This book argues that sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. This is perhaps even more remarkable given that the sheer size of the international seafaring workforce that stepped ashore on Ratcliffe Highway placed sailortown’s transient nature on a different level to the traditional slum. While the bourgeois observer viewed the district as chaotic and dangerous, to the international sailor, Ratcliffe Highway exhibited the recognisable characteristics of an urban–maritime culture associated with sailortown. This culture infused the locality and informed sailortown’s own micro-economy of the merchant shipping industry, sailor leisure, and boarding facilities. In understanding how sailortown functioned, this book has viewed Ratcliffe Highway through the prism of a contact zone. Pratt’s definition of contact zones as ‘spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other’ captures the complex cultural exchanges within these waterfront cosmopolitan communities. Sailortown was undoubtedly a transient district and a space of ‘heightened interaction’ that you would struggle to find in any other urban context. Its compact district fostered a space in which differing subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiating and at other times clashing with one another.