Britain in the early twenty-first century is not a pretty sight. Considering how wonderful the world could so easily be, the absence of optimism and realisable dreams is extraordinary. Instead, imaginations have been screwed down, caged, made pallid and become shrivelled by their imprisonment. Anxiety seems to hang in the air and be almost tangible. But if all of these characteristics of modern Britain can be found in Liverpool, this city is still a different place. The comments of newly arriving and well-travelled strangers are so utterly predictable. Noticing first, how un-English the city feels, they then talk of the energy, the self-confidence and the democratic habits of the natives.
And so it is impossible not to believe that, when there is a revival in the belief in the improvability of the world, Liverpool people will be marching with the band at the front.
INTRODUCTION
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