The whole history of Liverpool in 26 minutes — second city of empire, left with nothing

The history of Liverpool is the story of a city built not to make things, but to be a door — and of what happens when the world stops passing through it. A thousand years ago there was only a muddy, silted pool emptying into the River Mersey, and a fishing village named after that puddle. Then King John, needing a harbour to move troops to Ireland, granted a 1207 royal charter that conjured a free borough and port into being at the stroke of a pen, laying out the seven streets — Castle Street, Dale Street, Water Street, Chapel Street — around a new castle by the water. For four centuries the traffic barely came, and Liverpool languished in the shadow of Chester, until the River Dee silted shut and the trade of the Irish Sea turned at last toward the Mersey. But the river had a thirty-foot tide that left ships stranded on the mud twice a day, so Thomas Steers walled off the old creek with lock gates and opened the first commercial wet dock in 1715 — and the door was finally usable. What poured through it made Liverpool the second city of the empire on the transatlantic slave trade and the triangular trade, on Lancashire cotton and the desperate famine migration of the Irish potato famine, a port town that made almost nothing yet carried the traffic of half the world. This is that whole causal life laid bare, from how Liverpool was founded to why the ships eventually changed, the docks fell silent, and a city that was only ever a way through had to learn what it was without anyone passing.