Outside the main narrative frameworks of modern British history, Liverpool's past has been characterised as different, the exception which proved the rule. These essays critically address and interrogate this proverbial exceptionalism, a ‘difference’ which extends far beyond historiographical discourse. Liverpool's apartness, indeed, is crucial to its identity. Although repudiated by some as an external imposition, an unmerited stigma, Liverpudlian ‘otherness’ has been upheld (and inflated) in self-referential myth, a ‘Merseypride’ that has shown considerable ingenuity in adjusting to the city's changing fortunes. The purpose of these essays is to deconstruct some of these representations, projections and portrayals in the period covering Liverpool's exponential growth to become the second city of the empire to its recent (seemingly irreversible) economic and demographic decline into European Union Objective One status.

Located at the intersection of competing cultural, economic and geo-political formations, Liverpool defies ready historical categorisation. In its Victorian heyday a kind of ‘city state’ dedicated to commerce, culture and civilisation – the would-be ‘Florence of the north’ – Liverpool defined itself against industrial Manchester and in rivalry with commercial London. In the north of England but not of it, Liverpool (and its ‘sub-region’ of Mersey-side) was (and has continued to be) highly distinctive, differing sharply in socio-economic structure, cultural image and expression, political affiliation, health, diet and speech from the adjacent industrial districts. Vaunting its status as ‘second metropolis’ – the first after London to introduce a system of postal districts – this northern outpost of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ was the least ‘English’ of the great Victorian provincial cities. The industrial conurbations of the north grew out of conglomerations of small towns and villages, augmented by short-distance rural in-migration which tended to reinforce their culture, character and status as regional centres. Long-distance in-migration – the multi-ethnic, mainly celtic inflow – transformed Liverpool and its ‘scouse’ culture, setting it apart from its environs. In Liverpool, competing and conflicting inflexions of celticism (Irish, Welsh, Manx and Scottish) have been particularly pronounced, tensions (awaiting full scholarly investigation) at the very centre of the multi-national United Kingdom. Beyond the ‘inland’ Irish Sea, Liverpool's private celtic empire, the great seaport looked to the oceans, adding an external dimension to the city's cultural life and its migrant mix.