ABSTRACT
It is 1838, a mere eight years after the abolition of slavery. It is a momentous period in British political history. Working class militants, bitterly disappointed by the failure of the Reform Act of 1832 to introduce universal surage had turned to revolutionary syndicalism. Owenite building workers in Birmingham had drafted a plan to reorganise society along cooperative communist lines, and the People’s Charter was about to be launched.8 And it is in the midst of this proto-revolutionary shift in English political sensibilities, in spitting distance of smokestack and dockyard chains that the Liverpool bourgeoisie embark on their own quest to build their belief in the eternal nature of capitalist morality and justice. Glaswegians claim their city as the second city of Empire. Bengalis claim Kolkata. Scousers insist it is Liverpool. All of them have good reason. I stepped out of Lime Street station in the low autumnal sun and was dazzled by what was once the biggest and strangest civic building in Britain, a combination of concert hall and court of law.9
