Liverpool has more than a fair measure of poverty and it has a strong community identity and traditions of political and social organisation. If the tenets of community development are going to find fertile ground anywhere, this looks like the place. The city also has an extraordinary level of experience of attempts to deal with its poverty and the inevitable social problems that result – a level and variety of experience that might, one would think, have distilled into a confident local wisdom as to how these things should be done. In a seven-year period in the 1950s Liverpool City Council built Kirkby in Lancashire and populated it with 50,000 residents to relieve pressure on its housing list. From the late 1960s Liverpool was designated an Educational Priority Area (1968–72), with an intensive programme of positive discrimination to address the poor educational performance of children; then the Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project in the Granby area (1969–72) set out to involve local people in the development of imaginative responses to local housing need; then the Vauxhall Community Development Project (CDP) (1970–75) piloted the use of community development to find new ways of meeting local needs in areas of high social deprivation. At the same time as the Vauxhall CDP the Brunswick Neighbourhood Scheme (1971–73), on the other side of the city centre, was experimenting with the development of local amenities and environmental improvements, though without the engagement of local residents which was central in Vauxhall. Next came analysis, with the Inner Area Study (1973–76) attempting to understand the nature of inner-city problems from resident perspectives and making measured attempts to forge a corporate management response involving statutory, community and voluntary sectors. Then came the Urban Aid programme, fusing into the Partnership programme providing targeted support to meet central government-defined priority themes but available for statutory and voluntary agencies. And in between was the Third European Poverty programme in Granby Toxteth, and City Challenge, followed by SRB, ESF, health action zones, regional development funds, education action zones, development companies, and other EU programmes as well as the myriad funding streams within local authority and health departments – in short, a bewildering cornucopia of funding.