From 1821 English courts began to sentence convicted criminals to penal servitude in Australia, for a set term or for life. Most never returned to England, becoming settlers of different kinds in the colony. On this walk we follow the documented story of two Islington girls, Mary Moore and Ann Wade, 16 and 15, who in 1825 were caught thieving from a shop on the Goswell Road. They were sent to Newgate Prison, tried at the Old Bailey, convicted and sentenced to death. In Newgate they very likely met prison-reformer Elizabeth Fry.

After three months the girls’ sentence was commuted to transportation for life, and they were taken in a cart to Blackfriars Stairs to board a lighter to the ship Grenada anchored at Woolwich. There they waited 60 days before setting off for Botany Bay on a journey that took another three months.

Convict ships were required to carry a naval surgeon to keep conditions minimally hygienic, but what did these passengers do all day? What happened in storms and when ships stopped in ports?

Mary and Ann survived the voyage and disembarked, but there’s no record of how they got on afterwards. Many poor transported women were eager at the opportunity to start a new life even in a penal colony.

From the commercial gaiety of Islington the walk passes sites of several Clerkenwell prisons before reaching Newgate and eventually the river that leads to the sea.

The Naked Anthropologist is Laura’s longtime blog, focusing now on London walks with Gender, Sex and Class.