Legacies: Sailortown in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The classic sailortown declined with the age of sail, and the dominance of steamships in the early twentieth century undermined the old economics of crimping. But wartime dislocations revived old sailortown problems of transience and insecurity, provoking an inter-war building boom in missions, hostels and clinics that raised the standard of support available to visiting seafarers in most major ports. At the same time, however, the old sailortown districts were increasingly defined racially, as the descendants of black seafarers struggled to escape the waterfront and its outdated and irrelevant stereotypes. Regeneration projects from the 1980s created new waterfronts that often incorporated elements of imagined sailortowns, while further marginalising residents of the poorer districts a little way inland.