Sam Wetherell
@samwetherell
Historian of Britain and the World at the University of York. Interested in cities, art-making and the future. Liverpool and the Un-Making of Britain out now: www.samwetherell.com
What if we solved Britain’s crisis of post industrial obsolescence by making every single redundant building the Prime Minster’s personal office?
In which a journalist glances at the Wikipedia page for Liverpool and uses its 1980s local government to argue against, say, universal healthcare in the contemporary US. Here’s what I wrote in my book about this nonsense.
I wrote a book about how Liverpool’s modern history helps us think differently about Britain’s twentieth century - how it demands histories of wagelessness, environment ruin, obsolescence and new forms of resistance. It’s out in paperback today!
Writing a reference for a student for a private sector job. Is it even legal to be asking these questions?
Feels relevant to re-up an article I wrote almost seven years ago for the now sadly defunct Outline magazine about VAR, techno-optomism and the naive contradictions of liberalism. theoutline.com/post/7822/vi...
As a Leicester fan, Mahrez dominated my interior life between 2014 and 2017. This is just wonderful, on scoring late against Austria when a draw would have secured a better opponent in the last 32. www.nytimes.com/athletic/740...
Part of the fun of reading the FT is learning about radically different types of guy.
On 23 June I'll be in Manchester in conversation with the wonderful urban historian and activist Isaac Rose. See below for tickets. And stay tuned for more Liverpool Content later this year. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/manchester...
Paperbacks have arrived and are looking lovely. Buy yours from 16 July. It has been heartily endorsed by both the Financial Times and the Morning Star so its perfect for any Dialectic enthusiasts in your life. See below for some events too:
PSA: For the freaks like me who want to watch alI of, say, Ecuador Curacao, but aren't freakish enough to do so at 2am, I found an angry Reddit community to learn how to turn off the BBC's infuriating and unnecessary embedded spoilers. You have to hit "audio described" during the initial trailer.
So excited for Black Liverpool: The Real Thing by the incredible Berkeley Sociologist and scouser Stephen Small. At an affordable price too. If anyone wants to review this for @urbanhistory.bsky.social then drop me a line. liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10....
The funniest thing about this by-election is watching people like Nandy having to pretend that an arbitrarily demarcated exurban strip of market towns and commuter villages between Wigan and Manchester is some radically essentialist super special Gemeinschaft that holds the key to Britain's soul.
Cannot wait to read the latest by Jonas - this will set off a nuclear bomb beneath a discourse on class in Britain that has been desperately provincial, nakedly partial and unimaginative for too long.
Great to see that @modbritstud.bsky.social's new website is taking seriously my argument that Liverpool's modern history is exactly where we need to look to understand the past, present and future of Britain.
Balls is of course sprouting barely literate reactionary nonsense here. But, as I argued in a piece in 2019, Stalinism with a British accent rings true in complicated historical ways... A shared history of ruthless imperialism followed by structural unravelling. www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/...
Ah I see, Burnham is going to do busses *and* performative acts of racialised border violence!
Excited to announce that Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain will be out in paperback on July 16. I’ll be doing a launch event that day with the wonderful people at West Kirby Books. See below for tickets! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/liverpool-...
Nice reminder to what remains of the Starmer project that there might be an easier way of "winning over Reform voters" that doesn't entail bragging about robbing refugees of their personal possessions in militarised detention centres.
Cool, so the byelection will cost approximately 0.5% of the estimated annual amount given in military aid by the British government?
Everyone is too busy reading Infinite Jest to realise that the NHS waitlist for non-urgent care has fallen from 7.7 million to 7.3 million in the last three years.
3) This is also an engagement with the tradition of British cultural studies (from Williams to Hall) in which the changing material *work* that culture does is often neglected. What does it mean to write cultural history now, following two decades of cultural histories of economic life?
2) This history requires retelling British history through the framework of obsolescence, abandonment and superfluity categories which I argue are increasingly useful for British histories trying to make sense of the ways that the present relates to the past.
1) This is an attempt to write the history of what I call "creativity capitalism" - a fleeting alternative modernising project which worked on many levels (social, environmental, economic) to repair the damage of deindustrialisation. A history that is longer and more expansive than often recognised.
The Yorkshire Post’s coverage of the moon landing takes a refreshingly cynical Cold War angle.