LIVERPOOL is the best-known provincial British city in the US, according to a new survey. 

It topped the rankings in a Google consumer poll of Americans who were asked to name a UK city that wasn't London. 

The survey of 1,000 US respondents, conducted by website BlogSession, saw 15 per cent answer “Liverpool”.

Was it the Beatles, was it the soccer, who knows? But it scraped into the lead just ahead of Manchester (12 per cent), effectively putting the North West vastly ahead of the rest of the UK on the radar of those "Over There".

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Third placed Leeds could only scrape 4.7 per cent, Cambridge (3.7 per cent) and Bristol (3.6 per cent).

But a little knowledge, or no knowledge of the outside world, is a dangerous thing.

In the bottom no 10 slot of best known British cities came Paris (cue Family Fortunes buzzer)  with 1.9 per cent of the vote. More than two per cent had no clue at all and answered, “I don't know.”

Other answers from the world super-power, where only two in five people have a passport, included “Whales”, Devonshire, “Bathe” and Queens.

Stacey Cavanagh, who conducted the poll and who and works in SEO for a Manchester-based digital marketing agency, puts the win firmly down to Americans' love of all things Fab.

She told Confidential: "The survey was the response of a bit of an office debate about whether Manchester, or Birmingham, should be the UK's official second city.

"Obviously, we were a bit biased. So, just for fun, I thought I'd see what our transatlantic counterparts made of it.

"Clearly, I didn't factor in Beatles-mania (fail on my part) and we were pipped to the post by Liverpool. To be fair, being beaten by the Beatles is understandable!"