Feature: British city that rises like phoenix with help from EU

Liverpool has risen from the ashes like a phoenix to become one of Britain's most successful cities, earning its place on the world tourism map.

Just 20 years ago Liverpool was being written off as a basket case with mass unemployment and social deprivation, hectares of desolation where thriving factories once stood.

What kick started Liverpool's road to recovery was the European Union pouring almost 3 billion U.S. dollars into a dying city that less than a century earlier had prided itself as being the second city (after London) of the British Empire.

The EU declared Liverpool as an Objective One area, one of the poorest regions within the vast EU area.

It flung open the door to an unthinkable fortune worth, with private sector match funding, almost 6 billion U.S. dollars.

The city earned its reward in 2008 when it was celebrated being the European Capital of Culture, its historic waterfront also becoming a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Yet a recent survey shows Liverpool is near the top of a list showing areas likely to vote to leave the EU in next Thursday's national referendum.

Politician Flo Clucas, former deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, is in no doubt that the EU rescued the city.

"It was transformational beyond our wildest dreams. Liverpool had been written off as a basket case, but we refused to just lay down and die.

"Funding from Brussels kick started a regeneration and a renaissance creating a city that is totally unrecognizable compared to the Liverpool of the 1980s and 1990s. The big factories had disappeared, many of the old docks closed."

"There were signs everywhere saying 'we couldn't have done it without EU.' Funding from the EU put the city back on the world map for all the right reasons," said Clucas, also European envoy for Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson.

Mayor Anderson has also spoken passionately about the impact of EU funding.

Most people in the city are acutely aware of the difference those millions of euros made to Liverpool. So why are so many of its citizens planning to vote leave on June 23? Local analysis suggests concern about uncontrolled immigration is the main reason.

This week the city's main newspaper, the Liverpool Echo urged its readers not to turn its back on the EU. Its editor Alastair Machray wrote on Thursday: "At the end of it all there's loyalty. A word Liverpool, battered but unbowed, understands more clearly perhaps, than any other city." Endit