The Licensed City

Regulating drink in Liverpool, 1830-1920

David Beckingham

Liverpool University Press

No another book attempts such a detailed survey of licensing as a mode of regulation - its inputs, its impulses, its effects, which is particularly important for social and cultural historians as well as a critical legal studies audiences
Considerable depth in the study approach, seen in the broad temporal scope of the work and the ability to excavate the localism that made nineteenth-century liberalism
A fascinating study on the social reform agenda that made civic life in Liverpool
In terms both of presentation and analysis, the book is imaginative and innovative in its consideration of drink maps

The Licensed City

Regulating drink in Liverpool, 1830-1920

David Beckingham

Liverpool University Press

Description

In nineteenth-century Britain few cities could rival Liverpool for recorded drunkenness. Civic pride at Liverpool's imperial influence was undercut by anxieties about social problems that could all be connected to alcohol, from sectarian unrest and prostitution in the city's streets to child neglect and excess mortality in its slums. These dangers, heightened in Liverpool by the apparent connections between the drink trade and the city's civic elite, marked urban living and made alcohol a pressing political issue. As a temperance movement emerged to tackle the dangers of drink, campaigners challenged policy makers to re-imagine the acceptable reach of government. While national leaders often failed to agree on what was practically and philosophically palatable, social reformers in Liverpool focused on the system that licensed the sale of drink in the city's pubs and beerhouses. By reforming licensing, they would later boast, Liverpool had tackled its reputation as the drunkenness capital of England. The Licensed City reveals just how battles over booze have made the modern city. As such, it confronts whether licensing is equipped to regulate today's problem drinking.