Brad Beaven - Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700―2000

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

This first theme explores the nature and character of land-based maritime culture, its often idiosyncratic fusion of domestic and transnational influences, and the exchanges and interaction between seafarers, local landlubbers and the port hinterland. While the notion of sailors ashore still remains something of an underexamined issue in maritime historiography, the chapters in this section demonstrate a broader, more ambitious engagement with the liminality of port towns, probing the ways in which their cultures were constructed from within and without, from the influences of land and sea.

Urban-maritime cultures were not necessarily as schizophrenic as the term may first suggest. Port towns formed a cultural confluence through which flowed and churned concerns and attitudes drawn from both inland and the sea. They frequently embodied the outflow of ideas from the hinterland, acting as sites where the flotsam of contemporary anxieties relating to developing urbanisation gathered. Given their (often justified) reputation for hard drinking, prostitution, and an exuberant and excessive leisure culture, port towns often provoked an intensified fear and response from national and local authorities concerning familiar issues such as public health and immorality, particularly if they threatened commerce or naval efficiency. Yet at the same time they also drew concerns relating to the inward flow of a multitude of maritime influences, drawn from the vast, shared continents of the oceans. As points of ingress from and egress to the wider world, they were sites for facilitating the dynamic exchange of goods, services (legal and illicit), ideas, beliefs, stories, and potentially less desirable things such as epidemic diseases; they marked the transition from work to leisure, from confinement to temporary liberation, and vice versa. As places of homecoming they were locations where their land-bound communities frequently looked out to the water and dwelt upon the risks of maritime endeavours, while mariners looked to the land for its promise of safe return, comparative liberty, and pleasures often long denied.

This confluence of outward and inward dynamics energised port town localities, granting them a distinctive cultural richness and vitality. Urban-maritime cultures offer the historian an opportunity to explore where cultural influences come from, how they variously jarred or merged in specific spatial localities, and ultimately how they become part of a gestalt culture embodied within the life experiences and representative imaginings of port towns. They illustrate how maritime practices and mentalities seeped into the city and how seafarers took their land-learned cultures with them to sea. Urban-maritime cultures are sites where domestic and far-flung foreign cultures from overseas met and cross-fertilised.

A number of themes emerge from the chapters in this section. These include a persistent, underlying concern with urban anxieties and maritime otherness, tensions between the cultures within sailortowns and the broader, authoritative urban power structures in which they coexisted, and the frequently fluid nature of personal and collective identities in the waterfront city. Firstly then, port town cultures were simultaneously constructed from within and without, generating iconic representations (both positive and negative) that derived from, but also vied with, the realities of lived urban-maritime experiences. Paul Gilchrists exploration of song writing and maritime cultures in nineteenth-century Newcastle considers the shaping of social attitudes towards and representations of sailors, and the relationships between the everyday experiences of life in a port town and life at sea. Through its overview of poetry and song written by maritime workers, the chapter shows how sailors enjoyed a dual position from local versifiers, as both object of attachment and patriotism while also being subject to comic description and satire. Karl Bells chapter explores the role of religion and religiosity in shaping representations of anxieties and enacted notions of otherness in Victorian Portsmouth. It examines the ways in which the rhetoric of religious authorities and moral reformers helped construct an image of Britains premier naval town as a godless void, a place of heathen depravity. Moving within the towns community, it then considers Portmuthians and naval seamens popular religious mentalities, arguing that this fusion of Christian and superstitious beliefs and practices offered sailors and their land-based families a sense of comfort and control over anxieties about the otherness of life at sea.