Merseyside HA Launch Event with Professor John Belchem
24 June 2025, 6pm-8pm @ LJMU Student Life Building (Copperas Hill Liverpool L3 5AJ)
A new historical association, the Merseyside Historical Association (MHA), is launching in Merseyside this June, and you are invited to attend the FREE launch in June 2025.
The theme of our talks (around one a month from a range of stakeholders in History) from 2025-2026 is ‘MerseyMade’, and the focus is environment, history, and community in Merseyside and beyond. Our intention at the MHA is to link the past with policy and conditions in the present, in order to understand our direction of travel a bit better.
On June 24th, we will have a pre-eminent historian of Merseyside talking about the Mersey and human community in the past. There will be reflections on environment and policy in Merseyside today.
At the MHA, we are united in our commitment to use history to contextualise, understand, and make decisions in the present.
We would love for you to be a part of the conversation, and to take this opportunity to consider the place of History in your own life, work, and research.
Keynote speaker on June 24th: Professor John Belchem
Geography, Culture and History: Understanding Liverpool’s Past
After centuries of small things, remote Liverpool underwent dramatic progress. Physical isolation and material insignificance were cast aside by impressive infrastructural projects promoted through mercantile ambition and civic entrepreneurialism. Human geography in action, these new networks and connections transformed Liverpool, previously overlooked and out on a limb, into the western emporium of Albion, the second city of Empire. When the terms of trade changed, however, Liverpool was no longer at the nexus but distant and apart from the altered economic geography of the 20th century and beyond. This talk will question whether this apartness from the mainstream was simply geographic, requiring a reprise of infrastructural innovation, or whether cultural factors were at play, accentuating a sense of inverse pride – and business opportunity – in the city’s otherness.
Biography: Professor John Belchem is a world renowned and nationally decorated Historian. Former Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Liverpool, Belchem is a pre-eminent historian of Liverpool who has charted the city’s history from its official founding as a ‘borough’ in 1207, through to present day. Belchem is an esteemed member of the School of History at the University of Liverpool, for a long time serving as its Head.
Professor Belchem is also currently the Head of the Merseyside Civic Society.
As a taster, two of Professor Belchem’s key publications (out of a very many) include:
John Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race Relations in Twentieth-Century Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014).
John Belchem (ed.), Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006).
Please come along to the event if you would like to hear Professor Belchem talk, and if you have any questions that you would like to ask him. John Belchem is a big deal, but he is accessible and loves to talk about history in all its forms. Not an opportunity to be missed!
Merseyside HA 