Liverpool A Landscape History

The landscape has had a huge impact on the history of Liverpool and Merseyside. The ice age glaciers carved out the Rivers Mersey and Dee; the Sefton coast provided a perfect place for the earliest humans to hunt and gather food; and the Pool and the Mersey, and England’s position on the coast gave King John the perfect base from which to launch his Irish campaigns.This book explores the landscapes from these earliest times, and charts the changing city right through to the present day. It explains why Liverpool looks the way it does today, and how clues in the modern landscape reveal details of its long history. You’ll see how the landscape created Liverpool, and how in turn Liverpool recreated the landscape.

Liverpool has gained a national and international reputation for popular music, and was recently designated a UNESCO City of Music. This book explores the richness of Liverpool's live performance scene and tells a story of changing music sites, sounds, and experiences, highlighting music's contribution to the city's history and identity, and showing how the city's architectural and urban form has shaped its musical life and character. By touching on groups and artists involved with many diverse musical styles, authors Sara Cohen and Robert Kronenburg reveal new and fascinating information on well-known historic venues such as the Cavern Club and the Blue Angel, as well as new settings such as the Echo Arena. Featuring a glossary of artists and venues, previously unpublished photographs, illustrations, and music maps, this book investigates Liverpool's musical landscapes in unprecedented depth and detail.

From optical remote-sensing technology (lidar) to more traditional forms of landscape analysis and documentary research, this volume brings together the work of both amateur and professional historians and archaeologists, united in their enthusiasm for the landscape of north-west England and north-east Wales.

Forgotten Landscapes... Despite the proud boast of the Liverpudlians of today that there has always been a Liverpool and always will be a Liverpool, the truth is that for many centuries the world got on quite well without us, and as cities go Liverpool is only a recent newcomer compared with most others across Europe. The granting of the much-vaunted Charter of 1207 and the presence of an imposing castle were all well and good but the fact remained that the town was little more than a fishing village with a nice beach for the following 450 years. The event which awakened Liverpool from its slumbrous backwaters was the British colonisation of the West Indies which triggered a trade in slaves, an occupation which Liverpool shipowners took up with alacrity and made fortunes from throughout the following 150 years. The slave-trade was the catalyst for the building of Liverpool and it was from 1650 onwards, throughout the shameful years of the enforced African diaspora and beyond, that the architectural and cultural framework of modern Liverpool was formed; much of it has now gone and much of it is falling into decay but with a little imagination the fragments of that forgotten landscape can still be glimpsed. Forgotten Lives...The natural corollary to envisaging Liverpool's lost landscape is to wonder what the people were like who inhabited the city; were they tougher than us? They had a whole host of diseases to cope with, harder lives and primitive living conditions; were they cleverer than us? Victorian engineering was breathtaking but it is more than remarkable that Llangollen's Pontcysllte aqueduct was begun as early as 1795; were they as cultured as us? Some of their art works have never been surpassed. The facts speak for themselves and given the obstacles they faced our ancestors were a remarkably resilient and hardy lot. Although the lives of many Liverpudlians have been documented there are far more whose stories lie mouldering in the city's archives and in this book I have tried to bring some of them back into the light of day to enlighten our lives and wonder at theirs.

Most of England's larger towns and cities are ringed by extensive suburbs dating from the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from the opulent, spacious and leafy villa suburbs of the prosperous middle class to the dense gridirons of working-class and lower middle-class housing. The product of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, these suburbs, once derided or disregarded, now face major change themselves. This book explores the development of one area of Liverpool's suburbs, examining the forces that shaped it and explaining the patterns that we see in the landscape today. The story that emerges will surprise many, and may prompt a re-evaluation of these 'ordinary' places.

Tracing Your Liverpool Ancestors' gives a fascinating insight into everyday life in the Liverpool area over the past four centuries. Aimed primarily at the family and social historian, Mike Royden's highly readable guide introduces readers to the wealth of material available on the citys history and its people. In a series of short, information-packed chapters he describes, in vivid detail, the rise of Liverpool through shipping, manufacturing and trade from the original fishing village to the cosmopolitan metropolis of the present day. Throughout he concentrates on the lives of the local people on their experience as Liverpool developed around them. He looks at their living conditions, at poverty and the laboring poor, at health and the ravages of disease, at the influence of religion and migration, at education and the traumatic experience of war. He shows how the lives of Liverpudlians changed over the centuries and how this is reflected in the records that have survived. His useful book is a valuable tool for anyone researching the history of the city or the life of an individual ancestor.

The World in One School explores the global influence of Britain’s oldest university school of architecture in both word and image. The home of the “Liverpool Manner” style—developed under the leadership of Sir Charles Reilly and honed by architects like Herbert Rowse and Charles Dod—the Liverpool School of Architecture hosted students from all corners of the world and sent its graduates to placements in international practice. Tracing the School’s history—from its origins through the influence of America in the interwar years to a strong Modernist presence influenced by Edwin Maxwell Fry’s and George Checkley’s inspirations, this remarkable story of a School with five Royal Gold Medalists for architecture is a fascinating study of the transatlantic trends that shape education and practice in architecture and design.

Wessex is famous for its coasts, heaths, woodlands, chalk downland, limestone hills and gorges, settlements and farmed vales. This book provides an account of the physical form, development and operation of its landscape as it was shaped by our ancestors. Major themes include the development of agriculture, settlements, industry and transport.