney Bernstein’s Granada Television. For 21 years, from 1982 to 2003, there was the politically alert Channel 4 soap-opera, Brookside, set in Liverpool, filmed in Liverpool and produced, written and acted by self-taught Liverpudlians. In the decades following the early 1960s, it did seem as if the archaic, class-encrusted attitudes and institutions of Britain’s dominant classes were at last being deposed, and Liverpool’s irreverent and self-confident people seemed especially expressive of these new, subversively egalitarian sentiments.

One of the most striking characteristics of Liverpool people is their democratic attitude. This expresses itself not in such an ordinary way as exceptionally high turn-outs at elections, but in the way the people think, feel and act. This inclination is apparent in the way Liverpudlians talk confidently and unselfconsciously on equal terms with others regardless of their status; it shows, too, in their cheerful readiness to mock and puncture pretension. Above all, it manifests itself in a cavalier attitude to money. This is a city with the habits of the returned seafarer ashore after a voyage. Visitors quickly sense the spendthrift generosity of Liverpool, for they cannot help but notice the astonishing number of London-style black taxis on the streets. Indeed, the cabs should really be referred to as Liverpool-style, for in 2013 there was one for every 327 Liverpudlians and one for every 368 Londoners; Manchester – with a rather different outlook on life – had one cab for every 462 inhabitants.³ (A generation earlier, in 1987, the differences between the three cities were even more striking – London had one taxi for every 522 inhabitants, Liverpool one for every 360, but just one for every 997 Mancunians.) Such elementary statistics say something about Liverpool’s particularity.

This book is concerned with exploring the dimensions and explaining the genesis of Liverpool’s social character. There is, however, another aspect of this matter which, although not developed in the text, should be mentioned – this is the tangled question of the extent to which Britain can be understood as one nation. The development of effective national assemblies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales has already contributed to the unravelling of the idea of the UK as single cultural unit. Social historians have long suspected that underneath the idea of the nation there lies a fair amount of diversity that has by no means been swamped by the economic and political developments of the nineteenth century. It is impossible not to be impressed by the internal migration statistics showing that most changes of residence take place over very short distances – and then to discover from everyday encounters that very large numbers of people hardly seem to travel, living out their lives in remarkably restricted milieux. When Asa Briggs wrote his famous Victorian Cities in the 1960s, he argued that, although the great cities of the nineteenth century often had their own distinctive characters, this separateness did not last very long:

During the 1890s the pull of London tightened. Local newspapers began to lose ground to national newspapers. National advertising began to increase greatly in scope and scale. The same branded goods began to be offered in shops in all parts of the country. Neither the aesthete nor the expert was as much at home in the provinces as he was in the huge metropolis. Political and economic trends began to depend less on local social and market forces and more on national pressures from the centre. It was then, as the same kind of working-class houses were being built in the same kind of suburbs ... that cities began to be more alike.⁴

There is a lot to agree with in these remarks, and since they were written the further growth of both national and international companies has hastened the homogenising process. In Britain, perhaps more than anywhere else in Western Europe, towns and cities have the same shops selling the same goods at the same prices, and no other country is so densely served with national media. But does it follow that, simply because the British population buys the same sort of commodities, reads the same newspapers and watches the same television programmes, that it everywhere becomes the same or very similar in outlook and disposition? The view which at first seems so plausible is in fact flawed.

Even in terms of consumption there are some marked regional variations. But the real differences emerge in the area of economic production. Every major city tends to employ similar proportions of its population in retailing, in transport and communication, in financial services, in building and construction, but what distinguishes one from the other and gives each its own character is the branch or branches of industry in which it specialises or has specialised. Cities are a bit like nation states. Unable to produce for all their needs, they have to engage in external trade. Since the de-industrialisation that has hit many British cities since the 1980s, Manchester and Liverpool have both become regional cultural and retailing centres, but where Manchester has become the region’s principal financial and administrative centre, Liverpool, with its UNESCO World Heritage Site status, its famous waterfront skyline and, of course, its global musical fame, has become a major tourist city. The difference was much starker in 1901 when Liverpool imported the cotton which Manchester then spun and wove. Liverpool, by virtue of being a port, and Manchester, by virtue of being a cotton town, were very different places. The former required a large and casually employed population to sail the ships, repair them, load, discharge, store, shift and process their cargoes. When the ships were in, many might work; when the docks were slack, workers were laid off. Seasons, weather and tide affected Liverpool’s economy to an extent scarcely felt by Manchester’s more regularly employed factory workers. And then Liverpool also had a continuously transient population of seafarers to give it colour, variety and cosmopolitanism. It was being a port-city on a scale unseen anywhere else in Britain that made Liverpool such a particular place. In its ethos, if not in its employment statistics, that was almost as true in 1961, and even 1981, as it had been in 1901. The economic pattern laid down in the nineteenth century set the basis of the social character of many British cities, and of Liverpool in particular. Flows of migrants, induced largely by economic opportunity, followed in the twentieth century, but not noticeably in Liverpool.

City-dwellers know their cities in ways that they cannot possibly know their nation – the experience of the one is as immediate and direct as the experience of the other is indeterminate and indirect. Citizens’ loyalties, including those of immigrants, are first engaged by the particularities of their cities which help to shape and form their attitudes. ‘Britishness’ is what everyone has in common after they are Liverpudlians, Mancunians, Bristolians or whatever, and is probably more important to people who live in villages and small towns that are too limited in their functions to generate a particular social character and are, therefore, more dependent on an association with the emblems and symbols of Britishness. This is to stand conventional distinctions between small towns and cities on their head, for it suggests that it is city-dwellers who are the most locally oriented, the most ‘parochial’.

Local identifications permeate all sections of a city’s population – but not all of them equally. In Britain the middle classes are not ordinarily enthusiastic about their children acquiring the local accent, and this in itself is a sure indication that their horizons extend beyond their city or region. Middle-class people are more likely to move over longer distances and more frequently because they anticipate the possibility of progress and promotion in their careers. Working-class people, by contrast, have less expectation of progression in their jobs and more often expect to live out their lives in one place. This is confirmed by the facts of residential mobility.⁵ Differences in rates of mobility suggest that, whatever the social character which attaches to cities, the particularity of it is most likely to be the product of working-class life and working-class institutions.

Regardless of the extent to which different classes contribute to the social character of the modern city, and in spite of the undoubted levelling processes at work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, other economic and social forces have ensured the survival of powerful identifications with city and city-region. Liverpool, just like everywhere else, is far removed from the place it was. But what it was is buried deep in what it is.