Once the empire's second city, LIVERPOOL spent too many of the twentieth-century postwar years struggling against adversity. Things are looking up at last, as economic and social regeneration brightens the centre and old docks. Yet - even as any short-term visitor to the city could tell you - nothing ever broke Liverpool's extraordinary spirit of community, a spirit that emerged strongly in the aftermath of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster of 1989, when the deaths of 95 Liverpool supporters seemed to unite the whole city. Indeed, acerbic wit and loyalty to one of the city's two football teams are the linchpins of Scouse culture - though Liverpool makes great play of its musical heritage, which is reasonable enough from the city that produced The Beatles.

Although it gained its charter from King John in 1207, Liverpool remained a humble fishing village for half a millennium until the silting-up of Chester and the booming slave trade prompted the building of the first dock in 1715. From then until the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1807, Liverpool was the apex of the slaving triangle in which firearms, alcohol and textiles were traded for African slaves, who were then shipped to the Caribbean and America. The holds were filled with tobacco, raw cotton and sugar for the return journey. After the abolition of the trade, the port continued to grow into a seven-mile chain of docks, not only for freight but also to cope with wholesale European emigration , which saw nine million people from half of Europe leave for the Americas and Australasia between 1830 and 1930. Some never made it further than Liverpool and contributed to a five-fold increase in population in fifty years. An even larger boost came with immigration from the Caribbean and China, and especially Ireland in the wake of the potato famine in 1845.

The docks were busy until the middle of the twentieth century when a number of factors led to the port's decline : cheap air fares saw off the lucrative liner business; trade with the dwindling empire declined, while European traffic boosted southeastern ports at Tilbury, Harwich and Southampton; and containerization meant reduced demand for handling and warehousing. The arrival of car manufacturing plants in the 1960s, including Ford at Halewood, stemmed the decline for a while, but during the 1970s and 1980s Liverpool became a byword for British economic malaise as its fundamental businesses withered and died.

There's been a renaissance of sorts since the 1990s as EU development funds and millennium money have kick-started various projects. Financial services, information technology and biotechnology are all major employers while the city is the "call centre" capital of the UK. Compared to the wholesale redevelopment of neighbouring Manchester, the city still has a fair hill to climb but there is at last a welcome new confidence about Liverpool. It's rebranded itself as the "festival city" - on the back of which, it's making a bid to be European Capital of Culture for 2008