Liverpool: The Spaces of Remembering and the Places of Forgetting Again

A charter was granted to Liverpool in 1695 by King William III, which provided the legislation to create a town council. The power invested in the council enabled it to build the world’s first commercial wet dock which was under construction from 1709. Geographically, Liverpool benefitted from its location in northwest England on the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary, adjacent to the Irish Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. The town was ideally located for transatlantic trade, which included the slave trade. An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed in 1807. Slavery remained, however, legal in most of the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833. The accumulation of Liverpool’s various trading activities and subsequent need for expansion resulted in the later building of the Albert Dock. When it opened in 1846, it provided a mechanised and non-combustible dock and warehouse system. While the Albert Dock was heralded as a feat of industrial engineering, by the beginning of the twentieth century it had become obsolete. The site was awarded Grade I listed building status in 1952 and was subject to various planning proposals until it became the focus of a Conservative government initiative through the Merseyside Development Corporation in 1981. Renamed the Royal Albert Dock in 2018, the site today presents a more salubrious account of the city’s past. This chapter examines the changing identity of the port of Liverpool and considers why it is important not to forget through the places of history but to remember through the spaces of the past.