Popular music is now recognised as ‘heritage’ in specific locales around the world – and Liverpool most recognisably so, as the home of a number of historically significant ‘Beatles sites’ around the city. Michael Brocken, himself a native Liverpudlian, explores the popular music heritage tourism of Liverpool – specifically in relation to the Beatles – in terms of ideas, places and spaces. He discusses travel and Beatles tourism in Liverpool, ideas and identities, the context for popular music tourism in 1970s Liverpool, the beginnings of popular music tourism in the 1970s, and the issues surrounding this in 1980s Liverpool as the industry began to grow. Brocken also discusses American instances of Beatles tourism, including the failed Beatle City in Dallas, TX, and he provides extensive Liverpool case studies – in particular, the National Trust, and ‘Beatles Streets’. Further to this, he discusses guided tours, specifically the Cavern City Tours and the Replica Cavern in Liverpool and their relationship with Beatles fandom.

In terms of cultural geography, Brocken demonstrates that tourism such as that generated by Beatles fandom in regard to Liverpool can help to ‘reshape and display vitally important identities and aesthetic values and meanings in a postindustrial city’ (p. 2). As such, he discusses the industry from a spatio-historical perspective, delineating the city of Liverpool's relationship with the Beatles. This, in Brocken's study, raises issues of class politics, authenticity, contestation and tensions surrounding the Beatles’ relationship to Liverpool and what in fact constitutes an authentic heritage site. As Brocken states, ‘Entrepreneurs need to gain a type of semiotic authority via their unique “take” on the Beatles, but they also need to subscribe to an agreed mono-history in order to be seen as legitimate’ (p. 28), and specifically so when it comes to the cultural capital of Beatles fandom. Throughout, he utilises detailed anecdotes pertaining to his own experience as a music fan and collector, shedding further auto-ethnographical light on periods in the recent history of Liverpool. Importantly, he traces a shifting engagement from Liverpool tourism officials – from a lack of interest in the Beatles’ importance to the city, to a slow recognition that the band's success might be a drawcard for the Liverpool tourism industry. The importance of the Beatles in regard to heritage, Brocken reveals, was in many ways a complex negotiation in respect of what he describes as the city's mono-history of collective struggle, conservatism, and the co-optation of any counter-histories, which he delineates in useful detail.

Although Liverpool received relatively few tourists in the 1970s, after the death of John Lennon Beatles fans had begun to visit the city. Brocken discusses the beginnings of Beatles tourism proper in the 1980s, when Bernadette Byrne began working as a Liverpool City Tour Guide; it was her personal interest in the Beatles that led to her introducing Beatles’ minibus tours as part of her guiding. Following this, Beatles tourism grew during the 1980s and became significantly more economically important during this period and in the 1990s. Brocken discusses two significant tourist operations – The Beatles Story and Cavern City Tours – placing them in detailed, insightful historical and political context, and demonstrating the ways in which such historical and political forces affected both the city of Liverpool, and Beatles tourism itself.

He provides a particularly illuminating discussion of the National Trust's role in Beatles tourism in Liverpool and the attendant ‘politics of space’ (p. 157) in regard to this. He focuses specifically on the purchase of the former homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney and the author's own experience of visiting these sites; he also provides useful insight into to the non-purchase of George Harrison's and Ringo Starr's former homes, and the historical distance created by the National Trust between whom they consider the ‘serious composers’, Lennon and McCartney, and the (supposedly therefore) less musically important Harrison and Starr. This reveals a process of ‘selective selection’ and the privileging of certain historical facts over others – as well as the relationship with what each individual Beatle connotes in terms of ‘historical significance’, and in regard to the city itself. This, Brocken demonstrates, reveals a complex politics of identification: how Ringo Starr feels about Liverpool, for example, affects ‘how Liverpool feels’ about Ringo Starr; and this, in turn, affects the potential for officially recognised Ringo Starr heritage sites. The homes of Lennon and McCartney, having been agreed upon as appropriate and ‘ideologically sound’ heritage sites, so to speak, are even then subject to the organisation of historical facts (and artefacts) into an agreed-upon ‘historical schema’ (p. 154), aimed at producing a sense of ‘authenticity’.

As Brocken points out, Liverpool is a mythologised city existing both in the present and in a past that may or may not have existed. He insightfully illustrates this with his discussion of the guided tours of Liverpool, including the Cavern City Tours, and his own experience of being guided by Phil Coppell – and he does so in illuminating anecdotal detail. His discussion of the Replica Cavern and the ways that visiting Beatles fans engage with this replicated space as ‘phenomena of symbolic representation’ (p. 189), reveals yet another complex interaction between place, space and identity. Importantly, he notes that ‘… fandom does not simply respond to music spaces and places, it creates them’ (p. 212) – and he points to the importance of the shared experience between fans as a personal, ‘life-giving’ experience where friendships and mutual understandings are formed.

This thoroughly detailed work will be of interest to those working in the fields of Beatles studies, fandom and popular music tourism. Brocken successfully combines his discussion of fandom with ethnographic detail, personal anecdotes, historical research, cultural theory and cultural geography to present both the story of a city, and the story of the story of a city in popular music culture. And beyond the buildings and the tourist sites, he successfully presents the stories of the people who produce these pop-cultural experiences – those who benefit from their production, and those (the fans) who consume it.