not to be impressed by the internal migration statistics showing that most changes of residence take place over very short distances – and then to discover from everyday encounters that very large numbers of people hardly seem to travel, living out their lives in remarkably restricted milieux. When Asa Briggs wrote his famous Victorian Cities in the 1960s, he argued that, although the great cities of the nineteenth century often had their own distinctive characters, this separateness did not last very long:
During the 1890s the pull of London tightened. Local newspapers began to lose ground to national newspapers. National advertising began to increase greatly in scope and scale. The same branded goods began to be offered in shops in all parts of the country. Neither the aesthete nor the expert was as much at home in the provinces as he was in the huge metropolis. Political and economic trends began to depend less on local social and market forces and more on national pressures from the centre. It was then, as the same kind of working-class houses were being built in the same kind of suburbs ... that cities began to be more alike.4
There is a lot to agree with in these remarks, and since they were written the further growth of both national and international companies has hastened the homogenising process. In Britain, perhaps more than anywhere else in Western Europe, towns and cities have the same shops selling the same goods at the same prices, and no other country is so densely served with national media. But does it follow that, simply because the British population buys the same sort of commodities, reads the same newspapers and watches the same television programmes, that it everywhere becomes the same or very similar in outlook and disposition? The view which at first seems so plausible is in fact flawed.
Even in terms of consumption there are some marked regional variations. But the real differences emerge in the area of economic production. Every major city tends to employ similar proportions of its population in retailing, in transport and communication, in financial services, in building and construction, but what distinguishes one from the other and gives each its own character is the branch or branches of industry in which it specialises or has specialised. Cities are a bit like nation states. Unable to produce for all their needs, they have to engage in external trade. Since the de-industrialisation that has hit many British cities since the 1980s, Manchester and Liverpool have both become regional cultural and retailing centres, but where Manchester has become the region’s principal financial and administrative centre, Liverpool, with its UNESCO World Heritage Site status, its famous waterfront skyline and, of course, its global musical fame, has become a major tourist city. The difference was much starker in 1901 when Liverpool imported the cotton which Manchester then spun and wove. Liverpool, by virtue of being a port, and Manchester, by virtue of being a cotton town, were very different places. The former required a large and casually employed population to sail the ships, repair them, load, discharge, store, shift and process their cargoes. When the ships were in, many might work; when the docks were slack, workers were laid off. Seasons, weather and tide affected Liverpool’s economy to an extent scarcely felt by Manchester’s more regularly employed factory workers. And then Liverpool also had a continuously transient population of seafarers to give it colour, variety and cosmopolitanism. It was being a port-city on a scale unseen anywhere else in Britain that made Liverpool such a particular place. In its ethos, if not in its employment statistics, that was almost as true in 1961, and even 1981, as it had been in 1901. The economic pattern laid down in the nineteenth century set the basis of the social character of many British cities, and of Liverpool in particular. Flows of migrants, induced largely by economic opportunity, followed in the twentieth century, but not noticeably in Liverpool.
City-dwellers know their cities in ways that they cannot possibly know their nation – the experience of the one is as immediate and direct as the experience of the other is indeterminate and indirect. Citizens’ loyalties, including those of immigrants, are first engaged by the particularities of their cities which help to shape and form their attitudes. ‘Britishness’ is what everyone has in common after they are Liverpudlians, Mancunians, Bristolians or whatever, and is probably more important to people who live in villages and small towns that are too limited in their functions to generate a particular social character and are, therefore, more dependent on an association with the emblems and symbols of Britishness. This is to stand conventional distinctions between small towns and cities on their head, for it suggests that it is city-dwellers who are the most locally oriented, the most ‘parochial’.
Local identifications permeate all sections of a city’s population – but not all of them equally. In Britain the middle classes are not ordinarily enthusiastic about their children acquiring the local accent, and this in itself is a sure indication that their horizons extend beyond their city or region. Middle-class people are more likely to move over longer distances and more frequently because they anticipate the possibility of progress and promotion in their careers. Working-class people, by contrast, have less expectation of progression in their jobs and more often expect to live out their lives in one place. This is confirmed by the facts of residential mobility.5 Differences in rates of mobility suggest that, whatever the social character which attaches to cities, the particularity of it is most likely to be the product of working-class life and working-class institutions.
Regardless of the extent to which different classes contribute to the social character of the modern city, and in spite of the undoubted levelling processes at work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, other economic and social forces have ensured the survival of powerful identifications with city and city-region. Liverpool, just like everywhere else, is far removed from the place it was. But what it was is buried deep in what it is.
1 CITY OF THE SEA
If New York is the Empire State Building and Paris the Eiffel Tower, Liverpool is the Royal Liver Building. Although attacked by some architectural critics for its vulgarity – ‘swagger though coarse’, says Pevsner – painters, poster artists and television producers needing an instantly recognisable image of Liverpool always have the building somewhere in frame.6
When the Liver Building was opened in 1910 its clock mechanisms were boastfully presented as being the largest of their kind. By way of underlining such a trivial fact, the Royal Liver directors ate dinner off one of the clockfaces before it was put in place. That flamboyant gesture was of a piece with the times and the assertiveness that was even then so characteristically Liverpool.
The city was at its peak in 1910. Victoria, only recently dead, had not long been translated from mere monarch to Empress. In Liverpool, especially, the promotion must have seemed right. Red-ensigned merchant ships carried half of the world’s entire water-borne international trade and the most potently famous ships of British mercantile power, the Cunard and White Star liners, were operated from grandiose head offices on the Liverpool waterfront. Liverpool was the western gateway to the world.7
So many and so large were the fleets of passenger and cargo liners crewed by Liverpudlians, swarmed over and serviced by tens of thousands of other citizens, that the scale and intensity of ocean-going and coastal traffic made Liverpool a city-port like none ever seen before. A local journalist and politician said in the 1920s that the Pierhead, where the Liver Building stands, was a ‘threshold to the ends of the earth’.8 A permanent reminder of the truth of that statement were the huge, verdigrised cormorants (reclassified locally as ‘Liver birds’) atop the Liver Building’s twin cupolas, their wings outstretched to the Atlantic winds.
Calling at Liverpool in 1770 during his tour of some of the northern counties, Arthur Young said little of the city except that its glory was ‘the docks for the shipping, which are much superior to any mercantile ones in Britain’.9 Remarks to that effect were common then and continued to be so in the century that followed. Liverpool’s people became accustomed to thinking of themselves as belonging to a city with a place in the world. Horizons were seldom lower than that. Never down to the region, and unthinkably not to the south-west corner of Lancashire.
The shipowners, merchants
