The page numbers in the “ List of Illustrations ” refer to the original positions of the plates in the book. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the paragraph to which they refer. Inconsistent hyphenation and variant spelling are retained.   TO MY NEPHEW OR NIECE...

Neither guide-book nor history nor commercial estimate, this Book merely attempts the much less laborious task of handing on the instant effect produced by that active, tangible quantity, the Liverpool of the present day; and its Writer has therefore been forced to rely, almost as completely as its Illustrator, upon the private reports of his own senses rather than upon the books and testimonies of other people. None the less he has managed to incur a little sheaf of debts, and these, although h

The incisive feature of that history is the suddenness of the City’s emergence from a position of comparative obscurity into one of supreme moment. All down the ages, indeed, as the preparations for its sept-centenary celebrations, with which the place is ringing as I write, are now making especially clear, people have been clustered together on the river-bank, testing the great weapon, shaping and sharpening it, using it, as new issues and battle-cries uprose, with a constantly increasing force

Thus, the whole congeries splits up, it will be seen, rather more automatically than is usual, into just those four great divisions which every modern city is theoretically supposed to display. Here and there, of course, a divergency appears: over at Linacre, for instance, a group of industrial exploits—match-works, dye-works, a tannery—have lunged out towards the open, have tended to create out there their own special circle of suburb, their own little patch of slum. Over at Garston, again, the

BOLD STREET. And then one would like to appraise the elusive atmosphere of Bold Street—that intimate, elegant avenue of rare fabrics and shopping women and the ripe, drumming ripple of automobiles—the Bond Street of Liverpool, whose wood pavements make a sudden chosen silence in the midst of the clatter, which is held beautifully inviolate from electric cars and sandwichmen, and at the head of whose discreet vista the tower of St. Luke’s rises gravely up, faintly remindful of the manner in which

This double process of suburb-subordination and suburb-rejuvenescence has always, of course, been dependent upon the progress of the arts of locomotion; and its latest and swiftest phase was undoubtedly heralded by the clangour of the gong on the first electric car. It is her cars, as we have seen, that perfect Liverpool’s most characteristic beauty. It is her cars, again, that have helped to perfect her characteristic homogeneity and compactness, that have helped to bind the whole sprawling mas

For it is not that the wage of a dock-labourer is insufficient to grant life its decencies. It would, on the contrary, be quite possible for a dock-labourer, constantly employed, to live in one of the suburbs—out, say, at Seaforth—and come to the wharves each day by electric car. But the majority of these men are not constantly employed, and much of that inconstancy would seem to be inevitable. Ships come, ships go, and the tide of labour waxes and wanes as ceaselessly as the tides about it, and