Liverpool's recent economic travails need to be understood in a wider context of changing global trade patterns, some of which generated wealth, whilst others laid waste to its manufacturing base. From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the early 1970s Liverpool was a prosperous and vibrant world city where the elite had a tradition of engagement in global trade stretching back to the slave trade. Their wealth went towards funding some of Liverpool's remarkable buildings, including its library. However, that wealth was lost on the majority of its citizens as the city remained socially exclusive not only in rough times such as the 1930s depression, but also during prosperous times. The legacy of the Second World War was a bombed city centre and a housing crisis that took 35 years of rebuilding to address. Bombing had destroyed 6,500 houses and damaged 125,000 more, There were 20,000 unfit dwellings in the city centre, 33,000 people still on housing waiting lists in 1947. By 1954 the problems had got worse, with 88,000 dwellings deemed unfit. Liverpool's working class grew on a diet of casualised work based around the docks that was poorly paid and notoriously volatile. Many of Liverpool's workers occupied slum dwellings that contributed to their poor health. The poor then did not share the city's wealth (Taaffe and Mulhearn 1988: 33).

In 1944 the Merseyside Plan to keep the new war industries in new estates saw a move from military to civilian production. Only around 35 per cent of Liverpool's workforce was involved in industry in 1945, compared with 52 per cent nationally. In the same year the Distribution of IndustryAct moved industry away from the South East because of its vulnerability to air strikes. By the mid-1950s, the port of Liverpool showed signs of economic recovery as trade lost during the 1920s and 1930s was recovered: