Liverpool began in 1207 as "Liuerpul" – a muddy pool by King John's decree, built to launch Irish campaigns from what was probably the least promising patch of Merseyside silt you could imagine. Standing at the Pier Head today, watching the Mersey roll past the Three Graces, I tried to picture that original "lifer pol" and couldn't. This city rewrote its own story so many times the mud is buried under eight centuries of ambition.

In 1715 they built the world's first enclosed wet dock – the Old Dock – and invented hydraulic lifting cranes here before anyone else thought ships needed that kind of help. By the late 1700s Liverpool had locked itself into the slave trade triangle: manufactured goods out, enslaved people across the Atlantic, plantation crops home. It's the kind of prosperity that still shadows the waterfront, and the International Slavery Museum at Albert Dock doesn't let you forget it.

By the late 19th century, forty percent of the world's trade passed through Liverpool's docks – the second port of the British Empire behind London, which is like being the second-loudest voice in a room full of empires. When Jesse Hartley and Philip Hardwick designed the Royal Albert Dock in 1846, they built the first major British structure made entirely of cast iron, brick, and stone – no structural wood at all. It's now the largest collection of Grade I listed buildings in Britain, and walking through those colonnades feels like touring the bones of industrial revolution itself.

We walked off the ship straight into the legacy of all that history, and then promptly went looking for the Beatles. The Beatles Story at Albert Dock had us tearing up at John's round spectacles, and the reconstructed Cavern Club still smells of beer and 1962. Liverpool has produced more UK number-one singles than any other city – the "Mersey Beat" sound that emerged in the 1960s became the sound of a generation. The Beatles alone contribute eighty-two million pounds a year to the local economy, which means Paul McCartney is still working harder than most of us.

We did the Magical Mystery Tour bus – driving past Penny Lane, Strawberry Field, and the childhood homes felt like trespassing on sacred ground. Liverpool was European Capital of Culture in 2008, and you can feel it in the way the city wears its past: fiercely, proudly, with a Scouse accent that makes every fact sound like a friend telling you a secret.

We had lunch at proper Scouse stew at The Philharmonic Dining Rooms – a Victorian palace of marble and mosaics where John Lennon once said the only problem was "the men's toilet is too beautiful to use." The pros: genuinely warm Scousers who talk to you like family, history layered so thick you can taste it in the salt air. The cons: some areas still rough around the edges, but the city wears its scars the way it wears everything else – proudly.