Liverpool

A borough of Lancashire from 1207 that became significant in the late seventeenth century through the Atlantic slave trade, then imported the cotton that fed the Lancashire mills and served as the departure point for English and Irish emigrants to North America. It ran at the front of the Industrial Revolution: the first inter-city railway, the first non-combustible warehouse system at the Royal Albert Dock, a pioneering elevated electric railway. City status came in 1880. Decline in the mid-twentieth century was largely reversed after it was named European Capital of Culture for 2008.