• Walking Tour – Shadwell Sailortown: Pirates, Seamen, Slaves and Local Girls
    Walking Tour – Shadwell Sailortown: Pirates, Seamen, Slaves and Local Girls
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    From the 17th century Shadwell heaved with ship-suppliers, sailors on leave, pirates, runaway slaves, lascars, opium-eaters and sex workers. Shadwell was an early centre of Docklands, developed to supply both navy and merchant ships. Trades included sail makers, instrument makers, ship chandlers, ship brokers, victuallers, rope makers, glassmakers, sugar refiners, coopers, brewers, distillers and that’s…

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  • Walking Tour – Disgraceful Women of Old St John’s Wood
    Walking Tour – Disgraceful Women of Old St John’s Wood
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    In St John’s Wood Alternative Lifestyles were the norm, but nearby Lisson Grove saw the first sex-slave scandal, of young Eliza Armstrong. This walk begins 200 years ago in St John’s Wood, where family arrangements routinely diverged from Victorian rules of respectability. What did it mean to be a Kept Woman? Was it only disreputable…

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  • Walking Tour – Tumult of Women: Rag Fair, Rosemary Lane, Brothels and Docks
    Walking Tour – Tumult of Women: Rag Fair, Rosemary Lane, Brothels and Docks
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    East of the Tower rag-sellers, sex workers, thieves and so-called witches held sway in an area flattened by building the 1805 dock. Women reigned in Rag Fair, which extended from Tower Hill along Rosemary Lane into Cable Street in the 17th- to 19th-century parish of Stepney. The permanent market centred near Wellclose Square, but many…

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  • Walking Tour – Scratching out a living: The Medieval Female Proletariat
    Walking Tour – Scratching out a living: The Medieval Female Proletariat
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    How do we know how poor women lived in the Middle Ages when historians have ignored them? Walk the Thames and meet 6 medieval working women. Written history records only the rich and famous, because poor women do nothing interesting – right? No! Ordinary working women had interesting, varied lives in the Middle Ages, and…

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