This book is one of a selection of titles by British photographers, supported by the Arts Council, showing the most outstanding work produced in this country. Since 1982 when Marlow went from The Sunday Times to Liverpool, he became obsessed both with the poverty and the vitality of the city and its people. He has returned frequently to the city to record the decline of a great maritime tradition and has created one of the most harrowing social documents of Britain during the last ten years.

In the past fifty years, port cities around the world have experienced considerable changes to their morphologies and their identities. The increasing intensification of global networks and logistics, and the resulting pressure on human societies and earthly environments have been characteristic of the rise of a »planetary age«. This volume engages with contemporary artistic practices and critical poetics that trace an alternate construction of the imaginaries and aspirations of our present societies at the crossroads of sea and land - taking into account complex pasts and interconnected histories, transnational flux, as well as material and immaterial borders.