The Post

22/07/2025

🚨 Introductory offer to The Post: Following the popularity of our Spring discount earlier this year, we’ve decided to reopen it! Sign up for a Post subscription today and get your first three months for just £4 a month (less than £1 a week!).

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21/07/2025

Today’s big story will focus on a separate thread that we also believe is in the public interest.

After our initial investigation into Laurence Westgaph was published in February, National Museums Liverpool (NML) quickly announced it would be launching an inquiry into their internal practices, as well as Westgaph’s “alleged conduct while under freelance appointment with National Museums Liverpool”.

We can now report the results of that inquiry, as well as the concerns of some employees, who have told us they are disappointed by its limited scope.

We have contacted NML for comment on six occasions over the past three weeks, but they have chosen not to reply. We also contacted Laurence Westgaph for comment, but he did not provide us with a response for this story.

NML says it acted “appropriately” in dealing with complaints about its resident historian

16/07/2025

🚨 The historian Laurence Westgaph has been threatening us with High Court action and trying to intimidate our sources and staff. We have not taken our stories down as he demanded - and we think people in Liverpool should know about how he's behaving. Please read and share this editor's note.

The historian has been threatening us with High Court action and trying to intimidate our sources and staff

16/07/2025

🚨 The historian Laurence Westgaph has been threatening us with High Court action and trying to intimidate our sources and staff. We have refused his demands to take down our articles about him and we think it's important for people in Liverpool to know what he's doing, so please read and share this editor's note from Abi.

The historian has been threatening us with High Court action and trying to intimidate our sources and staff

14/07/2025

You would be forgiven for thinking charisma is the lifeblood of a politician. Well, at least until you come into contact with the current crop. In Liverpool, our two most prominent politicians at the moment are council leader Liam Robinson and metro mayor Steve Rotheram. Of the former, one prominent ex-politician has this to say: “Liam’s someone who likes trains. Draw your own conclusions from that.”

✍The ‘charisma bypass’: Why Liverpool’s leaders are so forgettable

After years of populist fireworks a new type of leader has emerged in the city. Polite, unassuming, passionate about ironing...

After years of populist fireworks a new type of leader has emerged in the city. Polite, unassuming, passionate about ironing...

11/07/2025

❓Will the Mersey barrage ever happen?
❓Was Shakespeare North worth the cash?
❓Is Liverpool's net zero target realistic?

Do you have a burning question about Merseyside?

✍️Comment on this post with your Qs, and they might be featured in our segment: Answers in The Post.

10/07/2025

The River Mersey is our “lifeblood”, as metro mayor Steve Rotheram is fond of saying. At the height of British imperial power, it helped make Liverpool an international trading port – the famed “second city” of the Empire – and Birkenhead an important shipbuilding hub.

But like a thriving Victorian tycoon gone sclerotic on too much Madeira and rich cheese, this main artery between Stockport and the Irish Sea became clogged with pollution. By the 1970s, our spiritual predecessors at the Liverpool Daily Post estimated the cost of cleaning up the river to make it swimmable for man or fish at £100 million. The following decade, Michael Heseltine, Margaret Thatcher’s environment minister, was told £2 billion was a more likely figure.

These eye-watering numbers turned out to be optimistic. Over 25 years, United Utilities and their predecessors North West Water say they spent around £8 billion between them. But the Mersey Basin Campaign, as the project to nurse the river back to health came to be known, was seemingly a success. Last year, Mike Duddy of the Mersey Rivers Trust called the Mersey’s comeback “the greatest river recovery in Europe,” now home to multiple species of fish, birds, and aquatic and semi-aquatic mammals.

But further developments have disrupted the flow of this triumphal narrative. Last year, a study from Durham University suggested that sewage pollution levels in the Mersey Estuary are at 1980s levels. One expert said the river was still “a hot spot for sewage dumping” and “a threat to public health”.

Liverpool’s world-famous river is synonymous with the city and wider region. It lent its name to everything from cultural movements like Merseybeat to institutions we take for granted such as Merseytravel – not to mention the name of our ceremonial county itself. So just what is happening beneath its surface?

For the latest edition of Answers in The Post, Laurence speaks to experts and public bodies to get to the bottom – or riverbed – of the story.

It was meant to be “the greatest river recovery in Europe”, but experts maintain it’s still a threat to public health

05/07/2025

In your weekend read, Melissa Blease visits Cafe Tabac’s photo exhibition of the Liverpool popstar who was mad, bad and dangerous to know: Pete Burns 💛

https://www.livpost.co.uk/pete-burns-wasnt-nice-kind-or-fair-but-he-was-unforgettable/

📸 Photos by

04/07/2025

While high streets have historically been at the centre of British urban life, over the past two decades they have been in steep decline. The rise of online shopping and supermarkets have killed much of what used to be on offer; a 2023 study by Power to Change reveals the North West has a shop vacancy rate of nearly 7% — above the national average of 5%.

Nowadays, it is much more likely that when you walk down a high street, particularly in the north of England, you’ll see little more than empty units and rubbish blowing in the wind. As I stroll down Wavertree High Street on Tuesday afternoon, each open shop is interspersed with two or three other units with their shutters firmly down. Bootle and Garston offer much of the same — even the affluent Heswall over on the Wirral is experiencing similar troubles.

So is there anything that can be done to revive our once beloved high streets? Or are they a lost cause, doomed to be derelict as Aldi and Amazon zap up their customer base? That’s today’s Answers in The Post, which you can read below.

As shop closures across the North West reach record levels, we ask how Liverpool can reinvent its derelict high streets

02/07/2025

Welcome to another writer’s edition, where we give our scribblers a space to tell you what they’ve been up to and what they’re working on ✍

We see this as an opportunity for readers to poke behind the scenes, as well as get to know us better. Since Abi wrote our last one in April, this time it’s Laurence’s turn.

His previous edition featured forgotten Liverpool novelists and Hope Street’s interdimensional portals, and spurred a great conversation in the comments section. This time, it’s weird fiction, underground rap, and blue mussel colonies in the dock…

A writer’s edition from Laurence

28/06/2025

🚨Exclusive: A Liverpool developer became a Dubai crypto kingpin. Now he’s accused of defrauding investors out of $400 million...

Peter McInnes is leveraging ‘Banksy’ street art he says is worth millions – so even the ‘Liverpool Rat’ lives in the Gulf ✍

Peter McInnes is leveraging ‘Banksy’ street art he says is worth millions – so even the ‘Liverpool Rat’ lives in the Gulf

19/06/2025

🎭In 2022, six years after Knowsley Council gave planning permission for a new theatre, the Shakespeare North Playhouse opened its doors. The venue’s genesis was actually in 2007, when academics and theatre directors inspired by the upcoming Capital of Culture celebrations highlighted the Bard’s North-West links.

But was the theatre – which cost £38 million to construct – a reasonable outlay, or an expensive white elephant that will never recoup its investments?

That's today's piece. Read it below ✍

Prescot's Elizabethan theatre cost £38 million. Three years on, we find out if that outlay was justified