Although Liverpool was the second largest and wealthiest city in England in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, it has been largely neglected by historians. Liverpool is Glasgow, Belfast and Hull rolled into one and is closer in character to Dublin than to London. It has affinities with other port cities like Naples, Marseille, Hamburg and Salvador in Brazil. The publication of two new social histories suggests that this inattention may be about to change. 

When I first visited Liverpool as a child, it was full of women with big prams who talked to my father at bus stops as if their lives depended on it. I remember seeing gentlemen with money to burn and an eye for profit hurrying down Water Street to Martins Bank and sitting with sailors and dockers on the Overhead Railway. Liverpool was a hard-living, hard-drinking diaspora space teeming with life. In the early 1960s, the Beatles transformed it into the coolest place in England, and for a few years everyone wanted to be a Scouser. By the time I returned in 1979, Liverpool had been reduced from the gateway to the empire to an empty silo whose only function was to provide melodramatic spectacle for the rest of the nation. My brother’s work took him to Bootle to photograph public houses. He told me he would drive over from Leeds, park in an empty street and then wait until he felt it was safe to get out of his car and take a few rushed shots. He was convinced he was being watched by the scallies. In the wake of the 1981 Liverpool riots, Geoffrey Howe, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, wrote a secret memorandum for the prime minister in which he said that Liverpool’s social problems were unsolvable and that attempting to fund a recovery would be like ‘trying to make water flow uphill’. 

Ironically, the Victorian quarters that had escaped the attentions of postwar, brutalist-minded planners came to its rescue. From the 1980s, investment from Europe and China poured into the Albert Dock and the area around the Pier Head. Developers now hope to transform the wasteland of the northern docks into something