There are few British cities with a more fascinating history than Liverpool which celebrates its 800th anniversary in 2007.

It was only a fishing hamlet on the River Mersey in 1207 when King John, needing a new port to sail to Ireland, gave Liverpool a charter.

Although a castle was built in 1235 - on the site today known as Derby Square, at the end of Castle Street - it remained little more than a fishing village for several hundred years.

Although during the English Civil War of 1642 to 1646, Liverpool was considered strategic enough for Prince Rupert to lead an army of 10,000 that seized the castle from the Roundheads.

The castle fell into disrepair and was finally demolished in 1721, six years after Liverpool's first dock was opened in 1715.

It was as more and more British ships set sail to explore the oceans that Liverpool, very well placed geographically for Atlantic trading, began to flourish.

This led to its pivotal involvement from the 1740s onwards in the slave trade, from which many Liverpool-based businessmen prospered.

Ships laden with cotton goods and hardware would sail from the Mersey to West Africa where the cargoes would be exchanged for slaves and ivory. They would be shipped in appalling conditions across the Atlantic and swapped for sugar, rum and tobacco whch woud then be sold In Britain. Visitors with particular interest in this chapter of history should visit the Merseyside Maritime Museum's Atlantic Slave Trade Gallery.

Liverpool was also a base for privateers - ships licensed by the British Government to attack and rob the vessels of other countries. Towards the end of the 18th century, there were around 4,000 French prisoners of war imprisoned in Liverpool, mainly captured by Mersey-based privateers who routinely paid press gangs to coerce men to help crew their ships.

Liverpool was also involved in the whaling trade. The author of Moby Dick was the American Herman Melville whose first seafaring voyage took him to Liverpool in 1839 at the age of 19. Melville also wrote a novel Redburn which drew on his time in Liverpool. By 1807 when Parliament outlawed the involvement of British ships in the trading of slaves, Liverpool was flourishing in many other ways.

The industrial revolution was underway and the port of Liverpool was benefiting enormously from the increasing interchange of goods. For example, cotton in its raw form was sent from the plantations of America to be processed in the mills of Lancashire before being exported. There was also considerable trade with China and India.

The opening of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway in the 1830s, one of the world's first, made the growing number of docks on the Mersey even more of a hub for both the movement of goods and people.

The Albert Dock, one of the earliest enclosed docks in the world, was opened by Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert in 1846.

Liverpool became the greatest emigrant port in Europe, with up to 200,000 people a year sailing from Liverpool to start a new life in America.

The figures reached a peak following the failure of Ireland's potato crop in the mid 1840s. Many sailed from Ireland to Liverpool to either find work in England or to pick up a boat to America. But there were also migrants arriving from places as far and wide as Wales, Scotland, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Liverpool became a city of great contrasts, ranging from the tens of thousands who lived amid disease and squalor in cramped cellars to the merchants who built lavish homes for themselves and, in moments of benevolence, also built great public buildings, some of which still stand today, and splendid parks. However, the health problems of the poor were so appalling that many initiatives were taken in the city. The world's first public baths and washhouses were founded in Liverpool in 1842. Five years later, Liverpool was the first city in Britain to appoint a public health officer.But life was grand for the merchants and those able to enjoy a slice of Liverpool's wealth.

In 1854 there was the opening of St George's Hall, described by Queen Victoria as worthy of ancient Athens. Charles Dickens, a frequent visitor to Liverpool, performed many readings of his works there before his death in 1870.

William Brown Street

In 1857, on Liverpool's 650th birthday, an American merchant's son William Brown laid the foundation stone for the city centre library which opened in 1860 and still stands today in the street that bears his name. The Walker Art Gallery, opened in 1887, was paid for by a local brewer Sir Andrew Barclay Walker.

There continued to be many strong links with the US. This was clearly illustrated in the 1860s during the American Civil War when vessels were built on the Mersey for both sides in the conflict. Most famous was the Alabama, built at Birkenhead, which sunk 68 ships. The last act of the U.S. Civil War was the surrender of the Confederate ship Shenandoah by her captain at Liverpool Town Hall, six months after the war had come to an end.

The city's influence continued to grow. Four times prime minister between 1868 and 1894 was Liverpool merchant's son William Gladstone, who was born at 62 Rodney Street.

Liverpool began the 20th century as England's second city and full of optimism, which was illustrated by the building work undertaken.

The foundation stone for the Anglican Cathedral was laid by King Edward VII in 1904. Also being conceived at this time were the three buildings, which have dominated the Liverpool waterfront ever since: the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool building, which together became known as 'The Three Graces'.

First, the Port of Liverpool Building was completed in 1907 in a style described as a dome reminiscent of St Paul's Cathedral rising over a Renaissance palace. Then the Royal Liver Building opened in 1911 with the Liver Birds on top.

The Cunard Building (right) - made of Portland stone and in the style of an Italian palazzo - opened in 1916 as the headquarters of the Cunard Steamship Company, which had begun its trans-Atlantic passenger service from Liverpool in 1840.

The Adelphi opened in 1912 to accommodate the rich and famous who used the trans-Atlantic liners sailing in and out of Liverpool.

Liverpool's pre-eminence as one of the world's major ports had resulted in the city becoming a major commercial centre due to the paperwork surrounding the transit, sale and insurance of the cargoes.

Three Liverpool insurance companies were among the only four insurance companies that paid in full the claims made on them by policyholders affected by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

The Titanic set sail from Southampton but was registered in Liverpool as the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company had its head office at Albion House, where many of the crew had signed on to the ship. Still standing today, Albion House, on the corner of The Strand and James Street, was besieged by relatives desperate for news of their loved ones after the ship sank.

Liverpool continued as a major port, so much so that by 1930 it was calculated that a total of nine million emigrants had set sail from the Mersey in the 100 years from 1830. Then came the Second World War in which Liverpool played a major strategic role.

The Mersey was the Western gateway for supplies and troop movements and Liverpool housed the Allied headquarters for the Battle of the Atlantic.

Merseyside was the Luftwaffe's chief British target outside London. Nearly 200,000 houses were destroyed or damaged. Around 4,500 men, women and children died in bombing raids on Merseyside between 1940 and 1942. Visitors can still visit the Battle of Atlantic HQ where,in a fortified underground bunker, the movement of ships, submarines and aircraft was plotted on huge wall charts and tables while top secret signals were transmitted and received. See Western Approaches on the Sightseeing page.

It is close to St Nicholas's Church where in July 2000, Prince Philip unveiled a tribute to those who died in the Luftwaffe raids on Liverpool - a 15ft statue depicting a mother pleading with her son to take shelter from the bombs.

Liverpool is fondly remembered by many U.S. servicemen who were stationed at bases around the city, such as Aintree and Haydock. Eleanor Roosevelt visited Liverpool in 1942. But the biggest U.S. base was Burtonwood, around ten miles outside Liverpool, which still housed tens of thousands at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s. Consequently many 'GI brides' originate from Merseyside.

But the Second World War had left Liverpool with many areas flattened. Prefabricated buildings were put up as temporary housing on the outskirts of the city. A lot were still there 20 years later.

In fact, they were a common sight to four boys growing up in Liverpool - John, Paul, George and Ringo. Paul even lived in one. The Beatles burst on the scene in the early Sixties and conquered the world.

Liverpool seemed at times in the Sixties to be almost the capital of England. In addition to The Beatles, many Mersey bands enjoyed success in the pop charts; the Prime Minister Harold Wilson was MP for the Liverpool district of Huyton; and the England football team's World Cup win at Wembley in 1966 came just a few weeks after Everton won the FA Cup in an equally thrilling final at Wembley, while Liverpool won the English championship.

However, these causes for celebration tended to conceal the fact that Liverpool was slipping into decline as a series of changes in the world economy took its toll on Merseyside.

Airliners had steadily taken custom away from the ocean liners and the last Cunard liner left Liverpool in 1966. Containerisation of the shipping industry meant that fewer and fewer dockworkers were needed to handle cargoes. There were also many factory closures. Then came the 1980s, a traumatic decade for Liverpool. There was the Toxteth riots in 1981. There was political turmoil with the city council locked in a bitter financial battle with the national government based in London. In 1985, the city was stunned by the deaths of 39 Italian football fans in the Heysel stadium, Brussels, at a European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus. Then in 1989, 97 Liverpool football supporters died in overcrowding in a fenced section of the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield.

The city began the 1990s with a belief that things had to get better. A new spirit of co-operation gradually developed and the result has been a huge wave of investment in a city rediscovering its self-confidence.

There is also return to living in the city centre with the growing number of buyers having a choice of loft apartments, beautiful Georgian houses and luxury flats in former dock warehouses.

As for the future, Liverpool continues to face many challenges. But given the increasing overcrowding and consequent strain on infrastructure in London and the South East of England, more and more companies and individuals are likely to consider moving to Merseyside.