Headfirst Editor's Pick
"Author and academic Sam Wetherell is at East Bristol Books to launch ‘Liverpool & the Unmaking of Britain’, an incisive dissection of the city’s post-war decline. Charting racism, rebellion and the threat of urban obsolescence, his panoptic portrait lays bare the fault lines running through both Liverpool and Britain’s post-industrial communities as a whole. Vital. "
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A event on Today. The event starts at 19:00.
*20& off the book on the night!*
Historian Sam Wetherell will discuss his new book, *Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain* in conversation with Amy Edwards from the University of Bristol. Both Atlantic port cities, Liverpool and Bristol share slave legacies, while following parallel but distinct tracks in twentieth-century Britain's post-industrial history.
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 major 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 fights on.
This is the epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they could 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 discrimination against the city's Black population – and of resistance, culminating in the Toxteth riots in 1981. It is the story of a city fighting against a descent into obsolescence.
Liverpool also becomes a prism through which recent British history is brought into a new focus. It is the fascinating history of a single, iconic city. But it is also a warning of what the future may hold for many more communities.
"It is not an overstatement to say that this book will change the way we think about the history of modern Britain."
- Emily Baughan, author of Saving the Children and 2024 BBC New Generation Thinker
"This book is a persuasive argument for Liverpool as a lens through which to understand British history. The trajectory of this extraordinary port city, as a major node in the ignominious networks of slave trade and colonial commerce, a palimpsest of immigrant communities including the oldest Irish, Black and Chinese populations in England, a site of working-class revolt, a testing ground for Thatcherite policies, and a troubling example of 'managed' obsolescence. Wetherell demands that we see Liverpool as a prophecy of what might befall us all in Britain."
- Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade
Sam Wetherell is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World. Sam specialises in urban history, black British history and histories of culture and art-making. His first book, ‘Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain’ (2020) tells the story of how twentieth century British politics was shaped by the everyday spaces where people live, work and shop. He has also published articles about the history of community arts, the development of urban policy in Britain and the United States and the history of how cities have responded to some of the environmental challenges of deindustrialisation.
Amy Edwards is a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on cultures of capitalism, finance, and enterprise in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
Historian Sam Wetherell will discuss his new book, *Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain* in conversation with Amy Edwards from the University of Bristol. Both Atlantic port cities, Liverpool and Bristol share slave legacies, while following parallel but distinct tracks in twentieth-century Britain's post-industrial history.
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 major 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 fights on.
This is the epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they could 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 discrimination against the city's Black population – and of resistance, culminating in the Toxteth riots in 1981. It is the story of a city fighting against a descent into obsolescence.
Liverpool also becomes a prism through which recent British history is brought into a new focus. It is the fascinating history of a single, iconic city. But it is also a warning of what the future may hold for many more communities.
"It is not an overstatement to say that this book will change the way we think about the history of modern Britain."
- Emily Baughan, author of Saving the Children and 2024 BBC New Generation Thinker
"This book is a persuasive argument for Liverpool as a lens through which to understand British history. The trajectory of this extraordinary port city, as a major node in the ignominious networks of slave trade and colonial commerce, a palimpsest of immigrant communities including the oldest Irish, Black and Chinese populations in England, a site of working-class revolt, a testing ground for Thatcherite policies, and a troubling example of 'managed' obsolescence. Wetherell demands that we see Liverpool as a prophecy of what might befall us all in Britain."
- Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade
Sam Wetherell is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World. Sam specialises in urban history, black British history and histories of culture and art-making. His first book, ‘Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain’ (2020) tells the story of how twentieth century British politics was shaped by the everyday spaces where people live, work and shop. He has also published articles about the history of community arts, the development of urban policy in Britain and the United States and the history of how cities have responded to some of the environmental challenges of deindustrialisation.
Amy Edwards is a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on cultures of capitalism, finance, and enterprise in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
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