Liverpool Eye

As a kid growing up in Liverpool during the 1940s, Liverpool was a very different city.

The run-up to Christmas was usually very cold and miserable, I remember shopping (with my mum) in the gloom of an austere, post-war Britain. The back of St. John's Market was lit with hissing tilly lamps, there may have been a few paper decorations and a few sprigs of holly here and there.

But today the pre-Christmas Liverpool is bright and vibrant with a "Liverpool Eye" and literally millions of Christmas Lights adorning city streets and shopping "parks"; street markets are all around the city - people hurry around, spending as much money as they can.

Were things better in the 1940s . . . OF COURSE NOT . . . or were they?