The Devil’S Highway

Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, within its bustling bars, brothels, lodging houses and streets. However, for social investigators, it was perceived as a place of fascination and fear as it harboured 'exotic' and 'heathen' communities. Sailortowns featured in most international ports in the nineteenth century and were situated at the interface between urban and maritime communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and they provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations within subaltern communities. This book goes beyond conceptualising sailortown as a global economic hub that entangled sailors into vice and exploitation. It will examine how, by the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties relating to urban modernity encouraged Victorians to re-imagine Ratcliffe Highway as a chaotic and dangerous urban abyss. Certainly, the sailortown population was varied and engaged in numerous working-class trades connected with the marine and leisure industries such as dockers, stevedores, sailmakers, sex workers and, international seafarers. Sailortowns were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. However, the book argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban-maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.