Peter Hall concludes his authoritative history of urban planning, Cities of Tomorrow, with a despairing discussion of the persistence of poverty and disadvantage in the city, of what he reluctantly describes as the ‘city of the permanent underclass’ (Hall, 2002). Although he does not use Liverpool to support his argument, there is no question that he could have done so. At the height of its global economic and political power, the city had a marked social geography. In the south were the mansions of the wealthy (Liverpool housed the largest number of millionaires of any city in the country at the time) while in the north end of the city were the overcrowded and unsanitary cellars and courts whose inhabitants experienced a poverty that, unlike that of today, was both relative and absolute. Contemporary press reports referred to these areas in a language of social pathology that was to be echoed, albeit less bluntly, in some of the early debates about the ‘urban problem’ in Britain in the 1960s:

Flash forward 120 years and we see the city introducing a Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy (Liverpool Partnership Group, 2002a) aimed at tackling a geography of social exclusion that takes in not only the areas in the ‘north end’ of the city that had so concerned Victorian commentators but also inner-city and outlying social housing areas in the south (including Speke as discussed in a number of chapters below).

As Stuart Wilks-Heeg argued in the previous chapter, the city has experienced a profound economic and social restructuring as it has gone from playing a leading role in the ‘old international division of labour’, based around colonial and imperial trading connections, to the urban core of a city-region officially designated as a ‘lagging region’ in the European segment of the triadic structure of the global economy (USA–Europe–Japan and the Pacific Rim). Figure 1 shows how this transformation has been reflected in the city's population.