Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain
Sam Wetherell
Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN: 9781801108867
27th February 2025
Britain’s last case of bubonic plague happened in 1926, in Liverpool. 20 years later a smallpox epidemic broke out in the city, killing 11. Malaria too was a persistent problem, with over 200 outbreaks per year well into the late 1940s.
This exotic microbial environment was a result of Liverpool’s docks, which each year brought people, commodities, and disease into the city. By the 1970s though, this had substantially changed. There were only three cases of malaria in 1973. The docks’ collapse broke the circulation of pathogens.
By 1981, Liverpool was less healthy than Britain as a whole. Rates of cancer, heart disease and pneumonia were all well above the national average. Depression and anxiety were common too, endemic within the ranks of the nearly over one in five who were permanently unemployed.
These snapshots of the health of the city tell a story, one which is the subject of Sam Wetherell’s recent book. In it, he lays out his thesis – that it is through Liverpool that one can best understand the two processes that have formed Britain today: decolonisation and deindustrialisation.
Attentive to the interlocking dynamics of race and class, the work globalises Lancashire, using its famous port as a prism to understand the crisis of “obsolescence” which shapes our conjuncture. Liverpool, it argues, is a prophecy.
Powerfully presenting the set-pieces of Liverpool’s post-war history – the Militant, the 1981 uprising, Hillsborough – the book stands as an object lesson in the enduring power of theoretically informed historical writing as a mode of political inquiry.
The book begins citing John McDonnell, a scouser, who recently argued that more critical studies of British cities could catalyse a revival in working-class politics and culture. If this is a project, then Wetherell’s study is destined to become a classic of the genre.