‘Liverpool’, said seminal Scouse sociologist Tony Lane, ‘is the only city in Britain (apart from London) upon which other Britons have definite opinions and it is seen as a city of problems where the people themselves are reckoned to be part of the problem.’Footnote ¹ The city's reputation as a cesspool of crime, squalor and depravity has earned it the notorious sobriquet of being ‘the black spot on the Mersey’ from the mid-nineteenth century, when the Victorian political imagination shifted its attention to the impacts and iniquities of urbanization. Being the ‘worst’, however, meant that Liverpool was often the ‘first’ in pioneering policy and infrastructure interventions, many of which are now the hallmark of classic urban history: public health and the appointment of the first medical officer of health in 1847; sanitation and the establishment of public wash-houses and baths in 1848; housing and the erection of the council-owned properties at St Martin's Cottages in 1869; and municipal architecture with the creation of the Department of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool from 1909. These interventions were not confined solely to the urban fabric of the city, but extended across Britain and flowed back and forth across the globe through Liverpool as the ‘Second City of Empire’. These qualities mean Liverpool is frequently defined by its difference, or ‘exceptionalism’, with the place and its people perceived as ‘a city apart’.Footnote ² While this ‘exceptionalism’ provides a source of identity and pride to the city and its inhabitants, it also constitutes a perennial public image issue, with Liverpool castigated as a ‘problem city’ incapable of remedy because of the affinity between people and place.Footnote ³ Accordingly, throughout its modern history, Liverpool's urban plight – whether imagined or material – has posed problems which have necessitated new mechanisms of intervention and regulation that continue to shape not only the city, but also our understanding of its past.

Each of the works reviewed here examines one facet of how Liverpool's people and places were regulated within the city through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crucially, each attempts to illustrate how Liverpool's ‘exceptionalism’ provides more than an instructive case-study and instead proves the rule in a number of historiographical fields within urban history: David Beckingham on leisure, licensing and consumption; Sam Caslin on morality, sexuality and gender; John Belchem on ethnicity, race and migration; and Peter Adey, David Cox and Barry Godfrey on crime, deviance and the state. However, none of the works adopts an explicit comparison with other cities, such as that found in Charlotte Wildman's pathfinding study of urban redevelopment in inter-war Britain, which examines Liverpool alongside its rival Manchester.Footnote ⁴ Instead, each navigates the historiographical fields in question using the case-study of Liverpool to delve into debates and discussions about regulation as a negotiated process rather than an event. Foucauldian paradigms of the discursive articulation of power and control are absent, and replaced by reliance on archival, material and documentary sources which are used to reconstruct and contextualize processes of regulation. Place, people and the exercise of power intersect in each of the works, providing situated studies on the moral and social geographies of Liverpool at the height of its urbanization, raising wider questions about how these defined, shaped and regulated the city and its spaces.

Beckingham's The Licensed City capably explores Liverpool's supposed ‘exceptional’ problem with drink and drunkenness to challenge established notions of liberal modernity in Victorian Britain, connecting the licensing process to other urban ills of prostitution, housing and poverty. Based on his 2009 doctoral thesis, Beckingham's monograph deftly navigates traditional Victorian political history concerning temperance radicals, Tory brewers and truculent landlords while offering original and insightful geographical, social and cultural analysis about the ways these determined the licensing process in Liverpool from 1830 to 1920. This analysis is layered, zooming in from national politics beyond Liverpool to events in the city, processes within the city's wards and districts that were shaped by class, gender and sectarianism, into the very layout of public houses and the contested architecture of privacy and inspection between publicans, punters and the police. His multilayered analysis complements his central argument: that licensing as a national process was shaped by locality, where the pressure for greater regulation at all levels infringed upon freedom and liberties of the city's drinkers in complex and contextual ways that changed due to local experience. Particularly, the issue of prostitution as one of female presence in male spaces and places provides a gendered discussion of the movement of drink and drunkenness from public to private spaces, and how licensing overlapped with other forms of Victorian urban regulation, discussed also in depth in Sam Caslin's Save the Womanhood. His implicit comparisons with Manchester, Glasgow and elsewhere support his conclusion, but are limited by the lack of comparably detailed analysis of local experiences. Throughout, Beckingham demonstrates how these processes were rendered visible through different interest groups and their production of texts, maps and statistics, and this critical interrogation of his sources is aided with the frequent reproduction of original materials. The Licensed City is undoubtedly a ground-breaking study and deserves a wider audience than those interested in Liverpool alone as it reconsiders notions about alcohol solely as a social problem in the Victorian urban imagination; however, the detailed, complex and layered analyses which constitute the greatest strengths of the study limit generalizations and comparisons across Britain and its imperial networks served by the city, as well as the consequences of local liberal policies of licensing beyond the long nineteenth century. Ultimately, the study is a top-down one of policy and politics rather than a bottom-up one of people and place, but Beckingham's study of Liverpool extends well beyond a carefully constructed local history of ‘the black spot on the Mersey’ and provides a substantial historiographical contribution to urban history.

While Beckingham makes explicit use of regulation as a framework for analysis, Sam Caslin's Save the Womanhood, which explores civic responses to urban immorality, deploys ‘social control’ to capture the complex, nuanced and fluid relationship between voluntary and statutory authorities, and anxieties about the public visibility of prostitution. Although Caslin's periodization straddles much of the twentieth century, two-thirds of Save the Womanhood focuses on the inter-war period as the height of local and national concern about the urban dangers of the city for young women. This reflects the strength of her sources and the subjects of her attention: the Liverpool Vigilance Association, Women Police Patrols and the moral welfare workers based in the House of Help. However, Caslin's careful theoretical, methodological and historiographical grounding provides a firm foundation for her feminist analysis which disentangles the production and policing of a ‘highly gendered understanding of urban space’ (p. 211) in Liverpool. While gender is integral to the ideas and actions of social purists and their policing of public space, Caslin intersects these with class, ethnicity, faith and age, noting that ‘fears about vice, immorality and urban danger were regionally nuanced’ (p. 147) through comparisons with developments elsewhere, notably London. As with Beckingham's study, Caslin's Save the Womanhood is a study of policy and practice understood from above, refracted through lenses of women's work, leisure, sexuality and agency. Similarly, Caslin convincingly pierces the façade of liberal modernity by demonstrating how women's access to place was shaped by judgments of their respectability, character and person which framed them as potential prostitutes despite any clear legal or policy frameworks. Her final chapter and conclusion concerning the 1959 Street Offences Act also reshape the historiography of prostitution in post-war Britain by showing how the eclipse of moral welfare and social purity organizations, their surveillance of public space and women who traversed them, did not reflect a modernizing impetus but the incorporation of their outlook into the apparatus of the state. Save the Womanhood breaks free from the conventional mould of urban histories of prostitution which have remained focused on Victorian London, but her work lacks the complexity and context – not to mention maps, which are helpful for those unfamiliar with the local geographies of Liverpool – of Beckingham (although this perhaps reflects the shorter time between her 2013 thesis from which the published monograph originates). Although more attentive to the local particularities of Liverpool, the impact of Caslin's work extends well beyond the city, and is essential reading about the regulation of female morality and sexuality in modern Britain.

Unlike the studies of Beckingham and Caslin, which are both based on doctoral research, Belchem's Before the Windrush is ‘natural progression of [his] previous work on Liverpool's remarkable history and demographic mosaic’ (p. xv) and is a professorial history of the city which complements an extensive career and an impressive record of publications on Liverpool's social, labour and political history. Belchem also considers the book to be an empirical and ‘detailed archival case study’ of ‘race relations’ (p. xx), and his assemblage of primary materials is undeniably extensive, encompassing dozens of local and national collections, and as with Beckingham and Caslin's social and moral historical geographies, he uses these to approach ‘race relations’ from above, but from a Liverpudlian vantage point. Like Caslin, Belchem's periodization also captures much of twentieth-century Britain, but – despite its title – mainly falls after the Windrush, with five of eight chapters covering post-war developments, which largely come to a conclusion with the riots of 1981. Without repeating Alex Scott's informed critique at length,Footnote ⁵ Belchem's study is hamstrung by its failure to engage meaningfully with a burgeoning literature on migration, ethnicity, diaspora and post-colonialism in Britain – particularly in the post-war period – as well as its lack of a connection to the significance of events, communities and identities beyond the history of the city itself. Before the Windrush produces a rich and detailed but thus myopic study of local policies and practices concerning the management of race as an issue in several political domains but, unlike The Licensed City and Save the Womanhood, these are not used to challenge notions of modernity, local liberalism or experiences, but instead to question the politics and chronology of ‘race relations’. His study is consequently recounted through key individuals and institutions in the policy and practice process, rather than engaging with those whom they concerned, or how these were realized over time, shaping the urban places and spaces of Liverpool in myriad ways. Despite these shortcomings, Belchem's survey stands as a landmark text in the making of Black Liverpool which constructs a comprehensive narrative of local policy and practice from a rigorous excavation of sources. However, its own ‘exceptionalism’ means that it will be of less relevance to a generation of urban historians interested in the ‘shock city of post-colonial, post-industrial Britain’ (p. xix) and the inner-city experiences of marginalization by generations of Liverpool's African Caribbean diaspora which stem from the production of ‘race relations’.

Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz is the only title not to be published by Liverpool University Press reviewed here, but like the others it challenges notions of liberal governance through a case-study of regulation and population control in wartime Liverpool. The authors are well positioned to undertake such an investigation, combining Peter Adey's work on aerial mobility and its transformation of place, David Cox's histories of crime and policing and Barry Godfrey's studies on criminality, families and everyday life.Footnote ⁶ Unlike The Licensed City, Save the Womanhood and Before the Windrush, which span nineteenth- and twentieth-century Liverpool, the narrow chronological focus adopted by Adey, Cox and Godfrey from 1939 to 1945 provides a centrifuge to their analysis that revolves around the height of events during the intensive bombing experienced by the city during May 1941. The authors profess that the study is ‘unlikely to fizz or crackle with grand theoretical developments’ and, like Belchem, they see their analysis as ‘primarily empirical’ (p. 14). The structure complements this process, looking at comparable policy and practice processes found elsewhere, but from bottom-up ‘pedestrian’ and ‘peripatetic’ (p. 4) perspectives that connect with ‘whole apparatuses of networks’ of statutory and voluntary personnel that were mobilized during the conflict and by reconstructing ‘efforts to protect the population [that] actually played out in the governing of everyday life’ (p. 13). Although such intentions are laudable, there is a discrepancy between this approach in theory and the finished product in reality, the shortcomings of which – as with Belchem – are exposed through a detachment from an abundant historiography. Unlike Belchem, however, Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz relies on a slender primary and secondary source base which scarcely encounters the ‘apparatuses of networks’ they seek to recover. Moreover, although they seek to wed sources to the ‘bureaucratic rationale’ (p. 22) they represent in relation to governing and policing people in place and space across the city – and, uniquely amongst the works reviewed, Merseyside – there is far from complete comprehension of these systems. This results in entire aspects of the state regulation of civilians during the war being overlooked, most notably those relating to the management of casualties and the Emergency Medical Services. In summary, Adey, Cox and Godfrey fall short of their own expectations, although this is perhaps due to the authors completing the book after moving onto other research commitments away from the project's conception at Keele University. The authors comment that during the Blitz in Liverpool ‘[t]he city itself was transient and difficult to grasp’ (p. 184) and despite their combined credentials, interests and analysis, Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz fails to grasp the impact of state governance on the urban fabric and character of Liverpool during war, as well as how the case-study and these mechanisms relate beyond the circumstances of the city.

Despite claims to being ‘a city apart’, Liverpool's ‘exceptionalism’ only becomes visible to urban historians when it either proves or disproves the rule, as each of the works reviewed here attempts. When seen as part of larger local, national and international patterns and processes, our understanding of these rules are sharpened. Colin Pooley, in his 2008 review article on Liverpool for Urban History, reminds us of the ‘importance of seeking to link people and place, and of interpreting physical structures within their social, cultural and political context’.Footnote ⁷ This applies equally to policy and practice structures which shaped the realization of liberalism and modernity in contemporary Liverpool, and is inseparable from place. The limits of these ambitions are explored by each of these studies, demonstrating how the challenges of regulation, control and enforcement of everyday living have left extensive legacies in Liverpool that reveal the interconnectivity between the imagined social and moral geographies of the city, and their physical manifestation.