Liverpool And The Unmaking Of Britain by Sam Wetherell:

Regular readers will know I am a Liverpudlian.  And I will regularly consume any book on it and enjoy the bizarre process of reading about your own history.  This is a grand book with an overarching concept of how a city rose and fell, rose again and still might fall into the sea.  

The book runs from 1945 to 2008 and amongst the disasters such as Hillborough, there is Toxteth, the rise of Militant - a group who literally ran the city into the ground, whilst profiting others - and it’s time as Capital Of Culture, overlapping with The Credit Crunch.  

And yes, the more unpalatable aspects of the city’s past such as the slave trade, the mass deportations of Chinese sailors after the Second World War, the racism that leads to Toxteth… but also on civic kindness such as the long-standing LGBTQ community during the early years of AIDS (gay dismissed as a ‘bourgeois concept’ by Militant and the pioneering treatment of drug users.

It ends on a mirroring note, with roughly the same amount of people employed in tourism as the docks at its height.  Speke could have been Disneyland, literally.  And Liverpool Waters will be a city within a city at the end of this century, but may only last a generation before climate change erases both from history. 

This is not to say it is a depressing read, it is a comprehensive, energising book.  The best books on Liverpool (A Game Of Birds And Wolves, Wondrous Place, There She Goes) have a narrow focus and do it well.  This, is probably the first to take a panoramic view as broad as The Mersey and succeed.  It is published on February 27th by Head Of Zeus and I thank them for a preview copy.  #liverpoolandtheunmakingofbritain.