The Boot Room Boys: The Unseen Story of Anfield's Conquering Heroes

Picture this: Saturday afternoons at Anfield, passionate terraces, a sea of red and Liverpool FC rules the world.

The Boot Room story starts in 1959 when Bill Shankly arrived and converted a 12 x 12storage room into a meeting place for him and his coaches, a move that had momentous consequences, both for the Club and British football.

Fans in the Kop will remember the heart-stopping extra time of the 1965 FA Cup Final, and the jubilation of winning the treble in 1984. But what was the common thread during Liverpool's glory years? It was the Boot Room.

Lifelong Liverpool supporter and editor of legendary fanzine The End, Peter Hooton takes us back into that old storage room, where first Shankly, then Paisley, Fagan and Dalglish in succession, drank tea, analysed, strategized, selected and deselected, and built the most successful British club in Europe in the 20th Century.

Illustrated throughout with powerful never-before-seen images from the Mirror, the Echo and the Liverpool Post, Peter Hooton sheds new light on the story behind Liverpool FC 's most exulted era, and celebrates a city flourishing around it.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Peter Hooton co-founded, edited and wrote for the legendary Merseyside fanzine The End which featured football, music and fashion. John Peel listed it as one of his all-time favourite magazines of the 1980s. Peter then became a songwriter with his group The Farm who went on to have a No 1 album.

Over the years he has had numerous articles published in a variety of magazines and newspapers including the Face, the Observer, the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, Loaded, GQ,
the Liverpool Echo and the New European. A lifelong supporter and season ticket holder at Liverpool FC , he wrote for the LFC Matchday magazine during the 1990s and contributed to several books about the club. In 2009 he authored the top-selling Liverpool edition in the When Football Was Football book series.

Peter has also scripted TV programmes, including a Granada TV documentary series about Liverpool’s social/economic and political history, BBC Newsnight (Hillsborough) and BBC This Week (Politics).

Peter has most recently been executive producer of a documentary about Liverpool’s legendary manager Bill Shankly, Nature’s Fire, which has received critical acclaim.