Geographies of drink culture in Liverpool: Lessons from the drink capital of nineteenth-century England

Author: Beckingham David  

Publisher: Informa Healthcare

ISSN: 1465-3370

Source: Drugs: Education, Prevention & Policy, Vol.15, Iss.3, 2008-01, pp. : 305-313

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Abstract

This paper explores the faith that different agencies, state and social, placed in police data detailing drunkenness, how that data was extracted, and, as a consequence, those who would make claims based on the data. Statistical rankings both reflected and reinforced a nineteenth-century geography of drunkenness, which revealed Liverpool to be the drink capital of England; this paper reveals how that geography was propped on problematic figures, which were reworked in contemporary discourses of drink and crime, and argues for a spatial contextualization of drinking and drunkenness.