Sailortown

This article is about the general concept of settlements catering to sailors. For the former community in Belfast, see Sailortown (Belfast).

Sweet Basil Building, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It was the last wooden building on Halifax's Water Street and was typical of the "Sailortown" buildings which served seafarers in Nova Scotia's Age of Sail.[1]

A Sailortown is a district in seaports that catered to transient seafarers. These districts frequently contained boarding houses, public houses, brothels, tattoo parlours,[2] print shops, shops selling nautical equipment, and religious institutions offering aid to seamen;[3] usually there was also a police station, a magistrate's court and a shipping office.[4] Because it took several days, in the past, to unload ships, crews would spend this time in sailortown.[5] These were "generic locations—international everyplaces existing in nearly every port." Cicely Fox Smith wrote that 'dockland, strictly speaking, is of no country—or rather it is of all countries'".[4] Sailortowns were places where local people, immigrants, social and religious reformers, and transitory sailors met.[3]

Sailortowns were found in major seaports, including London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Bristol, Cardiff, Hull, Tyneside, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, New York, San Francisco and many others in Europe, North and South America, West Indies, the East, Africa, and Australia.[6]

Modern methods for handling cargo such as roll on, roll off techniques, and containerization mean that mariners spend less time ashore and this has led to the decline of sailortowns.[7]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Fingard p. 54 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ "Tattoos, Tars and Sailortown Culture," Port Towns & Urban Culture
  3. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference New Media Lab was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Untold lives blog 2016 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference BBC 2010 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference QNP4g was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ BBC Radio Merseyside"Share your memories of Liverpool's Sailortown", [1]. Accessed 5 February 2018.