The ony time I have been to toxteth was early ish in the 80s. He locked the car doors before going down the high street and hoped we would not need to stop - anywhere! He was a liverpudlian and showed me the areas around Liverpool that had been bombed in WWII and still left desolated.
Hopefully things have improved over the last 40 years! It gave me a lasting impression of Liverpool, not much changed by the reports from students in the 90s. Baseball-batted gangs waiting for isolated students leaving the Uni campus and off-licences where the money was passed through a bottle sized aperture before the bottle was passed back through the same hole; all single bottles being on demo behind thick laminated glass. We were there only the one night and I was propositioned by a young lady even though we were not near any red light area. My lasting impression was of a very deprived city.
Has it changed at all?