No more Sailortown?

It was middle-class sensibilities that finally broke sailortown, but not in the way that James Fell would have imagined. The sailortown disappeared because it never really existed and once most people forgot about it (except for folklorists such as Cicely Fox Smith, David Bone and Stan Hugill) it disappeared. Like the western frontier, the sailortown was present in the collective imaginations of people on the outside looking in, and this world was exaggerated and mystified by its inhabitants. Seafarers found sailortown to be extremely useful—it created a view of seafarers as extremely manly, with legendary feats of womanizing, fighting and drinking—but they abandoned the supposedly strict boundaries of these places when it suited them. The middle-class found seafaring manliness threatening and tried to reduce the attractiveness of sailortown by portraying seafarers as victims, preyed upon by the various archetypes existing within this exotic space: the thieving prostitute, the cunning Jewish tailor, the sly Chinese opium-den keeper, the young but worldly pick-pocket. Sailortown lives on in song and tale, but a walk down Radcliffe Highway will no longer yield its secret alleys of pubs and brothels.