I’m glad to say I’ve achieved a goal to create walks in the East End of London. For these first walks I’ve focussed in the western area of what are called Docklands, the places where some of London’s earliest inland docks were located – large rectangles of deep water that ships entered to avoid anchoring in the river with the attendant rampant pilfering. The largest and first of these was called London Dock – its wall now a Marketing Suite with quaint signage.

At the beginning of the 19th century three of these docks were built east of the Tower of London near the parallel thoroughfares of Rosemary Lane, Cable Street and Ratcliff Highway. Maps sometimes make the whole area look empty, but there were people living there, working for their livings in villages called Ratcliff, Shadwell and Wapping, surrounded by shipping providers of all kinds including very wealthy merchants. These latter are what histories usually cover; I’m expanding that to describe some of the social and economic life of women living there – non-elite working women. This is part of a project some of us historians call History From Below.

The first walk, on 7 September, is Women of Rag Fair, Rosemary Lane, Brothels and the Docks. It focuses on women who made livings as old-clothes sellers (sometimes called Frippery Women), sex sellers, lodginghouse landladies and tavern workers, along with women accused of witchcraft, women who lived by thieving and a convent of mendicant nuns, the Poor Clares. And of course the wives of seamen who sometimes were away for years and took charge of making lives for themselves on their own. We’re talking about a lot of interesting women.

Rag Fair extended from Tower Hill along Rosemary Lane into Cable Street in the Manor and Ancient Parish of Stepney. There was an area of permanent market, but many vendors moved up and down the streets. Some of the back-alleys still wend their ways past dock walls allowed to remain after the docks were razed.

Brothels proliferated, set up to service sailors between ships. Damaris Page, called by Samuel Pepys ‘the great bawd of the seamen’, ran a brothel near the Navy Victualling Office, which for a fee she allowed naval press-gangs to search for men to force into the Navy. When apprentices attacked brothels in the Bawdy-House Riots of 1668, Page’s place was targeted. One of the writers of the satiric Poor Whores’ Petition, she went on to become a property-speculator, In her will she left tuppence apiece to ‘the Sisterhood’ of whores to buy thread to mend their stockings.

Fans of Call the Midwife will be interested to see the alley where young Mary escaped from a brothel-café in an area devastated by bombs in WWII and afterwards allowed to decline into slums and squats that formed a red-light district. Where we walk was part of the territory midwives bicycled from their base in Poplar.

Two women accused of witchcraft lived here, their ways of life not to the liking of mainstream men. And JMW Turner was here, he who liked prostitutes and said I hate married men. They never make any sacrifice to the arts but are always thinking of their duty to their wives and their families, or some rubbish of that sort.

These are only a few of the history-bits you’ll hear on this walk so come if you can: Saturday 7 September at 1300, starting at Tower Hill Station.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist