Saturday, June 28

Shadwell Sailortown: Merchants, Pirates, Seamen, Slaves and Local Girls

From the 17th century Shadwell heaved with the licit and illicit buying and selling of everything related to shipping and sailing.

By The Naked Anthropologist

Date and time

Saturday, June 28 · 1 - 3:30pm GMT+1

Location

Shadwell Overground Station

Outside Cornwall Street exit London E1 2QD United Kingdom

Refund Policy

Refunds up to 1 day before event

About this event

Event lasts 2 hours 30 minutes

Shadwell was an early centre of Docklands, developed to supply both navy and merchant ships. Trades included sail makers, instrument makers, ship chandlers, ship brokers, victuallers, rope makers, glassmakers, sugar refiners, coopers, brewers, distillers and that's not all. It was a multicultural hub where escaping slaves hid out, fed-up sailors started new lives, river pirates spied opportunities and women provided the comforts of home in lodging-houses, taverns and brothels. And of course women were also seamen, pirates, slaves and merchants!

West Londoners came to experience the dangers of the many opium-dens that were standard unwinding for seafarers. Despite the lowlife, merchants based major businesses here to equip British imperial interests and explorations, including privateers sanctioned by the crown to commit piracy on the seas.

Shadwell Basin was the easternmost of three built in the early 19th century, displacing what had been a thriving village. The docks were heavily bombed in WWII, then filled and buildings left to crumble until redevelopment in the 1980s. This is part of the area where midwives from Jennifer Worth's memoir and Call the Midwife television series bicycled to help East-Enders.

On this walk we pass remnants of all these phenomena as well as river stairs, imposing warehouses, green spaces, the Thames Path and numerous appealing pubs.

The Naked Anthropologist is Laura's longtime blog, now dedicated to historical walks that highlight issues of Gender, Sex and Class.

Organized by

The Naked Anthropologist

Laura Agustín has been a writer, researcher and critical historian all her life. She has been a Londoner since the 1960s, although she has lived in other towns and countries. Author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, she has for many years focused on getting the stories out of women and others marginalised because of being poor, foreign, ‘different’ or doing jobs some folks think are Wrong, in the present and in the past. She spent time with illuminated manuscripts at the British Library looking for clues to how women lived 1000 years ago, and couldn’t stop reading even if she wanted to. She is known as The Naked Anthropologist. She has qualified as a tour guide in order to take this focus to the streets, where guided history walks rarely talk about the poor except as objects of charity.

£15