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 great 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 stubbornly refuses to die.
This is a brilliant, elegantly written history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they should 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 di
