Inspired by the methods and paradigms of historical geography and urban sociology, studies of Liverpool have tended to concentrate on spatial and socio-economic factors, ignoring cultural and associational aspects of ethnic identity and collective mutuality. Census statistics have been deployed as ‘hard’ evidence for a positivist case study in the paradigmatic ‘urban transition’. Liverpool was ahead of other cities in its ‘modern’ spatial segregation, a pattern already established on Merseyside by 1871. Distinct areas took their character and identity from the socioeconomic status of the residents, although choice of residence was influenced by subsidiary variables such as position in the family life cycle, and ethnic affiliation. In this model, Irishness was reduced to the lowest socio-economic level, an ethnic stigma that clung to the worst housing areas adjacent to waterfront casual labour markets, recourse of the impoverished famine migrants. Predominantly unskilled, the Irish tended to congregate around ‘core-streets’ in the ‘instant slum’ of the north end with its purpose-built court housing, and in the failed middle-class suburb of the south end, hastily ‘made down’ into overcrowded and cellared street housing. The persistence rate was remarkably low as the Irish, lacking attachment to particular jobs or buildings, favoured short-distance movements within familiar territory. Few, however, moved outwards and upwards. Considerably smaller in numbers, the Irish middle class, a longer-established and mainly Protestant mercantile presence, rapidly distanced themselves from the ‘core’ areas, abandoning any identification with such Irishness to seek socio-economic integration in the more desirable residential location of outer suburban Merseyside. Isolated and segregated in the city, the Liverpool-Irish poor were simply assumed to lack the resources for associational culture – other than the ‘muscle’ to defend disputed residential boundaries.

This crude assumption, at odds with post-modernist emphasis on cultural identities, has remained unchallenged despite the burgeoning interest in the Irish in Britain. Dismissed as a sectarian redoubt marginal to the cultural and political life of the nation, Liverpool has no place in the emergent orthodoxy, focused on assimilation, small-town studies and ethnic fade. Given its size, however, the Liverpool-Irish ‘colony’ compels attention.