Book reviews
August 29, 2021 / July 23, 2023 by Martin Greaney | 1 Comment on Film Review: Almost Liverpool 8, a portrait of Toxteth in the 21st century
Toxteth. Liverpool 8. Sometimes just running those two phrases together can get people hot under the collar. One thing we learn from Almost Liverpool 8, a new documentary from Dartmouth Films is that the name ‘Toxteth’ was hardly heard before 1981, that watershed in the area’s history. I didn’t know this, having got so used […]
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Maps and mapping
January 24, 2014 / January 15, 2023 by Martin Greaney | 8 Comments on The Ancient Crosses of Lancashire
This article is about a lovely little book from 1902, detailing one man’s niche interest… Here’s a quiz question: how many churches on Merseyside can you name which have pre-mid16th century origins? The Ancient Crosses of Lancashire by Henry Taylor is a small hardback book and a catalogue of hundreds of ‘ancient’ (read: historic) crosses […]
May 21, 2013 / November 24, 2022 by Martin Greaney | 1 Comment on Maps of Landscapes
I recently visited that there London, popping into the London Review Bookshop (a bricks-and-mortar relative of the London Review of Books – definitely pop in if you’re in the area!), where I stumbled across Maps, the first in an annual series of compilations by Five Leaves Press. It’s one of the most fascinating books I’ve […]
Landscapes
September 29, 2011 / October 3, 2023 by Martin Greaney | 11 Comments on Toxteth – Some distant childhood memories.
The following article is a bit of a departure from the normal round of news or analysis. I was approached by Derek Tunnington who was born in Leeds but grew up in Toxteth, and has many memories of his childhood in Liverpool. What follows is his account of those years. Over to Derek… Toxteth – […]
September 13, 2011 / December 2, 2022 by Martin Greaney | Leave a Comment
On August 23rd 2007 Liverpool celebrated 800 years as a settlement! There are quite a few things which were laid down in 1207, the evidence of which is still visible today. 1 – Seven Streets Every historian of Liverpool should know about these: They are the original roads laid out when Liverpool was founded in […]
July 18, 2011 / October 3, 2023 by Martin Greaney | Leave a Comment
The ‘Museum of Liverpool‘ is a very fitting name, because this is a museum about the city, and about the people. It’s the largest national museum dedicated to a city in over a century, and opened in a year when the M Shed in Bristol, the Cardiff Story, and Glasgow’s Riverside Museum Project bring similar […]
July 7, 2011 / July 25, 2023 by Martin Greaney | 2 Comments on Toxteth – redressing the balance
July 2011 marked 30 years since the violence in Toxteth which would hang a cloud over the suburb of Liverpool for decades, at least in the eyes of the public at large. It came to symbolise the economic problems of early 1980s Liverpool, and helped cement the stereotype of inner city, unemployed Scousers which probably […]
Hidden History
April 6, 2011 / July 25, 2023 by Martin Greaney | Leave a Comment
OK, so perhaps the Norse are aren’t the first people to come to mind when we think of ‘Liverpool Heroes’. They’re distant in time, left little visible trace in our city, and went about changing society through the delicate application of pointy-horned helmets. But of course none of that is strictly true. There are traces […]
January 12, 2011 / November 9, 2022 by Martin Greaney | 2 Comments on Woodland on Merseyside and the Mersey Forest
The year 2011 was declared as the International Year of Forests by the UN (see the Echo for some of Liverpool’s plans). The very modern Mersey Forest has seen 8 million new trees planted since 1994. But there’s a much longer and fascinating history of woodland and forest in this area. The origins of the […]
