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To walk through Liverpool in the 1980s, writes Sam Wetherell in his bracing and provocative book about the city’s postwar history, “meant moving between radically different visions of Britain’s future”. Its docks, which had been closed in 1972, bore the traces of the city’s imperial pomp and held memories of postwar gains in job security for dockers — gains that were by then being erased. Its industrial estates surrounded by housing, built in the mid-20th century to suburbanise the working class and provide light manufacturing jobs, were already pockmarked with closed factories.
Liverpool was haunted by obsolescence: of its industries, of a good proportion of its inhabitants, of the city itself. Rather than find this obsolescence to be something inherent in the city’s geography, or merely a peculiarity, Wetherell sees a prophecy of the problems many of us will face in a future that may not be as distant as we hope.
The concept of obsolescence enables Wetherell to regard some of the postwar gains for the working class with a cold eye. Those advantages most obviously benefited white, male residents of the city — while docking work was passed down from father to son, women in the same industry lacked the same job security and were mostly relegated to menial or administrative tasks. Meanwhile, members of the city’s Chinese population, who had come to Liverpool as sailors, were deported after the second world war. Its Black population, scrutinised by eugenicists and discriminated against on the council’s housing list, were hemmed into a small corner of the city by unremitting police violence, leading to an explosive uprising.
It’s difficult not to see the Toxteth uprising (Wetherell uses that term rather than “riot”) in the first week of July 1981 as a pivotal point in Liverpool’s modern history. A motorcyclist, while being chased by police, crashed in front of a crowd who refused to hand him over for arrest. This tense moment triggered an escalation of violence and the use of semi-military tactics — deemed suitable for distant colonies and even Northern Ireland but not the metropole — by police forces on the streets of Britain for the first time. Those few days of violent confrontation had been decades in the making.
Wetherell doesn’t pull his punches when he assesses the long-standing racism within the city and a complacent assumption among the better off that obsolescence merely applies to others. A similar assumption would later be projected on to Liverpool by the nation’s political class and media. The arrival of Michael Heseltine, then secretary of state for the environment, in the days that followed the riot, was a sign that Liverpool had the Conservative government’s attention. A mixed blessing. By taking national business leaders on a coach tour around derelict areas of Liverpool, Heseltine signalled that the city was a problem to be solved by central government and private finance.
Wetherell is drawn to exploring the grassroots, sometimes radical movements that developed in the shadow of this entrepreneurial urbanism. The book memorably addresses the horrific events at Hillsborough and the families’ subsequent campaign for justice.
But the author is equally adept at documenting the smaller-scale movements: the “Battle of Hardwick Street” of 1956, when an inner-city street plagued by speeding cars (one of which had injured a two-year-old girl) was shut down by women who constructed barricades from dustbins; the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee, a group of Black leaders who organised during the Toxteth events and took statements documenting police brutality; the distinctive trade union culture of Merseyside’s car plants; and the city’s needle exchange programme, which significantly reduced the number of Aids cases among intravenous drug users.
To walk through Liverpool now is to find a city whose history has been reanimated and often sanitised to cater for the tourist market. The docks abandoned by trade have been colonised by culture, and development continues to move northward, losing the city its Unesco heritage status but gaining a new football stadium. The streets on which the Liverpool One shopping centre was built were handed over by the council to private interests. The city’s radical reputation persists — but it’s not difficult to discern who won.
Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain by Sam Wetherell Apollo £25, 448 pages
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