LIVING is the second volume of Mersey Minis, a series of small books celebrating Liverpool's 800th anniversary. Living continues where the first volume, Landing, left off. While Landing looked at people’s first impressions, Living reflects more of the life of the city and its environs. Beyond the choppy river and the massive dock walls, visitors are finding their feet and starting to explore this ‘best built town’.
Americans at leisure, immigrants looking for lodgings, newcomers looking for adventure or acceptance, these evocative accounts capture the sights, sounds, smells and psyche of the bustling, bemusing and sometimes scary big city. Many are talking about the Liverpool of old, but their accounts are strikingly modern. They do the same as tourists and visitors do today. They compare and contrast. They stare in amazement and admiration at the huge dray horses, the strange modes of transport, the elegant shops, the new parks, the gin palaces and grog shops, even the Liverpudlian fashion sense! And they gripe, in time-honoured fashion, about the chilly weather, the soot-grimed stone, the ‘frowning’ buildings and the fog.
Some early visitors were almost certainly indulging in a little industrial espionage, checking out the new docks. Another 19th century traveller enquires about the city’s emblem, the Liver Bird, long before the Liver Building graced the waterfront, and is answered in typically gnomic fashion.
Living also looks at the working and domestic life of the city. From dancing to the dole, shopping and strife, tower blocks and tunnels, Living has high life and low life and everything in between.
Some of these extracts have been unearthed from obscure journals and memoirs, bringing back to life long-forgotten layers of the city and its business. The biographies at the back of Living are necessarily short, but they reveal a little bit more about these extraordinary – and ordinary – lives, and along with the book list will hopefully prompt further reading.
-- Deborah Mulhearn