Speaker: Prof. Brad Beaven, University of Portsmouth

Note: This is the British Commission for Maritime History’s annual ‘Proctor Memorial Lecture’. Registration to attend is to be done on the BCMH website, www.maritimehistory.org.uk, or at Lloyds Register https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/

Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, in this bustling district. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it harboured chaotic and dangerous ‘exotic’ communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations. They were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. This lecture argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The lecture 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.

About the speaker: Brad Beaven is a Professor of Social and Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth, and Co-Director of the Centre of Port Cities and Maritime Cultures which explores urban and maritime experiences, past and present.

Since 1990, he has published widely on urban popular culture in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His publications include Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men, 1850-1945 (2005, 2009 paperback edn), Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1850-1939 (2012, 2017 paperback edn) and Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfont, c. 1700-2000 (eds with Karl Bell and Rob James, 2016). His new book The Devil’s Highway: Urban Anxieties and Subaltern Cultures in London’s Sailortown, c.1850-1900 (Manchester University Press) is forthcoming (2024).

He is one of the founding editors of the Palgrave series Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History and serves on the board of Sage’s Coastal Studies and Society Journal that was established by the Centre for Port Cities and Maritime Cultures.