Annie AHERN
1873-1923
Born: Ireland
Died: Poplar, London, , England
the Parish of St Paul's in Shadwell, is along the Highway, between Limehouse and St George in the East
<p>By the beginning of the twentieth century, Limehouse and the whole riverside district of East London, stretching along the Thames from the Tower and Wapping to Limehouse and inland north up to the Commercial Road, was a notorious slum area. Its streets of little terraced houses were squeezed among canals and railway-lines, timber-yards and sawmills, lead-works and coal-yards, dry docks, ship-repair-yards, factories and workshops. There was heavy pollution and bad sanitation. There was overcrowding, along with low and irregular wages and among the highest levels of child mortality and the highest levels of poverty in London. </p><p> What made Limehouse and its riverside neighbours distinctive was their maritime connection. This was the most cosmopolitan district of the most cosmopolitan city in Britain. Since Victorian times dozens of cheap lodging-houses and brothels, public-houses, beer-shops and dance-halls had catered for, and often ruthlessly exploited, a floating population of sailors with little English and too much money in their pockets: Charles Dickens Junior in 1879 noted how the cafes, pubs, beer-shops, boarding-houses and dance-halls along the old Ratcliffe Highway were ‘each, for the most part, devoted almost exclusively to the accommodation of a single nationality’. Thus the Rose and Crown at the Wapping end of the Highway was mostly used by Spanish and Maltese sailors. There were other places largely catering for Germans, or Swedes, or Greeks or Italians. There was even a music-hall, The Bell, which provided entertainment ‘for the edification of Quashie and Sambo, whose shining ebony faces stand jovially out even against the grimy blackness of the walls’. </p><p>In 1934 Limehouse Causeway was widened and a maze of alleys and side streets, including several occupied by Chinese businesses and lodging-houses, were demolished. </p>