Museum of Liverpool themes and displays
Artist's impression of the People's City gallery
© National Museums Liverpool and Redman Design Associates
People's City will be about the experience of living in the city: what it means to be Liverpudlian, how people have left their mark on Liverpool and the impact and issues caused by dramatic social change over the last 200 years.
Displays will reveal the long and rich history of the city from Stone Age settlers who left their imprints in the sand in Formby, to people from all over the world who have made the city their home.
In People’s City visitors will be able to explore the city and its inhabitants in all their diversity and contrast - wealth and poverty, opportunity and deprivation, housing, social reform, trade unionism and social tension.
The gallery will consider the complexity of city life: communities and neighbourhoods; race and religion; health and education as well as the impact of world wars in the 20th century. Liverpool’s communities expanded, developed and grew with the migration and settlement of people from across the world. The impact on the human geography of the city will be explored as the museum looks at how communities settle, develop, grow, how economies work, the role of faith in urban areas, as well as considering the roots and impacts of racism and racial tension, politics, grass roots movement and radical politics.
Over time, People’s City will explore the very nature of communities and neighbourhoods, looking at current debates around multiculturalism and integration through the study of Liverpool. We will tackle issues of identity, diversity and community from early times to the present day, but concentrating on the period when Liverpool’s spectacular growth and decline made the city a byword for, in turn, extraordinary commercial success, then chronic urban decay.
New links with urban geographers will assist the museum in researching and showing how people have an impact on the city over time. Looking at the city, the displays will reveal where and how people live, die, work, socialise, shop, and learn. The gallery will also explore how the city changes and adapts and how people’s lives are changed by economic forces as well as social, political and technological development.
One of the key exhibits in the gallery will be the enormous model of the unbuilt design for Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral by world-famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.
The displays within People’s City will include:
A public forum to discuss the key themes of the People's City gallery was held on 12 December 2007. A podcast and transcript of the key speakers at the public forum, including Ray Costello, John Belsham and Frank Carlyle, is available on this website.