​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. 

​Sam Wetherell’s book is an 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. 

​During this presentation, the panel will reflect on the main themes of the book: racism, urbanism, and post-imperial port cities – with crucial comparisons between British and Dutch case studies.