In 1986, at the height of the ideological confrontation between Mrs Thatcher's government and municipal leaders, Michael Parkinson published Liverpool on the Brink, an account of the ongoing fight as it affected the north-west's great seaport city.Footnote ¹ His narrative ended in the autumn of 1985, too early for the dramatic dénouement in March 1987 when a ruling of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords caused 47 of Liverpool's city councillors to be disqualified from office for five years and made personally liable for debts of more than £500,000. In the perspective of historians, such overwhelming (and cruel) assertion of Westminster sovereignty, compounded by the simultaneous abolition of elected metropolitan governments, has placed the defenders of local autonomy in a heroic light. But if the sub-title of Parkinson's youthful book – One City's Struggle against Government Cuts – suggested a David-and-Goliath narrative, the contents were more nuanced. Liverpool had been carried to the brink not only by the expenditure cuts imposed by the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, but also by the responses of the city council under the leadership of Derek Hatton and the ideology of the Militant Tendency. The book carried a balanced indictment of both parties.

In the three and a half decades since On the Brink Michael Parkinson has kept a close watch on the ever-fascinating micro-politics of Liverpool. In an exemplary demonstration of the regionalist ideal of a research observatory, he and his colleagues at the European Institute for Urban Affairs and the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy & Practice have evaluated every successive initiative in the city, from the restoration of Albert Dock in 1984 through to the first direct election of a city mayor in 2012 and the response to COVID-19 in 2020. Articulate and personable in designer specs and whiter-than-white shirt, he is a natural media guru, a professorial celebrity on a par with the city's musicians and footballers. Parkinson was awarded the status of a Citizen of Honour in 2016 and today is the University of Liverpool's Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Civic Affairs. Alongside his standing as an expert on Merseyside, the author is known for comparative urban analysis. Funding from the European Commission and OECD has facilitated extensive work on other cities in collaboration with research teams all over Europe and beyond. Similarly, most of his British work has compared the challenges and contrasted the responses of several cities. When the UK's Economic and Social Research Council conducted an ambitious five-year investigation into urban cohesion and competitiveness, around the turn of the millennium, the work of 25 universities was directed from Liverpool by Parkinson.

The present volume brings together both strands of the author's research career. On the one hand, it draws on his 30-year archive of Liverpudlian policy studies, synthesizing them into a single narrative of urban recovery. On the other hand, the key word of this book is ‘normalization’, the norm being set by comparison with experience elsewhere, whether in Liverpool's ancient rival and nearby neighbour the City of Manchester, or the less specific ideal-type of modern urbanism in mainland Europe: for example, his fourth chapter is poignantly titled ‘The rise of the aspiring premier European city, 1998–2010’. Today's reader may find it difficult to share Parkinson's pre-COVID-19 optimism about the role of provincial capitals as ‘the drivers of national economic success in the twenty-first urban century’. More prescient are his warnings of the risks of Brexit for a place that drew so much benefit from European Objective One funding status – in cash terms, £1.5 billions between 1994 and 2006 – and, as importantly, benefited psychologically from belonging to the larger territorial whole and serving as its cultural capital for the golden year of 2008. How long ago that seems.

Early on in the book, Parkinson considers the audience for whom he is writing. He aims at a wide readership, avoiding the constraints of academic disciplinarity and drawing fully on his own involvement as a participant-observer of Liverpool's recovery. It is a first-person-singular account written in a direct accessible style. Despite short-comings in the scholarly apparatus – an incomplete index and separate bibliographies for each chapter – Beyond the Brink is a recommendable addition to the city's historiography. A confusion of policy initiatives has sprung up in the 40 years since Michael Heseltine arrived from London to walk the streets of Toxteth, launch an International Garden Festival and save the Albert Dock from ruin. Parkinson provides a sure guide through the thicket, and has an uplifting story to tell.