Liverpool 800 - Culture, Character, and History

£14.95

Published to mark the 800th anniversary in 2007 of the founding of modern Liverpool by King John, “Liverpool 800” is the definitive biography of this magnificent world city.

Contributors explore the life of Liverpool over eight centuries, looking at the town’s early development, the eighteenth-century foundations of its mercantile economy, the golden period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the difficult inter-war years, the fifties boom and the subsequent disastrous and seemingly irreversible decline - seemingly, because the winning of European Capital of Culture status for 2008 reflects Liverpool’s contemporary renaissance, an aspect of current history which is also reflected upon by the contributors.

Ranging widely over politics and government, famous and infamous personalities, domestic lives and global connections, and culture both high and low, "Liverpool 800" offers a warts and all portrait of a city which has inspired contempt (‘a black spot on the Mersey’) and adulation (‘the centre of consciousness of the human universe’) but rarely indifference.

Elegantly designed and including over 300 illustrations, many of which have never been published before, “Liverpool 800” is a superb anniversary celebration of a great city and its people.