Decline and the City: the Urban Crisis in Liverpool, c. 1968-1986

This thesis uses Liverpool to study the British urban crisis from 1968 to 1986, showing how the city became the locus of concern, in particular within central government policy-making, surrounding the processes of urban decline. The British urban crisis is understood, firstly through anxiety surrounding the social effects of urban decline with particular respect to residents of the ‘inner city’. The experience of urban decline was shown through central government-sponsored social surveys, as well as through cultural representations. This thesis shows how the processes of urban decline – population decline, de-industrialisation and economic decline, urban decay and dereliction, and urban deprivation – were all linked and mutually reinforcing. Secondly, the urban crisis arose through the inability of central and local government, and voluntary organisations, to ameliorate or reverse the effects of these changes. The British urban crisis was therefore as much a crisis of government policy as it was one of lived experience. As this thesis demonstrates, the urban crisis was the result of long-term processes of urban decline. But there were particular moments during which Liverpool’s crisis called into question the governability of urban Britain; these included the ‘riots’ in Toxteth in July 1981, and the dispute between Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and the city council, dominated by supporters of the Trotskyist group Militant Tendency between 1983 and 1986. This thesis therefore contributes to the historiographies of decline and declinism, social and economic change, and politics in late twentieth-century Britain.