A reflection of its time, Merseypride: essays in Liverpool exceptionalism grappled with the stigma, doom and gloom which kept late twentieth-century Liverpool apart, an internal ‘other’ within enterprise Britain. Written in the context of seemingly irreversible economic and demographic decline, the essays sought to re-evaluate Liverpool's history of difference and apartness – and to offer some limited optimism for the future. Liverpool's ‘exceptional’ past, it was suggested, offered the last best hope in the city's ‘urban asset audit’: repackaged as heritage, ‘Merseypride’ history might facilitate regeneration through conservation and cultural tourism. How circumspect and unambitious this now seems. In the space of a few short years, the ‘reborn’ city (as the former leader of the council, Mike Storey, described it) has reinvented itself, moving beyond regeneration towards urban renaissance. Population loss has been halted and employment prospects improved. Like its re-named and re-branded ‘John Lennon’ airport, among the fastest growing in Europe, the city has taken off, outstripping other major cities in the latest surveys of new business start-ups. Once considered a hindrance, its distinctive accent is now a marketing asset, placing Liverpool at the top of the league for call centres, including the European reservations centre for US Airways. From just one entry in the Good Food Guide in 1995, the city, picked out for special mention in the introduction to the 2005 edition, now boasts six entries. Forward-looking self-promotion, not self-pitying nostalgia, prevails in the new ‘Livercool’, incipient European Capital of Culture. Alongside courses on social exclusion, the Department of Sociology at the University of Liverpool now offers a flagship MA programme on ‘Cities, Culture and Regeneration’ with Liverpool as exemplary case study, the ‘ideal environment’ (the brochure asserts) in which to study and contribute to key policy and academic debates about the relationship between culture and regeneration.

The Toxteth riots of 1981, an indictment of exclusion, deprivation and discrimination, brought Liverpool, the shock city of post-colonial, post-industrial Britain, to the forefront of political attention, hastening a major policy shift from regional development to urban regeneration. Thereafter a kind of experimental test-bed for a large number of ill-fated initiatives, Liverpool for example had one of the first Enterprise Zones, the first Task Force, one of the first City Action Teams, and one of the two first-generation Urban Development Corporations.