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IMMIGRANT CITIES
Liverpool
Ports have always been places of arrival. Built on trade with the world, port cities attract people from all parts of the globe. The communities that take root in them are more cosmopolitan and outward-looking than those of inland towns.
The Immigrant Times is launching a new series, Immigrant Cities, that examines how immigration has shaped some of the world's major cities: their neighbourhoods, cultures, conflicts, and characters. We begin with four port cities whose stories span several centuries of migration: Liverpool, Marseille, Rotterdam, and New Orleans.
During the 1800s, tens of thousands of poor Irish labourers and their families left Ireland to find work in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Large numbers came to and settled in Liverpool, facing terrible conditions. The Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral serves the city’s Catholic community, which grew significantly with the arrival of Irish refugees. The Legacy sculpture commemorates the nine million people of all backgrounds who emigrated to America via the docks of Liverpool.
Introduction
April 2026: Liverpool became a city of immigrants because of its location, at the mouth of the Mersey River with easy access to the Atlantic. That favourable geography made the city the perfect port for trade and people arriving and departing.
For two centuries, Liverpool was the world’s busiest emigration port, the point through which millions of Europeans passed on their way to new lives in America, Canada, and Australia. What is less often remembered is that many of those same ships brought people in the other direction, and that the city's wharves, warehouses, and boarding houses became home to a succession of communities that left permanent marks on the culture, the language, and the physical fabric of the place.
Liverpool today has a population of around 509,000 people. According to the 2021 census, approximately 17 per cent of residents were born outside the United Kingdom, and the city's ethnic minority population has grown steadily in recent decades, with Black, Asian, and mixed-heritage communities now accounting for roughly 13 per cent of the total. (Please note: the two figures measure different things. The first captures place of birth, which includes white Europeans born outside the UK; the second reflects ethnic identity, which includes British-born descendants of immigrant communities.)
The largest individual communities include Chinese (with an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 residents), Ghanaian (around 9,000), Somali, Yemeni, and a substantial Eastern European population that arrived following EU enlargement in 2004. But behind these numbers lies a story that stretches back centuries, one of the most layered and complex immigration histories of any British city.
A useful starting point is the city's nickname. Liverpudlians are called Scousers, after a stew, lobscouse, that was popular with sailors across northern Europe and arrived in the city via the docks from Norway, Germany, Latvia or Wales, depending on which account you believe. Even the identity of the people is, in other words, an immigrant story.
Historical immigration to the beginning of the 20th century
Liverpool's trade connections with the wider world date back to the early 18th century, but it was the slave trade that first established the city as a major Atlantic port. By the mid-18th century, Liverpool's merchants were handling approximately 40 per cent of the European trade in enslaved Africans, and the city's wealth, its grand civic buildings, warehouses, and docks, was substantially built on that trade. This is not an immigration story in any comfortable sense, but it is a foundational one: it established the routes and the commercial infrastructure through which later waves of people would flow.
After the abolition of the slave trade in Britain in 1807, the city redirected its maritime energies toward the movement of goods and people across the Atlantic. By 1851, Liverpool was sending more ships to New York than any other European port, and between the 1830s and the 1930s, approximately nine million migrants departed from its docks, earning it the description ‘the New York of Europe’. Yet among those millions who passed through, very many also stayed.
The Irish
No single immigration event shaped Liverpool more profoundly than the Irish Famine of the late 1840s. Irish people had been arriving in the city for decades before the catastrophe, as seasonal labourers, dockworkers, and domestic servants, and by 1841 the Irish-born population already stood at 17.3 per cent of the total. Then, in 1847 alone, nearly 300,000 starving and destitute men, women, and children arrived at Clarence Dock in the first eleven months of the year. For those with sufficient resources and health to continue, Liverpool was a waystation to America or Australia. For the estimated 116,000 who arrived ‘half-naked and starving’, it was the end of the line.
The Liverpool poor law system was quickly overwhelmed. The response of the local population was mixed. The press ran articles describing the Irish as worse than ‘locusts’, and between 1846 and 1853, some 62,779 Irish people were forcibly removed under the Poor Law Removal Act. Yet many tens of thousands remained. By 1851, Irish-born residents made up over 22 per cent of the population, the highest proportion of any English city.
They settled primarily in the courts and cellars around the docks, in conditions of extreme poverty, taking the hardest physical labour: dockwork, construction, heavy industry, soap and sugar processing. The mortality rates in these areas were staggering. In the 1840s and 1850s, Liverpool had one of the worst public health records in Britain.
The Irish in Liverpool also brought with them the sectarian divisions of home. The Catholic-Protestant fault line, already present in the city, was dramatically deepened by the Famine influx, and it would persist for generations, shaping housing patterns, political allegiances, and even which football club a family supported.
The construction of the Metropolitan Cathedral, consecrated in 1967 and popularly known as "Paddy's Wigwam" for its resemblance to a teepee, stands as a monument to the eventual establishment of the Catholic Irish community in the city. The Irish dimension has been so thoroughly absorbed into Liverpool's identity that John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the city's most famous exports, both carry Irish surnames.
The Welsh
Less celebrated but numerically significant, Welsh immigrants arrived throughout the 19th century, drawn by work in the docks and related industries. By the mid-century, a writer described the inhabitants of Liverpool as largely ‘Irish and Welsh’. Linguists believe the Welsh influence contributed to the distinctive sing-song cadences of the Scouse accent.
The Chinese
The first vessel arriving directly from China docked in Liverpool in 1834. The Chinese community began to take a more permanent shape in the late 1860s, when Alfred Holt and Company, the founders of the Blue Funnel Line, began employing large numbers of Chinese seamen on its routes between Liverpool, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Sailors who jumped ship, or who stayed between voyages, settled in the area around Pitt Street and Frederick Street, close to the docks. By the 1890s, there were boarding houses, groceries, laundries, and cafes catering to this community, the beginnings of what would become Europe's oldest Chinatown. The intermarriage of Chinese men with local working-class women was common from the outset, producing a distinct mixed-heritage community whose descendants still live in Merseyside.
Local newspaper coverage of the Chinese community in the 19th century was often hostile and sensationalised, portraying the area in terms of opium dens and gambling. In reality, the community maintained coherence through mutual aid organisations and, from 1906, formal associations such as the See Yep Association.
Italian, German, Jewish, and Scandinavian communities
The 19th century also saw the arrival of communities that have been less prominently remembered. Italian immigrants, many of them from the mountain regions of northern Italy, driven out by agricultural poverty and the upheavals of Garibaldi's unification, arrived in waves throughout the century. Many began as street entertainers or mosaic and terrazzo layers, and, through chain migration, settled near others from their own villages, establishing the ‘Little Italy’ area of the city. By contemporary accounts, they were generally well-regarded by their neighbours.
German merchants and their families settled in sufficient numbers to construct their own church, the Deutsche Kirche. A Greek Orthodox community built the Church of St Nicholas. Scandinavian sailors and traders, whose connection to Liverpool ran through the Baltic trade, established the Gustav Adolf Church.
Liverpool's Jewish community, with roots in the 18th century and strengthened by immigration from Eastern Europe in the latter 19th century, built the Princes Road Synagogue, which still stands today as one of the most impressive synagogue buildings in Britain. These institutions, many of which are still active, are physical evidence of how thoroughly immigration had transformed the city’s religious landscape by 1900.
Perhaps the most curious story from this period is that of William Henry Quilliam, a native-born Liverpool solicitor who converted to Islam in 1887 following a visit to Morocco. Taking the name Abdullah, he established England's first mosque at 8 Brougham Terrace in 1889, funded partly by a donation from the Crown Prince of Afghanistan. The mosque attracted Muslim seamen from across the world, from West Africa, Yemen, India, and elsewhere, and served as a hub for Liverpool's growing Muslim community. By the turn of the century, the Liverpool Muslim Institute had around 150 members.
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Immigration from the early 20th century to World War II
The opening decades of the 20th century brought Liverpool's immigration story to a violent and often shameful juncture.
By the time the First World War broke out, the city hosted around 1,500 Chinese seamen in the merchant navy, alongside well-established West African and West Indian communities concentrated in the Toxteth district. These communities had their origins partly in the Elder Dempster shipping company's West Africa routes, which had drawn sailors from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere since the late 19th century.
When the war ended in 1918, returning white servicemen found themselves competing for work with the Black and Asian seamen who had, in many cases, kept the merchant navy running during the conflict. The result, in June 1919, was a series of vicious racial attacks in Liverpool and other British port cities. West African and West Indian men were attacked by white mobs. In one case, a Caribbean man named Charles Wootten was chased into the dock and pelted with stones until he drowned. The government's response was not to protect the Black communities, but to consider legislation for their repatriation. Calls in the press and from officials to send Black seamen "back to Africa" were a standard feature of the period.
The interwar years brought further hardship. Economic depression reduced shipping activity, and the communities that had depended on it were pushed into extreme poverty. The 1925 Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order effectively imposed a colour bar on non-British seamen, making it harder for Black sailors to find legal employment. Many who had lived and worked in Liverpool for years found themselves reclassified as ‘aliens’ and denied access to poor relief.
The Chinese community experienced similar pressures during the 1930s, as the Great Depression hit the shipping industry. The council planned to demolish the original Chinatown, citing decay and overcrowding.
This was not a period that reflected well on Liverpool's civic institutions or on the British state's treatment of the communities it had, in many cases, actively recruited during the preceding decades.
Immigration from World War II to the end of the 20th century
The Second World War brought the Chinese community to a moment of crisis. By the early 1940s, as many as 20,000 Chinese merchant sailors were registered in Liverpool, serving the Allied cause through the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1942, they went on strike for equal pay with their white counterparts. The British government and the shipping companies labelled the strikers ‘troublemakers’.
When the war ended, their reward was to have their pay cut by two-thirds, to be offered only one-way voyages back to China, and in many cases to be forcibly repatriated, separated from their Liverpool wives and mixed-heritage children, many of whom continued to live in the city. The German bombing of the original Pitt Street Chinatown during the Blitz had already displaced the community; it reconstituted itself around Nelson Street, where it remains today.
The post-war period saw Liverpool become part of a national pattern of Commonwealth migration. Caribbean workers, encouraged by the British government and its industries to fill labour shortages, began arriving in larger numbers from the late 1940s. West Indians had been recruited to the RAF during the war, with many stationed near Liverpool at Burtonwood.
After 1948 and the arrival of the Empire Windrush, Jamaican nurses, Barbadian bus drivers, and workers from across the Caribbean settled across British cities. Liverpool's Black community, however, followed a different trajectory from most English cities; it was older, more established, more mixed in heritage, and more concentrated in the Toxteth area (known locally as Liverpool 8) than the large-scale Windrush arrivals that transformed, say, Brixton or Handsworth.
The 1950s and 1960s also brought significant Commonwealth immigration from South Asia, though Liverpool's Indian and Pakistani communities remained smaller than those in the textile mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, reflecting the port city's different economic base in decline.
And decline was, by now, the dominant theme of Liverpool's story. The containerisation of cargo in the 1960s and 1970s eliminated vast numbers of dock jobs. Deindustrialisation gutted the manufacturing base. By 1981, Liverpool had one of the highest unemployment rates in Britain, and Toxteth had one of the highest in the city.
The result, on the night of 3 July 1981, was nine days of rioting that became the defining event of the city's post-war history. The immediate trigger was the heavy-handed arrest of a young Black man, Leroy Cooper, by Merseyside Police, but the causes ran far deeper. The Black community of Toxteth had for years endured aggressive policing, particularly the arbitrary stop-and-search powers of the ‘sus’ laws, alongside unemployment rates exceeding 30 per cent, inadequate housing, and what the subsequent Scarman Report acknowledged as racial disadvantage. CS gas was deployed on the British mainland for the first time. Over nine days, 468 police officers were injured, 500 people arrested, and at least 70 buildings destroyed by fire.
The media coverage was frequently sensationalist, with the Daily Mail running a front page that read ‘Black War on Police’. The then Chief Constable of Merseyside, Kenneth Oxford, was careful to distinguish Toxteth from Brixton, insisting that Liverpool did not have an ‘immigration problem’ because the Black community was long established. He was, on that specific point, correct — but the fact that a community could be centuries old in a city and still face unemployment, police harassment, and institutional exclusion was itself the point. As one historian put it at the time, the clue to the violence was ‘economic, not racial’, though in Toxteth, the two could not easily be separated.
The government response included the appointment of Michael Heseltine as ‘Minister for Merseyside’ and a series of urban regeneration initiatives, including the restoration of the Albert Dock. The 1980s also saw the Somali community in Liverpool begin to grow more substantially, as civil war in Somalia drove large numbers of refugees to seek asylum in Britain. Somali seamen had connections with Liverpool going back to the 19th century, when sailors from the British Somaliland refuelled at Aden; now their descendants and compatriots began arriving as refugees.
Immigration in the 21st century (2000 to the present)
The early years of the 21st century brought Liverpool a new wave of immigration from an unexpected direction. When Poland and other Eastern European countries joined the European Union in 2004, the United Kingdom — unlike most EU member states — immediately opened its labour market to the new members. The result was one of the largest peacetime migrations in British history. Polish workers arrived in their hundreds of thousands across the country, and Liverpool received a significant share. Polish grocery shops, Catholic churches, and community organisations appeared across the city. The Polish community integrated with relative ease into the city's established Catholic infrastructure, finding common ground with the city's strong Irish-Catholic tradition.
The period also brought continued growth of the Ghanaian community (estimated at around 9,000), the Somali community, the Yemeni community, and an expanding Chinese student population, with the University of Liverpool hosting more Chinese students than any other UK university. Liverpool's twinning with Shanghai in 1999 formalised and deepened commercial and cultural ties, and the construction of the Chinese Arch on Nelson Street in 2000, the tallest in Europe, assembled by artisans brought from Shanghai, gave Chinatown a striking landmark.
The 2016 Brexit referendum and the subsequent exit from the European Union substantially reduced EU migration.
The 2021 census recorded 3.5 per cent of Liverpool's population within the Black, Black British, or African and Caribbean category, up from 2.6 per cent in 2011, an increase of over 40 per cent in a decade. Significantly, the composition had shifted: Black African residents now form the majority within this group, driven largely by immigration from Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and other sub-Saharan African countries, alongside the long-established Caribbean community. The city's most recent demographic growth has come partly from asylum seekers dispersed to Liverpool by the Home Office and from the continuing arrival of international students.
The most recent significant wave of arrivals came following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Under the British government's Homes for Ukraine scheme, Liverpool, like most British cities, received Ukrainian refugees, most of them women and children whose husbands and fathers had remained in Ukraine to fight. How many will settle permanently remains uncertain. Many Ukrainians have expressed a strong wish to return once the war ends, but the scale of the displacement, one of the largest refugee movements in Europe since the Second World War, ensures that the Ukrainian presence will leave some mark on the city.
Liverpool's economic and cultural development has improved substantially since the depths of the 1980s. Tourism, the university sector, and the cultural industries that emerged from the 2008 European Capital of Culture designation have become major employers. The immigrant communities that had once been confined to the margins of civic life, Toxteth's streets and Chinatown's boarding houses, have become embedded in the city's fabric.
Prominent men and women of immigration
Alfred Holt (and the Chinese community he created): Holt himself was not an immigrant, but his decision in the 1860s to build the Blue Funnel Line, connecting Liverpool, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, directly created Liverpool's Chinese community, which became the oldest in Europe. The legacy of his ships is visible today in Nelson Street's famous Arch.
Michael Whitty: An Irish immigrant who arrived in Liverpool in the early 19th century and rose to found two institutions still central to the city's life: the Liverpool Fire Brigade and the Liverpool Daily Post, at its closure in 2013, one of the longest-running newspapers in Britain.
William Brown: Another prominent Irish immigrant of the early 19th century, Brown financed the construction of the William Brown Library, one of the finest public library buildings in England. The street on which it stands bears his name.
Abdullah Quilliam: Though born in Liverpool, Quilliam's story is inseparable from immigration. He founded England's first mosque and created a community for Muslim seamen and settlers from across the world, serving as an intermediary between Liverpool's diverse port community and its institutions. He was appointed Sheikh-ul-Islam for the British Isles by the Ottoman Sultan and was effectively the first figure to give institutional form to Islam in Britain.
Ho Kwong: One of the founders of Liverpool's Chinese community networks in the late 19th century. Men like Ho Kwong established the boarding houses and welfare structures that allowed a community of isolated sailors to survive and eventually thrive in a city that was often hostile to their presence.
Howard Gayle: Born in Toxteth in 1958 to a family of Caribbean heritage, Gayle became Liverpool FC's first Black player when he came off the bench in 1981, the same year the district where he grew up was burning. He subsequently became an advocate against racism in football. He was nominated for an MBE (Member of the British Empire medal) but turned it down, saying it would be “a betrayal to all of the Africans who have lost their lives, or who have suffered as a result of Empire.”
Katarina Johnson-Thompson: Born in Liverpool in 1993, the daughter of a Jamaican father, Johnson-Thompson became world heptathlon champion in 2019, breaking the British record. She is representative of the third and fourth generation of immigrant-heritage Liverpudlians who have come to embody the city's identity rather than being defined against it.
The story ‘Liverpool, an immigrant city’ is the first in a series. In the coming weeks, The Immigrant Times will also feature the port cities of Marseille, Rotterdam, and New Orleans. Please email the Editor (immigrant.cities@gmail.com) if you wish to suggest other cities for the series ‘Immigrant Cities’.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Immigrant Cities - Liverpool || Britain's immigration policy threatens future prosperity || British newspapers on immigration || Filipino nurses care workers in Britain || The fiscal impact of immigration in Britain || Immigration in Britain || Labour moves to the right on immigration || Britain’s harsh asylum reforms || English language requirements || Liverpool on immigration || The Solidarity Prize 2026 ||
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