Scandal & Society · Liverpool, Merseyside
Liverpool Sailortown — Land-Sharks and Lodging Houses
Victorian Liverpool's Sailortown was a waterfront economy of lodging houses, pubs, brothels and crimps—and also a set of close migrant communities that hostile observers reduced to vice.
The story
Around Paradise Street, Wapping and Park Lane, Liverpool's nineteenth-century Sailortown served one of the world's busiest ports. Period authorities counted hundreds of brothels and thousands of women working in or around the sailors' quarter, although all such estimates are necessarily uncertain. The district also ran on crimping: lodging-house keepers and agents controlled sailors' wages, credit and access to ships. Contemporary and later accounts often sensationalised this trade, so the evidence needs the same correction applied to Tiger Bay: exploitation was real, but a working migrant district was more than the respectable city's story about it.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- Historic England, Shock City: Sailortown Liverpool
- Cambridge University Press, The Liverpool Underworld: Prostitution (paywalled)
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