Sam Wetherell, "Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books and Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Sam Weatherall about Liverpool and the unmaking of Britain. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.

This is a fantastic book and declaring interest, it's both something I'm really, really kind of interested in, sort of an area of study that I was really excited to see you'd written a book about. But also I think it's particularly intriguing because it's not just a kind of straightforward book.

this happened on this date history of Liverpool, the city. What it tries to do, I think, is something much bolder, much more ambitious and much more interesting. And I guess the place to start is why have you written this book about Liverpool? And I guess what's the kind of

approach you've taken to the book? Yeah, great question. So I think the place to begin is to point out that Liverpool has, for most historians of Britain as a whole, Liverpool's been relatively marginal to the narratives that they've constructed. Obviously, there are fantastic local historians of Liverpool and

But for the most part, historians have seen Liverpool as relatively exceptional to some of the main big stories that we see as dominating the major narratives we have of the formation of modern Britain. So Liverpool's economy was dominated by trade rather than industry, unlike most other large northern cities. Its politics was dominated by

by Irish nationalism and by Protestant reaction to that Irish nationalism until really late into the 20th century. It didn't have a local Labour government until the 1950s. And obviously its form of Labour politics under the militant regime in the 1980s was very different to the rest of the country. And then lastly, its society is extremely different as well. Its Black and Chinese communities are much older. It may have a much...

a very different historical formation to the Windrush story, which has reshaped the narratives of most other multicultural British cities. So for that reason, Liverpool's kind of always seen as an outlier to the rest of Britain. But actually, what

I argue in this book, and the reason why I've turned to Liverpool is I argue that Liverpool is exactly where we need to look to tell a history of Britain from our present moment. And, you know, we could talk a little bit more about what that means, perhaps, but what I mean is,

In short, our present moment is characterized by a bunch of depressing things, by stagnating standards of living, by the collapse of mainstream politics.

political parties and uh and kind of familiar kind of politics was dominated british life um by um uh by crumbling infrastructures of care and crumbling infrastructures of um uh of sort of transit and regeneration so i've tried to write a uh i've turned to liverpool um because i think it's

the place we need to look to understand our present moment, one which is characterised by declining standards of living, by quumbling infrastructures, particularly infrastructures of care, by impending environmental catastrophe, by climate change, but also perhaps more hopefully by new kinds of political formations emerging

particularly, for example, the revival of calls for black civil rights from London to St. Louis. So I think we are living in a profoundly different moment right now. And Liverpool is, for me, the way into understanding our present. There's a wonderful line from the US historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who says that there are times when new voices ring out from the historical darkness and demand to be heard.

And I think that our present moment requires actually a history of Liverpool and requires seeing Liverpool as central to the story of modern Britain. I guess the way you sort of approach that sense of Liverpool as a potential blueprint for a hopeful but also potentially quite bleak future.

uh future is with this overarching concept concept of obsolescence and it'd be good for you to i guess kind of introduce the idea maybe give a sense of kind of like um where it comes from how you thought of it and and how it kind of runs through that arguments about liverpool as a as a blueprint as a as a prophecy yeah absolutely so i think we're used to thinking of a term obsolescence in quite a narrow scientific way right we think about um

planned obsolescence, the idea that light bulbs were once designed to last for decades and now they only last for a few weeks or whatever. I take that term and I kind of expand its meaning to encompass both physical and environmental elements as well as human and social elements. I'll talk about both of these things. So

on the one hand, obsolescence refers to a built environment that was constructed at a particular historical moment to serve a particular function, which has outlived that political and economic moment and has outlived that function. So maybe just to flesh this out a little bit, we're used to, if we look at some of the sort of canonical literary writers who were writing around the enormous transformation and

development of cities in their first flush of growth, right? We look at, say, the way that Beau Zolaire wrote about Paris in the late 19th century as someone who was dazzled by the unbelievable and sort of dizzying rate of change that was pulsing through the city. Or we think about the way that Henry James wrote about New York at the turn of the 20th century as a city where you can never walk down the same street twice because it is being, in his words, kind of ventilated

by the chill wind of change and redevelopment. Or even the contemporary documentary filmmaker Cao Fei, who's produced these amazing films about places like Guangzhou, which are these enormous cities conjured from the earth in China. What we can see in Liverpool is kind of the opposite of this process. We have a built environment conjured from a previous era, but it's stubbornly persisting in spite of

the collapse of a project that it was summoned to before. So, you know, we think about the famous adage from Karl Marx, all that is solid melts into air. The idea of obsolescence kind of inverts that, right, in that really all that is solid remains while things like kind of hope, communities, jobs,

forms of economic life have melted into air. So that's one thing. It's kind of the obvious story of kind of dereliction, abandonment, the kind of environmental crisis that comes with having a post-industrial obsolete landscape. But the other, maybe more...

and maybe more troubling point I want to get at with obsolescence is that, you know, Britain's more broadly, and this was a crisis that affected Liverpool first, but I think it's coming for all of us, are a population that were conjured from the earth to be

to serve a particular kind of world that is no longer there. The reason why close to a million people at the peak of its population gathered at the mouth of the River Mersey was to service a series of trade networks and a set of technologies for loading and unloading ships which are no longer there. And so part of what I'm trying to do with Obsolescence is to rethink modern British history and

And Liverpool's story of this is quite old. Liverpool has been grappling with obsolescence since the interwar period. But rethink of modern British history as a series of ways in which this problem has been either managed or has exploded into political life, has produced new kinds of ways of being in the world and new kinds of political claims. Maybe we'll take a couple of examples to kind of flesh that out, that sense of

um, surplus or unwanted industries, populations, places. And some of this, I guess, um, comes in ways that are pretty appalling and terrifying as ways of kind of like thinking and, and acting upon, uh, surplus populations and places. But some of it, I think are examples of maybe like well-meaning interventions that, that try and kind of, uh, adapt, um,

industries, people, places that, as you say, are kind of no longer exactly relevant, whether for technological or broader economic changes. And the picture you paint of the kind of moment of 1945 and the kind of post-war moment when we're thinking about people or populations is, I think, quite a

challenge to how both the kind of popular understanding of British society thinks of itself as, you know, this kind of moment of a fairly homogenous society that, you know, kind of settles down having been victorious in the war and kind of, you know,

goes back to work and builds quote unquote a new Jerusalem when actually there are quite you know hair raising examples of Liverpool as being you know subject to some really incredible forms of racism state racism and at the same time you know this being a multicultural if we might use a modern term city that

is, you know, kind of, as you've said earlier, distinctive, different, but also gives some clues about modern Britain. So what's going on, I guess, in that kind of immediate post-war period with regard to questions of race, racism and queerism?

quote unquote, unwanted population? Yeah, absolutely. Well, so I think that these stories of, on the one hand, state violence against people of colour in a multiracial environment

imperial yet, you know, in the early stages of decolonisation, political formation and the story of the creation of Britain's welfare state must be told together. And Liverpool helps us do that. So just to go slightly even further back in the interwar period, obviously, this was a period of massive economic turmoil in Britain, you know,

the Great Depression, but also wider collapses in Britain's capital industries, declining trade networks, a sense that other economies were for the first time beginning to catch up with Britain. And this interwar economic turbulence was really damaging for Liverpool to the point where this question of obsolescence and superfluousness

was already on the agenda. So the famous, well not famous, the kind of slightly notorious eugenicist sociologist, Daniel Caradog-Jones, who worked at the University of Liverpool, which was very much a centre of kind of eugenics in the interwar period.

did this kind of huge survey of life in Merseyside and calculated that there were exactly 74,010 too many people living in Merseyside in 1930, I think it was 1936. And so we can see the immediate post-war years.

as a massive local and national state-directed attempt to deal with this surplus population in the city. But for Caradog Jones, it was a kind of troubling racialized underclass who

in need of a kind of redemption. So what happens immediately after the Second World War is a kind of bifurcated process. On the one hand, the elements of this surplus working class that were white and living in Liverpool were

temporarily rescued by a series of state interventions. So what did this look like? On the one hand, this looked like the construction of massive new satellite towns and industrial estates in a sort of ring around the city and around Merseyside and into the Lancashire hinterlands, more broadly places like Speak, which was designated in the 1930s but developed very heavily in the 1940s. Places like Kirby, this kind of

the closest thing in Britain to a kind of Soviet shock town, right? Um, between 1951 and 1961, Kirby was the fastest growing census district anywhere in Britain. Uh, a new town, uh, built just on to, to the kind of, um, uh, North East of the, the, of Liverpool, uh, places like Aintree, um,

and then eventually bigger new towns like, like Scalmersdale and Runcorn. And so what, what these did was effectively evacuate this unwanted population from the city and give people sort of subsidized light industrial jobs in industrial estates

where assembly line, electrical assembly line production was paramount, and particularly later on, the car industry became extremely important in places like Speke.

And this was a company with hundreds of thousands, well, tens of thousands, housing for hundreds of thousands of people that was predominantly council housing, but would anchor these new communities in place. And then for those that remained in Liverpool, particularly dock workers, the war and the aftermath of the war was the first time that serious forms of

state-backed job security was introduced for dock working. It's a complicated process, but basically put simply, dockers for the first time had guaranteed weekly wages. They weren't dependent on the incredible instability of trade. They weren't suddenly thrown into periods of unemployment.

However, for people of colour, particularly black and Chinese populations in the city, so Liverpool had one of the oldest and most established Chinatowns in Europe and had some of the oldest and longest established black communities in Europe as well, both of which have been formed

through the city's relationships with China and West Africa, kind of long standing 19th century trading relationships through which local labor, because it was cheaper, Chinese and West African labor were hired to man the ships, but, you know, in huge numbers went back and forth from Liverpool across the Pacific or across the Atlantic to service these trade routes. And

And this same period of dealing with one surplus population, which was white in one particular way, saw a massive clampdown on the lives and working conditions of people of colour. So most notoriously, the Chinese community, many of which had assembled during the war to do incredibly dangerous merchant seaman work,

Close to 2,000 were deported pretty much secretly, 1945, 1946. Many were brutally rounded up by the police. Many left behind families that never knew their fate, wives, children. They'd married local women. A similar yet slower process of gradual deportation continued.

came for the black community as well. And it's worth noting that if we go as far as 1962, both of these communities whose lives have been really shaped by Liverpool were then sealed off from being able to travel to Britain by the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act and by the complex of border controls which emerged in post-war Britain. So my point is that we can see the story of welfare as actually a

process in Liverpool, the management of surplus populations along the lines of race in a decolonizing world. And Liverpool helps us tell those two stories together. At Sierra, discover great deals on top brand workout gear, like high quality walking shoes, which might lead to another discovery. 40,000 steps, baby. Who's on top now, Karen? You've taken the office step challenge a step too far. Don't worry, though. Sierra also has yoga gear.

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That sense, I guess, of interventions that are designed to maybe support particular populations whilst others face some pretty brutal tactics from the state is one that I think runs through the book in a variety of different ways. And there are several examples where you come back to that idea, but one that we might pick up on and we kind of spool forward a bit

in time and into the middle part of the book is what happens when the docs are radically transformed by technological change. So the shift

from, I guess, a truly kind of manual form of labor to containerization, which is still manual labor, but involves far fewer numbers of workers and is a very different sort of technologically assisted way of dealing with dock work.

on the one hand, makes the docks, I suppose, more efficient. But on the other hand, we see real devastation in relation to the working population of the city, or should I say actually the working men population of the city. We're going to talk about women and gender a little bit later. So what did containerization do? And I guess

When it impacts, how did it impact in a way that the state was not all that interested in supporting this population that then became surplus? Yeah, absolutely. So this complex that I mentioned earlier of kind of light industrial estates and new towns was built with a recognition process.

Even from the 1920s and 30s, Liverpool's port was kind of in decline. It was losing a lot of its trade gradually each year to other ports, particularly London. But what no one saw was this very sudden radical shift in how

goods were moved around the world in a way that fundamentally transformed dock work on every continent, every inhabited continent on Earth. So, you know, effectively, this is a story that begins in the 1950s with this American...

sort of trucking magnate who decides that a cheaper way, realizes that a cheaper way of moving stuff up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States is to drive fully loaded trucks onto ferries and then have them go up and down. He then realizes that the truck beds can be taken off. He then realizes that actually suddenly what you can do is

create a single standardized shipping container that would then be seamlessly offloaded from trucks to trains, to ships. You know, that could be intermodal was the word at the time.

And so, you know, it's worth noting that before this time, dock work, and this was what the architecture and fabric of Liverpool's docks was made to serve. And this was why, you know, tens of thousands of people had come to be employed in this service. Dock work was this extremely tangible job. It required basically physically, manually unloading and reloading ships, you know, commodity by commodity.

Whereas what the steel shipping containers do is basically a single crane can lift a shipping container onto a waiting truck, which can then drive off and the shipping containers can be unloaded at their destination. It disrupts the very fabric and the very logic of dot work, both in terms of

its employment base, but also in terms of its physical architecture, suddenly tens of thousands of people, but also miles and miles of buildings, jetties, warehouses, suddenly become totally obsolete and useless. And in Liverpool, this happens to such a dramatic degree that, you know, the time between suddenly a bit of concern about this emerging in the mid to late 1960s

turns into effectively the port going bankrupt in 1970. And then in 1972, the Port Authority abandoning the seven miles of Victorian dock, which had spanned right through the heart of the city and moving all trade up to a tiny container terminal in Seaforth, a few miles to the north of Liverpool. So, you know, there was this shockingly quick collapse, which no one quite saw coming in the speed, scale and intensity of it.

And this was eventually accompanied in 1989 by the recasualization of dock work, dock work which had once become secure during World War II. By 1989, these kinds of, the system, the part nationalized system that had managed this was abolished by Margaret Thatcher. And dock workers were once again thrown into, you know, the small number of remaining dock workers thrown into precarity.

So I think the overall story here is we can see a form of work, and this is true of so much of Britain's post-war economy, a form of work that was once very land and labour intensive, it was very visible, but it was on display in the heart of the city.

becomes instead something invisible, something that is concentrated to a fine, narrow point, a very, very small, very, very peripheral container terminal sealed off behind palisade fencing many miles outside the centre of the city that is very, very productive. By 2002, Liverpool's docks were

importing by volume more than they had imported at any point in their history, but that employs very, very few people and leaves a kind of halo of dereliction all around it. And the port authority, Liverpool's port authority, reinvented itself as a kind of, you know, for a new kind of neoliberal world. It became a consulting company that consulted, you know, largely post-colonial experts

on how to build and manage their own container terminals. It became a global private security enterprise. It became a major landlord as it came to eventually, for lucrative sums of money, sell off vast amounts of the land it had acquired. So eventually it was kind of reinvented to be this kind of very lucrative business that was emancipated from the workers' capital

and the land that had made it necessary, leaving unemployment and dereliction in its wake. This moment, I think, is well represented in some ways in both the contemporary popular culture, but also kind of subsequent

representations, but that tends to be focused on what happened to the dock workers, predominantly men. One of the things that I think is most kind of interesting in the second half of the book is the way that you say, actually, there are important other stories. And I guess the moment of hopefulness or possible alternatives comes from those stories that

to an extent, have not been popularly told. Although, actually, when you talk in detail about race and city, we can draw, I guess, a kind of a pre-existing history there. But we'll start, I think, with the story of women's reactions and resistance to the impact of obsolescence, particularly that moment of real kind of collapse around the docks. What was going on in terms of, I guess, both the...

communities, but also I think, um, particularly the way women were grappling with things like the labor market at the same time too. Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, um, uh, de-industrialization is often told, particularly in places like Liverpool as a very male, uh, and very white story. Um, and I have tried to, um,

to try to tell it in a slightly different way. So one thing to note is that there were many women working on the docks. That work just looked

very different to what we would consider dot work, the manual loading and unloading of ships. Women worked in huge numbers as ships cleaners, basically cleaning the ships that arrived once they'd been loaded and unloaded. They worked in the huge infrastructure of canteens, which

evolved to feed dock workers. They worked as nurses. They worked as the attendants that manned passenger ships. And they worked in light industry in huge numbers as well. But this work was always...

basically, uh, oh, and, and of course typists, uh, secretaries and typists managing this huge new bureaucracy, but this, but the standardization of dot work and the securitization of dot work required. Um, but this work was always paid much, much worse than dot workers. It never had the same kinds of job security. Um, it was always, uh, it was often denigrated. The women who were shipped cleaners were often subject to kind of forms of bullying and sexual harassment from the dot workers. But, um, uh,

near where they worked. And so, you know, we can see, we should always see when we talk about the granting of job security in the docks,

this is something that was partial. It was also something that excluded particularly black and Chinese seamen that continued to work in the city in the post-war period as well. So actually only a small part of this intercontinental process of moving goods around the world with Liverpool at its heart, only a small, only a fragment of the people working in that system had their jobs and livelihoods preserved.

And then I think it's worth building this story out into places like Kirby. So by, and this takes us to the later parts of the story, but by the 1970s, Kirby, which had really only existed as a town for about 15, 20 years, was plunged into an unbelievable crisis by the recessions of the 1970s, which effectively led to massive closures.

of the industrial estates. So suddenly, you know, the shock absorbers that had been created to manage the decline of the city's port economy themselves, you know, completely fell apart by the late 1970s, early 1980s. And what this meant was that these were areas of high female unemployment. Many women were unemployed.

as was very common with kind of electrical hand assembly line production in post-war Britain. Many women were working on the industrial estates in Kirby. But what's really interesting in the 70s and 80s, or what I think is really cool, is the way that working class

women in these new kinds of suburbs formed really exciting and radical new kinds of political consciousness amidst this disaster. So one example would be the Wages for Housework movement, which was this originally emerged within sort of Italian autonomous Marxism. The idea...

basically the idea that women should be paid for the housework that they do in a way that should codify really formally domestic labour, the labour of parenting, cooking, cleaning, as work, as something that belongs specifically to the labour market. And there was always a recognition that this was kind of an impossible demand. But in making it, it opened up a really radical set of questions and possibilities. And one of the biggest centres for

activism around wages for housework in Britain was in Kirby, organised by this group called Big Flame. And this, what we saw was women kind of importing the language of the assembly line into

understanding the kind of oppression in the home. So they talk about their husbands as foremen. They talk about, you know, when bus services were delayed, they'd have to do more childcare. They talk about that as doing overtime, right? They talk about the, you know, the combination of paid work and then unpaid work at home as working a double shift

And this culminated in this extraordinary, largely women-led rent strike in 1974 in Kirby, which was a response to Ted Heath's increases in council house rates, basically, which was eventually a failure, but it was an amazing moment of political consciousness. And the women involved talk about how they really saw the world in an entirely new way after it took place. That...

political consciousness I think comes through when the book tells the story of race and racism particularly in the 1980s in the city and again you know the kind of moments of political uprisings in the early 1980s has been I guess kind of like documented and are

noted in popular culture and popular consciousness but actually I think some of the politics of the time where you try and kind of tease out

I mean, in some cases, some of the people cross over and, you know, there's similar kind of communities, but in some cases it's parallel with different kinds of political agency that go on with the black community. So what's happening there? Is it, I guess, the kind of the same story as with things like women and red strikes and same response to obsolescence or are there distinctive and different features? Yeah. I mean, I think the, the,

it's worth sort of beginning, I guess, with the point that Liverpool's black community, so by, from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, Liverpool's black community as shipping work dried up, moved for the most part, and this had been happening throughout the 20th century, but it accelerated during this period from the area around the docks into the area immediately to the south of the city that we now know as Toxteth or Liverpool 8, and

And this community faced unbelievable levels of racism and state violence. So I think the first thing to note is that this community were never beneficiaries of the

albeit short-lived process of job security and social mobility that carried so many former white workers, former dock workers who were white out into the suburbs, into the car assembly plants, into the light industrial plants.

For the most part, for various formal and informal reasons, people of colour were unable to get council housing in the city. So we're dependent on sort of rapacious private landlords in places like Toxteth. And we're then at the mercy of very high rates of unemployment, but also an incredibly hostile police force that, you know, that...

basically terrorized the community through stop and search practices, through quiet instances of police brutality, violence, unnecessary arrests, and so on. And this was sort of also underwritten by sort of more grassroots violence from the city's white community that would often make police

people of colour, through acts of violence, feel very unwelcome if they ever try to move, even briefly, you know, step outside of a neighbourhood or at least try and live outside of this neighbourhood. So this was a politics of resistance forged in this unbelievable furnace of oppression that was like

isolated from the major institutionalized channels of political resistance that we might see through maybe things like unions or the Labour Party, the kind of safety valves that would have organized politics for other kinds of people and in other kinds of ways. And

you know, this rich political ecology of resistance emerged within this community, but took multiple different forms from feminist groups, such as the Liverpool Black Sisters, that really fought through what it meant to face the double, even triple oppression of being black working class women, to groups like kind of basketball teams that, you

They kind of commandeered their equipment, so to speak, from private schools in the dead of night to practice and play and create distinct forms of culture through things like music, sport, etc. But obviously, this kind of process of

budding political resistance and consciousness coupled with intense isolation and brutality, you know, culminated in the uprising of 1981. Obviously, this was one of multiple events that happened across the country in 1980 and 1981, beginning with Bristol in 1980, Brixton in April 1981, and then Toxteth in July, which then set off a series of other events

Moss Side in Manchester immediately afterwards, Southall in London immediately after that, and then places like Handsworth in Birmingham, Chapel Hill in Leeds, and so on. But Liverpool's uprising was by far the largest.

and it's sort of been neglected a little bit in favour of Brixton, partly because Liverpool came second, but also because the Scarman report focused so heavily on Brixton. But Liverpool's uprising was bigger in terms of number of arrests, numbers of police cars destroyed, numbers of injuries, amount of property damage than the Brixton and the Bristol uprisings combined, right? It was

It was outside of Northern Ireland and outside of the counter, outside of the insurgencies in the colonial world, the biggest instance of civil unrest in mainland post-war British history, right? And it culminated in the only instance in which CS gas, tear gas has been used on mainland Britain, again, outside of Northern Ireland, outside of the imperial counter insurgencies, right?

in which basically this extraordinary theatrical act of state violence occurred in the dead of night on the 6th of July. But what I say, so there's many different ways of reading this, and often the script is

It takes two forms. The conservative script is this was mindless, chaotic violence. The most absurd end of this was an editorial in the Liverpool Daily Post that blamed John McEnroe's disobedience against the umpire during the Wimbledon final that year as a sign of a greater disobedience that was filtering randomly into the social body. Two

a more sort of nuanced, but still, I think, flawed kind of old left critique that this is about class rather than race.

This was very much a multiracial black uprising, even though there were white people involved. To quote the sociologist Stephen Reicher, you know, the overarching script was one of police violence against black people. And politically, everyone who was involved, for the most part, identified themselves as black, right? It was a politically black moment, which had this kind of expansive control. This is how Stuart Hall has read this moment as well.

And then I think the last thing I would say about it is, you know, a lot of people talk about the kind of incredible, you know, the sort of the spectacular regeneration of Liverpool in the later 20th century. They talk about Michael Heseltine as the sort of, you know, the good Tory, this kind of wonderful, you know,

noble figure that came in and called himself the minister of Merseyside. The reason, if we see that as a good thing, and I'm on the fence about whether that's a good thing, then, you know, the reason it happened is because of the uprising in Tocqueville, right? So we, you know, rather than seeing this as a sort of nihilistic thing,

act that, you know, that was, you know, that was counterproductive, that was a cry of pain, that was depoliticized and disorganized. And this was instead, arguably, you know, with all of its contradictions and problems, and, you know, it was necessitated by really extraordinary, awful, awful conditions, you know, it was a terrible moment in many ways.

But it was arguably the most productive, one of the most productive political acts of extra-parliamentary resistance ever.

in post-war British history. And Michael Heseltine's famous statement memo, It Took a Riot, which was published shortly after the uprising or circulated in government shortly after the uprising, which became the kind of intellectual basis for late 20th century Thatcherite urban planning. It was called It Took a Riot, unbeknownst to Heseltine,

or maybe unintentionally to Heseltine. This is a statement about radical black extra-parliamentary agency. So those are some of the things I'd say about black politics culminating in 1981. The other thing of the period that

I think the book does really well. It's to try and tell a story of things that I guess weren't really in the headlines, but have had potentially kind of quite long term influence and consequences. And this is brought to light when discussing public health, both in terms of the city's response to the AIDS crisis, but also in the kind of broader context.

context of public health and things like drug addiction and the intent to basically do public health rather than public punishment, which is, you know, how a lot of both states, but also popular responses to both of these issues manifested themselves. And

I'd be interested to know a bit actually about those kind of lower profile forms of kind of solidarity that again, you know, emerge in the city and offer this kind of clue, this kind of blueprint to a way of doing kinship solidarity and social change differently. Yeah, absolutely. So, so yeah,

The best way into this probably is to think about how healthcare became a site of, following the term of the historian Belinda Cooper, I describe it as a sort of deinstitutionalized

healthcare response, a healthcare response that took place outside of the formal channels of healthcare provision, which we are mostly familiar with. And so, you know, there are two or there are three major examples of this.

The first would be, again, coming from a black community and led by black women, an attempt to rescue kind of black people and also more recent migrants whose English was less good or might have special religious needs when faced with health care provision from the condescension and often misunderstandings of health care and the NHS.

We can see it actually also going further back through the incredible networks developed by women in the 1970s to support women who were coming over from Ireland to have an abortion in the city. There was a radical sort of abortion corridor support network set up by feminist activists in the city to help Irish women, you know, this is when abortion was illegal in Ireland, but legal in Britain, go through that process. We can see it in the ways that gay men are

organized forms of care for each other, uh, buddying systems, um, systems of, of, of just kind of love and mutual support, um, uh, to help men who are otherwise facing extremely lonely, uh, deaths in the city who are also, um, you know, really marginalized by the, by the healthcare systems in, you know, in Britain as a whole. Um, and then, um, so, so, so, so those are sort of three big sites of places where, um, uh,

What these things have in common is a kind of insistence on life's worth in the face of various different systems which are trying to make people disposable or are interested in...

you know, these are areas of kind of a politics shaped in the final analysis by a kind of obsolescence and a new kind of humanism that emerges in these situations. And, you know, I think we could also see it actually in the political response to the Hillsborough disaster led by the families of victims and survivors were

which was very much about insisting on life's worth in the face of those who would kind of deny people's experiences or deny the police's role in orchestrating that disaster. But maybe the most interesting of these kind of public health responses was a clandestine needle exchange, which was founded right at the early stages of the AIDS crisis in the city. So Liverpool had one of the biggest heroin crises in the city.

in the country, you know, very much a problem shaped by deindustrialization and by the collapse of secure male work, particularly among the white community of the city.

And this insurgent needle exchange founded by two public health officials, which was created in the heart of the city on Maryland Street, which basically was a sort of supermarket for exchanging used needles for new needles. It was all...

entirely anonymous. It was very secretive. It was designed to be totally independent from the police and the social services, from the healthcare system. It was an organization that reached out to both male and female sex workers who were extremely vulnerable and very, very reticent to seek other means of help within forms of social services or healthcare for the risk of encountering the police. And it was an organization which

which required basically doing deals with the police to not arrest them and shut them down. It required doing deals with the Liverpool Echo to not report and write newspaper articles about them. It was condemned by the Militant Council in 1985 when it opened, who saw, you know, basically had a very...

unproblematic belief that drug taking was a crime, that the police should enforce it, that drugs were counter-revolutionary things to sedate the working class. And so, yeah, so all of these things, I see public health as some of the areas of, you know, places where in unimaginable situations of crisis, we can see forms of hope.

I usually end these podcasts by saying something along the lines of, you know, we could have talked a lot more. There's so much more in the book, you know, that kind of thing. But we really could have talked a lot more and there is so much more in the book. And I'd sort of urge everyone to buy it, to read it, both in terms of the, I guess, kind of slightly more hidden moments in Liverpool's post-war history that we tried to touch on, but also to go back to where we started, that

kind of organizing arguments and as you just said the moments of hope that come from examples of solidarity in terms of kind of wrapping up though having done this book and I guess kind of carved out this sense of argument is that something you're going to pursue with future work or are you thinking about doing something quite distinctively different? That's a good question um

I put so much into this book. This book is really a sort of repository for all of the things that I've been thinking about over the last five years. And my first book, which is a sort of more traditional history of the kind of neoliberal British built environment, was really shaped by the politics of

as were so many of my peers. And by the time it came out in 2020, I sort of thought, you know, we're living in a different moment and I wanted to write a book that would, you know, reflect the moment we're living in, as I began this interview by saying. And so I'm continuing to play around with these questions of superfluousness, of homelessness, of environmental crises and trying to think about how

how histories of Britain look from, you know, not so much from writing about these things, although I think that's important, but more from the perspective of these things, perhaps. So in the longer term, that's sort of what I'm thinking. I have a different book

project at the moment which I'm playing around with in the very, very early stages, thinking about, which builds up on some of the themes of the last chapter of my book about the ways that under conditions of emergency, history and heritage became central to saving the political economy of Liverpool and thinking about what that does to how we think about history, how we think about time and

what it means to be writing history at this present moment. So I'm playing with some of those ideas, but all extremely ill-formed at the moment. ♪