Liverpool

Army games in the front garden for a young boy with his beret and Tommy Gun, violence and confrontation was evident in Liverpool, circa 1981. The 1980s saw the City of Liverpool's fortunes sink to their lowest postwar point. 

Although the 1970s, along with the rest of Britain, had brought economic difficulties and a steady rise in unemployment, the situation in Liverpool went from bad to worse in the early 1980s, with endless factory closures and some of the highest unemployment rates in the UK. An average of 12,000 people each year were leaving the city, and 15% of its land was vacant or derelict. Militant supporters were elected to key positions within the Liverpool Labour Party and, in 1983, the same year that Margaret Thatcher won her second general election by a landslide, Labour won the city council elections on a radical socialist manifesto. It immediately cancelled the 1,200 redundancies planned by the previous administration, froze council rents and launched an ambitious house-building programme targeting the city's most deprived neighborhoods. Former Grenadier Guardsman John Stoddart had returned to the City where he was born after leaving the army. His photographs from the early 1980s provide an important record of those troubled times, and for John Stoddart the city gave him many opportunities to practice his photography. In 1984 he moved to London where he worked as a freelance for magazines and newspapers for more than 35 years.