National Museums Liverpool – serie

Liverpool was a burgeoning trading centre and rapidly growing town in the early 18th century, developing into a thriving mercantile metropolis by the 19th century. The demand for new housing was high, and court housing largely filled that need. Court housing was a form of high-density back-to-back housing around courtyards. It provided homes to nearly half of Liverpool’s working-class people by the mid 19th century. Contemporary descriptions highlight the cramped, dark and often damp conditions in these houses. This book uses a range of historical and archaeological evidence about courts to consider their development, life within them, and the measures eventually taken to rid Liverpool of them. This book considers courts and their impact on people’s lives in Liverpool for over 250 years.This book features international parallels to courts as well as some of the people involved in investigating this type of housing, providing historical context to this fascinating aspect of Liverpool’s past.

In 2001 the Guinness Book of Records declared Liverpool ‘City of Pop’, the City that has produced more hit records than anywhere else. But why is Liverpool so important musically and how has it sustained its importance from the Beatles to the Zutons via Echo and the Bunnymen, Cream, The La’s and others?The Beat Goes On is a critical historical account of popular music in Liverpool which explores the contextual, creative and geographical factors that have contributed to the city’s status as a major centre of creativity within Anglo-Amercian popular music. Rather than attempting to create a singular linear account of the history of popular music and its cultures within the city the book will take a thematic and case-study approach which will offer a new approach to the study of the subject. The book is therefore necessarily interdisciplinary with contributions from experts from the field of popular music history, cultural geography, ethnography and musicology, alongside essays and interviews with Liverpool musicians.

In 2001 the Guinness Book of Records declared Liverpool ‘City of Pop’, the City that has produced more hit records than anywhere else. But why is Liverpool so important musically and how has it sustained its importance from the Beatles to the Zutons via Echo and the Bunnymen, Cream, The La’s and others?The Beat Goes On is a critical historical account of popular music in Liverpool which explores the contextual, creative and geographical factors that have contributed to the city’s status as a major centre of creativity within Anglo-Amercian popular music. Rather than attempting to create a singular linear account of the history of popular music and its cultures within the city the book will take a thematic and case-study approach which will offer a new approach to the study of the subject. The book is therefore necessarily interdisciplinary with contributions from experts from the field of popular music history, cultural geography, ethnography and musicology, alongside essays and interviews with Liverpool musicians.

If you had been behind the Titanic on that fateful night in 1912, the last word that flashed before your eyes as the great ship was lost to the sea would have been ‘Liverpool’. The ship’s loss, a national and international tragedy, was also a tragedy for its home port and this fascinating book explores the history and myths surrounding the sinking, highlighting for the first time new and extraordinary stories that link Europe’s pre-eminent port and its most famous maritime loss. Using material from the White Star line archives, the extensive holdings of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, new illustrations and a variety of historical sources, Scarth unearths the full back story of key characters and companies: many of her key officers and crew were either from Liverpool or had strong links with the port, the ship’s owners were based in the City, many of the most colourful tales emerging from the disaster relate to Liverpool people and here, where appropriate, we find out what happened to them after the sinking. Titanic and Liverpool will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the Titanic and also for anyone hoping to understand Liverpool’s role as the great processing port of Europe and gateway to the US and Canada.