![]() However, the book isn’t without its faults. One thing’s for certain: Liverpool faced challenges, and whatever your views of its response, at least it rose to them, and this book captures Liverpool accurately in its moment of transition. Speke on the outskirts would host the grand experiments of new housing schemes. Tuebrook survived more or less intact, while West Derby was the setting for new council flats (e.g. The town centre would burst with new shops and department stores, while the slums came tumbling down. What’s obvious from this book are the different characters of the areas shown. The theme running through the book are the slice-of-life issues like holidays, school, horse and cart veg sellers, Aunt Sally (good for blowing bubbles, apparently!), sugar soap and the paraffin-and-wax smell of Duffy’s store on Rose Vale. The chapters take no fixed pattern: some are area-based (Bootle, Tuebrook, Toxteth) while others cover events or topics (Coronation Year, 1953, Liverpool City Police). To be fair, he’s selling himself short, as this book should appeal to a wider audience than those who remember it as part of their childhoods. The Introduction sets the scene, and while it’s easy to see these books as nostalgia fests at least the author admits to such up front. The photographs – the main attraction in this ‘Britain in Old Photographs’ volume – capture Liverpool in its pre-Modernist, pre-towerblock, pre-St John’s Precinct era, and depicts street scenes of shiny black cars, children at the seaside, and lines of small, independent shops the like of which we see less often all the time. Rationing was still in force, areas of the town centre remained pock-marked with bomb sites, and life was only just getting back to normal. Edwards new book, Liverpool in the 1950s, published by The History Press, focusses on the decade when the effects of the War were still keenly felt. ![]() Not only housing, but offices and shops popped up like green shoots from the rubble of the shattered city in the 1950s and 1960s. A housing crisis was the result, the response to which was a building bonanza. Housing stock was poor in many neglected city centres and a ‘baby boom’ added to the burgeoning population. But along the optimism, the middle of the 20th century brought to a head many threats which had been simmering just under the surface. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |