Brad Beaven
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The imagined geography of Ratcliffe Highway
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This chapter argues that while social explorers imbued many similarities to the traditional slum tourists of the nineteenth century, Ratcliffe Highway’s ‘sailortown’ status unsettled researchers in very different ways from the ‘orthodox’ land-locked slum. For the nineteenth-century social explorer, the district’s remoteness and isolation from ‘civilisation’ had allowed sailortown to evolve unchecked by religious and civic intervention. Indeed, it was believed that sailortown’s seclusion had fostered a malign and degenerate maritime culture that was ingrained in its geography, buildings, commerce, and people. The chapter will proceed to explore how these lofty assessments of the people and the environs of Ratcliffe Highway clashed with the realities of a robust and confident working-class community. This community, along with a notable number of local business people, challenged the dominant narrative of sailortown that stigmatised the people and the district.

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The devil’s highway

Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c. 1850–1900.

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