Limehouse: a Sino-British Interchange on the Victorian Water-Highway?

Millette, Holly-Gale (2014) Limehouse: a Sino-British Interchange on the Victorian Water-Highway? Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA): Victorian Transport, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. 10 - 12 Jul 2014. (Submitted)

Abstract

This paper considers two marginal late Victorian communities tied to the commerce produced by water transport and poses questions about their relationality. Inland boatmen were British travellers who made a living by transporting goods along England’s canal networks, which began to emerge in the late 18th century. The dissemination of local British goods regionally and eventually internationally, was made possible by this efficient use of Britain’s water-highways as throughout the nineteenth century local trade to global markets depended on these men and their boats. One of the most significant inland interchanges in London was at Limehouse. Limehouse was a canal barge port built in 1820 that offered canal boatmen an interchange to the Thames, The Regents Canal and the River Lea. Later in the century it would become an area peculiarly conducive to Chinese Immigration.

With overcrowding in urban areas following the repeal of the Corn Laws and mass internal diaspora, the late 19th century saw these canal boatmen accompanied by, first their female partners, and then their families. By 1880, many families were living aboard the very vessels that provided them their business. Also in 1880, immigrants from China occupied Limehouse. In a similar pattern to canal boatman, they were an exclusively male diaspora at first and were followed by female partners in 1900. Two marginalised communities developed at the Limehouse interchange: the boatman’s community and the Chinaman’s. Both communities vacillated and transitioned within oppositional spatial boundaries, and both communities existed in a netherworld where their otherness was perceived, in a touristic way, as exotic, transitory, and earthy. Crucially, both communities existed solely on the commerce and the trade that water-transportation provided. This paper asks: What can be gained from investigating the commonality between these two significant Limehouse communities and to what degree did they interact?

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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