The Hurricane Port: A Social History of Liverpool - Hardcover

"The remarkable sweep and scope of this book traces the many origins and formative energies of this most anarchic, carnivalesque, promiscuous and contradictory of cities" (Paul Farley, poet and author of Edgelands)

"At last a book on Liverpool with the heart and zest the city deserves . . . a cornucopia of colour and detail" (Jamie McKendrick, poet)

"The author has threaded his way through [a] tangled web of materials vividly to evoke for us a distinctive myth-history of the city" (Peter Robinson, poet and editor of The Liverpool Accents)

"Powerful, passionate, punchy and provocative" (Liverpool Echo)

"A powerful and personal take on the city" (Liverpool Daily Post)

Scousers believe they live in a special place, one that has more in common with Salvador da Bahia, New Orleans or Gdansk than anywhere in England, and the city has always punched above its weight. In less than a hundred years, however, Liverpool's image has declined from a major mercantile player known as the Second City of the Empire to what some social commentators have described as a cultural backwater remembered largely as the place where the Beatles were born.

In The Hurricane Port, Andrew Lees reveals how Liverpool's pre-eminence in the slave trade left an indelible scar on the psychogeography of the city. He also explores the roots of Liverpool's contrary nature, its rebelliousness and its hedonism, as well as some of the recent hurricanes that have battered the city, including the anger of Toxteth, Militant's stand against Margaret Thatcher and the murder of James Bulger. In this distinctly personal account, Lees defines the characteristics of this Celtic enclave, with her loudmouthed, big-hearted people who have created a city quite different from anywhere else in the world.