Seaport

"Yes! This is the best book ever written about an individual city. Hughes was an architect, a conservationist and a soldier. There are these fabulous, grainy, evocative photographs in here. He shows the 1960s Liverpool slums in the most romantic possible way, and you have to remember that you had Allen Ginsberg hanging out there at the time. Hughes describes Liverpool as the centre of the universe. He was my tutor later at Liverpool University and I proposed to my wife in his house. This book is a history, a memoir, a critique. When he wrote it Liverpool was on the absolute cusp – in one way completely ruined, it hadn’t found its direction yet. Liverpool in the 1960s was like Florence in the 1440s."