Liverpool

• 1. Introduction

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  Liverpool is a port city in Merseyside, England, built across a ridge of sandstone hills that rise to about 230 feet above sea level at Everton Hill. It sits 178 miles north-west of London, on the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary near the Irish Sea. In 1851 someone called it "the New York of Europe", and for stretches of the 19th century its wealth exceeded London's own. At least 40 per cent of the world's entire trade once passed through its docks. Yet by January 1982 its unemployment stood at 17 per cent, and the city had collapsed into what historians call its nadir. How does one town pull the wealth of a continent through its harbour, then watch its population effectively halve in seventy years? Why was a single English city once described as the most pro-Confederate place outside the Confederacy itself? And how did a place that fell to its lowest point become, by 2008, one of Britain's most visited cities? The name itself hints at humble beginnings. It comes from the Old English lifer, meaning thick or muddy water, and pol, meaning a pool or creek. It was first recorded around 1190 as Liuerpul, a reference to a tidal creek now filled in.

• 2. The Pool And The Castle

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  King John's letters patent of 1207 announced the foundation of the borough of Liverpool, then spelt Liuerpul. There is no evidence the place had been a centre of any trade before this. The borough was probably created because John wanted a convenient place to embark men and supplies for his Irish campaigns, in particular his Irish campaign of 1209. The original street plan is said to have been designed by King John, laid out in the shape of a double cross. The seven original streets were Bank Street, Castle Street, Chapel Street, Dale Street, Juggler Street, Moor Street and Whiteacre Street. Bank Street is now Water Street, Juggler Street is now High Street, and Whiteacre Street is now Old Hall Street. Liverpool Castle was built before 1235 and stood until it was demolished in the 1720s. For centuries the town stayed small. By the middle of the 16th century the population was still around 600, likely fallen from an earlier peak of about 1,000 because of slow trade and plague. A third of the townspeople died in the 1558 plague, and further outbreaks struck in 1609-1647 and 1650. Nearby Chester on the River Dee had been the region's principal port since Roman times. During the English Civil War, Prince Rupert led a royalist army against the town and described it as "a mere crow's nest which a parcel of boys could take". He stormed Liverpool Castle in 1644 with considerable slaughter. In 1647 Liverpool was made a free and independent port, no longer subject to Chester.

• 3. Cargo And Conscience

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  In 1699, the same year it was made a parish by Act of Parliament, Liverpool's first recorded slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, set sail for Africa. It sold a cargo of 220 slaves in Barbados. By the mid- to late 18th century the town had become the European port most heavily involved in the Atlantic slave trade. As the River Dee silted up, maritime trade shifted from Chester to Liverpool on the neighbouring Mersey. The first commercial wet dock in the world opened in Liverpool in 1715, the starting point of an 18th-century boom. Substantial profits from the slave trade and tobacco helped the town prosper and grow rapidly. Several prominent local men opposed it. William Rathbone, William Roscoe and Edward Rushton stood at the forefront of the local abolitionist movement. The port also imported cotton for the Lancashire textile mills and became a major departure point for English and Irish emigrants to North America. The Western world's first financial derivatives, cotton futures, were traded on the Liverpool Cotton Exchange in the late 1700s. The legislation of 1695 that reformed the Liverpool council was arguably of even more significance to the town's later development than its parish status.

• 4. The New York Of Europe

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  By 1830, Liverpool and Manchester became the first cities to have an inter-city rail link, through the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The wealth of Liverpool sometimes exceeded that of London, and its Custom House was the single largest contributor to the British Exchequer. Liverpool was the only British city ever to have its own Whitehall office. During the 1840s, Irish migrants began arriving by the hundreds of thousands as a result of the Great Famine. At the height of the famine, Liverpool's Irish-born population peaked at about 83,000 to 90,000, with forty-three thousand settled around the docks. By 1851 more than 20 per cent of the city's population was Irish. Cotton bound the city to the American South. Historian Sven Beckert called Liverpool during the American Civil War "the most pro-Confederate place in the world outside the Confederacy itself". Liverpool merchants helped bring cotton out of ports blockaded by the Union Navy, built ships of war for the Confederacy, and supplied the South with equipment and credit. The CSS Alabama was built at Birkenhead on the Mersey, and the CSS Shenandoah surrendered there, the final surrender at the end of the war. The city's reach extended to the far south of the planet. Liverpool played a major role in the early 19th-century Antarctic sealing industry, and Liverpool Beach in the South Shetland Islands is named after the city. Immigration reshaped its skyline. The Deutsche Kirche, the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas, the Gustav Adolf Church and the Princes Road Synagogue were all established in the 1800s to serve the German, Greek, Nordic and Jewish communities.

• 5. City Of Firsts

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  In 1864, Peter Ellis built the world's first iron-framed, curtain-walled office building, Oriel Chambers, a defining feature of skyscrapers around the world. The list of things that began here is long and strange. The first School for the Blind, the first Mechanics' Institute, the first council house and the first Juvenile Court were all founded in Liverpool. Charities including the RSPCA, the NSPCC and the Citizen's Advice Bureau all evolved from work in the city. The first British Nobel Prize was awarded in 1902 to Ronald Ross, a professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the first school of its kind in the world. The world's first integrated sewer system was built here by James Newlands, appointed in 1847 as the UK's first borough engineer. William Henry Duncan served as the first medical officer for health. Sport and play owe debts to the city too. Borough engineer John Alexander Brodie invented the football goal net in 1889. Between 1862 and 1867 Liverpool held an annual Grand Olympic Festival, devised by John Hulley and Charles Pierre Melly, the first games to be wholly amateur and international in outlook. The programme of the first modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896 was almost identical to that of the Liverpool Olympics. In 1865 Hulley co-founded the National Olympian Association in Liverpool, a forerunner of the British Olympic Association. Frank Hornby, a Liverpool inventor, produced three of the most popular toy lines of the 20th century. He made Meccano and Hornby Model Railways, both in 1901, and Dinky Toys in 1934. The British Interplanetary Society, founded in Liverpool in 1933 by Phillip Ellaby Cleator, is the world's oldest existing organisation devoted to spaceflight. The first Christmas grotto opened in Lewis's department store in Liverpool in 1879, a concept devised by retail entrepreneur David Lewis. Sir Alfred Lewis Jones, a shipowner, introduced bananas to the UK via Liverpool's docks in 1884. In 1897 the Lumiere brothers filmed Liverpool from the Liverpool Overhead Railway, capturing what is believed to be the world's first tracking shot.

• 6. Blitz And Decline

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  During the Second World War, both Hitler and Churchill recognised Liverpool's critical strategic importance. The Luftwaffe made 80 air raids on Merseyside, killing 2,500 people and damaging almost half the homes in the metropolitan area. The city suffered a blitz second only to London's. The pivotal Battle of the Atlantic was planned, fought and won from Liverpool. After the war, the city twinned with Cologne, Germany, in 1952, a city that had also suffered severe aerial bombing. The peace brought its own demolitions. The Shankland Plan of the 1960s, named after town planner Graeme Shankland, has been blamed for compromised town planning and vast road-building schemes that divided inner-city neighbourhoods. Historic portions that had survived German bombing were destroyed by urban renewal. Historian Raphael Samuel labelled Shankland "the butcher of Liverpool". Population drained away. At the 1931 census Liverpool reached an all-time high of 846,302 people, with the highest-recorded figure of 867,000 noted around 1937. Then central government policy systematically relocated tens of thousands to new towns such as Kirkby, Skelmersdale and Runcorn. Kirkby was the fastest growing town in Britain during the 1960s. From the mid-1970s the docks and traditional manufacturing declined as containerisation made the old docks largely obsolete. Dock workers were thrown out of work, and by the early 1980s unemployment in Liverpool was among the highest in the UK. The city became a hub of fierce left-wing opposition to the central government in London. Liverpool in the 1980s has been called Britain's shock city, once the acclaimed second city of the British Empire.

• 7. Scousers And Sound

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  Residents of Liverpool are formally known as Liverpudlians, but more often called Scousers, after scouse, a local stew made popular by sailors. The adjective Liverpudlian was first recorded in 1833. Earlier demonyms came and went, including Liverpolitan in the 19th century, and nicknames such as Dick Liver, Dicky Sam and whacker, which gradually fell out of use. Professor John Belchem argues that by the time Frank Shaw's My Liverpool was published in 1971, Scouser had firmly become the dominant term. The Scouse accent began diverging from the Lancastrian accent in the late 19th century. The city's musical record is unmatched. In the 1960s Liverpool was the centre of the Merseybeat sound, whose best-known band is the Beatles. Recording artists from the city have had more UK number one singles than anywhere else in the world. Lita Roza, a singer from Liverpool with Filipino ancestry, was the first woman to achieve a UK number one hit. Liverpool Airport was renamed after Beatle and Liverpudlian John Lennon in 2002, the first British airport named in honour of an individual. Its diversity runs deeper than music. Liverpool is home to the UK's oldest black community, dating back to at least the 1730s, with some Liverpudlians able to trace black ancestry back ten generations. It also holds the oldest Chinese community in Europe, whose Chinatown gateway is the largest such gateway outside China. The city had the earliest mosque in England, founded in 1887 by William Abdullah Quilliam, a lawyer who had converted to Islam and set up the Liverpool Muslim Institute in a terraced house on West Derby Road.

• 8. The Long Recovery

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  In 2008 the European Union selected Liverpool as the European Capital of Culture, reportedly generating over 800 million pounds for the local economy within a year. The recovery had begun earlier. The late 1980s saw a regenerated Albert Dock open as a catalyst for further regeneration, and by the mid-1990s the city enjoyed growth rates higher than the national average. In 2004 property developer Grosvenor started the Paradise Project, a 920 million pound development renamed Liverpool One, which opened in May 2008. The capital of culture celebrations brought La Princesse, a mechanical spider 20 metres high and weighing 37 tonnes, which roamed the streets and concluded by entering the Queensway Tunnel. Its eight legs represented honour, history, music, the Mersey, the ports, governance, sunshine and culture. The numbers turned upward again. After effectively halving between the 1930s and 2001, the population of the city proper rose to 486,100 at the 2021 census, a 4.2 per cent increase from 2011. Liverpool now holds the UK's second-highest number of art galleries, national museums, listed buildings, and parks, behind only London. It was the fifth most visited UK city by foreign tourists in 2022, and hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023. Major projects continue into the 2020s. Liverpool Waters, in the disused northern docklands, has been identified as one of the largest megaprojects in the UK's history. Everton's new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock was regarded as the largest single-site private sector development in the United Kingdom at the time of construction.