Shelter at the shore: the spatiality of lodging in sailortown and beyond

The port of Antwerp expanded immensely in the nineteenth century as it was able to capitalize on the transition from sail to steam from the 1870s onward, becoming one of the major ports in Europe.Footnote ¹⁵ The Belgian government’s thorough investment in the construction of railways proved a crucial factor as it connected Antwerp with the rapidly industrializing German Rhineland, which, among other things, increased the demand for both maritime and harbour-related labour.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, Antwerp’s ideal location in the Atlantic trade network allowed the port to establish shipping lines that served as extensions of the dense railway network overseas, particularly when shipping companies like the American-Belgian Red Star Line (1873–1934) transformed the port into an international hub for passenger transport between Europe and the United States.Footnote ¹⁷ Antwerp attracted different people across the social ladder, which in turn impacted the city’s demography. Natural growth and migration explain why Antwerp’s population increased from approximately 120,000 inhabitants in 1860 to more than 315,000 in 1910. As such, Antwerp was the largest Belgian city in demographic terms at the turn of the twentieth century. No other Belgian city, not even the capital city Brussels, could follow Antwerp’s pace.Footnote ¹⁸

The transformation of Antwerp into a world port attracted a variety of people, a part of whom embodied the global and transient nature that characterized sailortown and relied on the local lodging sector for room and board, information and entertainment. Although not all transients were attracted by the vibrant activity in and around the harbour, maritime growth and economic expansion were important factors to explain why Antwerp’s sailortown developed into a crowded quarter.Footnote ¹⁹ The maritime labour market mostly required male unskilled labour on the docks and clerical and merchant positions to facilitate trade, while the shipping industry, as a result of an insufficient supply of Belgian labour, relied heavily on foreign labour.Footnote ²⁰ Additionally, there was also a need for female employment in the domestic, harbour-related, entertainment and hospitality industries in and around sailortown.Footnote ²¹ The question now arises where these mobile groups were accommodated.

Although Belgian sources on the private lodging sector remain difficult to trace, particularly because such evidence is fragmented across time and scattered across a multitude of archives, an 1883 police report proves an exceptional source to map Antwerp’s lodging sector. The report was created in response to massive fires in large hostels for transmigrants in Bremen, which stimulated Antwerp authorities to instruct the local police to create a detailed overview of the conditions in every lodging house in the city, including information on the housekeeper, available rooms, beds and prices, as well as observations on cleanliness and morality.Footnote ²² As such, the 1883 police report enables us to reconstruct Antwerp’s lodging sector in detail, both spatially and socially (Database Lodging Antwerp). Since the report entailed the city of Antwerp in its entirety, it allows us to make comparisons between sailortown and the rest of the city in order to analyse its peculiarity.

Despite its relatively small geographical size, the 1883 report indicates that Antwerp’s sailortown harboured a significant amount of the city’s lodging facilities (Figure 1). From the 388 identified establishments, no less than 84 (22 per cent) were in a territory that coincided with the boundaries of sailortown.Footnote ²³ Furthermore, reflected in the red dots, a clear concentration existed in the core of the neighbourhood, a nexus of specific streets that were littered with various inns and lodging houses: Korte Schipperskapelstraat, Blauwbroekstraat and Schippersstraat, Oudemansstraat and Vingerlingstraat, and the Verversrui. The Blauwbroekstraat, for example, counted 37 houses (53 if we include the cul-de-sacs), 10 of which were identified as lodging houses.Footnote ²⁴ However, the map also highlights that strong concentrations of lodging facilities were not limited to sailortown. Lodging houses were a distinctly urban phenomenon, with particular concentrations near areas of arrival and departure or so-called transition spaces, such as harbours, quays and train stations.

Figure 1.

The lodging sector in Antwerp in 1883. N = 376 (12 lodgings could not be plotted due to uncertain addresses).

Source: Database Lodging Antwerp.

If we zoom in on sailortown, lodgings were paradoxically both larger and smaller compared to the rest of the city. Larger, in the sense that there were more beds available on average (5.7 in sailortown compared to 5.3 in the rest of the city), but smaller as there were fewer rooms and arguably less space (2.2 rooms in sailortown versus 2.3 in the rest of the city).Footnote ²⁵ Many of these were also twin beds. The upcoming middle-class ideals of private space were clearly not applicable for the general newcomer in Antwerp. This crowded character also emphasizes how the architecture of a lodging house facilitated encounters between strangers, allowing for opportunities to establish both social and professional networks, exchange information or just casually converse. Architecture, at least in theory, stimulated encounters rather than isolation.

For seafarers and other port-related professions, proximity mattered. Due to the temporary nature of the labour market, it was important to stay close to employment opportunities. The lodging sector cleverly capitalized on this. Near the harbour, room and board costed around 70 Belgian francs (BFR) per month, while elsewhere in the city, this averaged 50 BFR. Even though these numbers obfuscate the very diverse range of lodging practices and services this included, an average price difference of 40 per cent indicates that sailortown was not a cheap area to reside in – an able-bodied seaman in the Belgian fleet, for instance, earned about 100 BFR per month.Footnote ²⁶ Daily and weekly lodging rents were commonplace in sailortown, suggesting that the lodging sector often aimed their services at transients. Yet even within the harbour district there were striking price differences. In central commercial streets, such as the Schipperstraat, room and board almost universally costed 3 BFR per day (90 BFR per month), while in adjoining streets further inland, such as the Falconrui, this was about 10 to 12 BFR per week (40–45 BFR per month). The uniformity of prices in the main street furthermore suggests that lodgings here did not (have to) vie with each other for clients, but perhaps were able to settle cartel-like fixed prices. A newspaper article from 1879 mentions the existence of such an association of all lodging housekeepers in sailortown (excluding the Italian, Greek, Spanish, Turkish and black counterparts).Footnote ²⁷ In any case, the variety in prices with other streets suggests that seafarers had options without losing touch with the labour market.

The omnipresence, diversity and relatively high-priced lodging house sector reveal a thriving economy in Antwerp’s sailortown. This success was also an incentive for private organizations and authorities to offer alternatives and take control, not in the least because of the neighbourhood’s associations with alcoholism, prostitution, abuse and exploitation. These vices were considered detrimental for the well-being and discipline of the maritime labour force and the progress of shipping in general.Footnote ²⁸ As such, German, Norwegian, Swedish and British private organizations established seamen’s homes that were targeted at the many compatriots who dwelled in Antwerp, offering a safe harbour with affordable prices, the organization of meetings and a strict ban on all the vices that were associated with the lodging house sector, such as alcohol, promiscuity and gambling.Footnote ²⁹ For example, the German seamen’s home on the Rijnplaats had 17 rooms in 1890, while the new building on the Brouwersvliet could accommodate 100 seafarers in 1909.Footnote ³⁰ In 1891, the International Seamen’s Home (ISH), officially the Koninklijk Belgisch Zeemanshuis, opened its doors with some hundred beds available at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to previous initiatives, the ISH was not aimed at a specific nationality. Although the number of annual guests steadily increased from about 1,000 seafarers in 1892 to more than 2,700 in 1910, this remained only a fraction of the seafarer population.Footnote ³¹ On the contrary, the private lodging sector even continued to expand. A concise police report in 1914 counted 795 lodging houses, with 165 (20 per cent) in sailortown.Footnote ³² The private lodging sector in sailortown thus remained a major player in accommodation. This would only diminish when the connection between port and city was gradually broken in the twentieth century.Footnote ³³

Behind the facades: the profiles of lodging housekeepers

According to the 1883 police report, lodging housekeepers were mostly male, both in sailortown (84 per cent) and the rest of the city (82 per cent). This is likely an over-representation. London’s Victorian trade directories, for example, counted 566 lodging houses with a female owner, about 40 per cent of the whole sector in 1871. Through a comparison with insurance records, Alison Kay concludes that even this was likely an underestimation, as many of these enterprises were signed in the name of their male partner.Footnote ³⁴ A study on early twentieth-century lodging in Blackpool, on the other hand, also revealed an almost exclusively female-run sector.Footnote ³⁵ Regardless of the gendered ownership of the establishment, women, either as landladies, or in relation to the landlord as a partner or maidservant, would have been doing the bulk of the domestic work involved with the keeping of a lodging house.Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, this was a profession favoured by widows as it allowed women to generate income while simultaneously maintaining a (matriarchal) role in the domestic sphere.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, also in the case of Antwerp’s sailortown, 9 out of 13 women (69 per cent) were identified as widows in the 1883 report, whereas this was less pronounced for the rest of the city (35 per cent).

Lodging housekeepers were overwhelmingly middle-aged, with an average of 42 years of age in 1883. Individual foreigners’ files the State Security reveal that many of the housekeepers in sailortown had worked on the waterfront or were seamen.Footnote ³⁸ For instance, Peter Anderson from Stege, a town on the island of Møn in the south-east of Denmark, came to Antwerp in March 1890. He declared himself to be a seafarer, but a year later, Anderson worked as a tally clerk in the port of Antwerp, while together with his wife he was also running a lodging house in the Korte Schipperskapelstraat in sailortown.Footnote ³⁹ This and other examples strengthen the idea that lodging housekeepers would have been experienced urbanites, well equipped to guide their clientele through local labour markets, administrative practices and the urban social space of leisure and commerce. Yet we need to be careful not to overestimate the proportion of active or former seafarers in the sailortown lodging sector. Research in early twentieth-century Rotterdam demonstrates that only 35 per cent of the lodging housekeepers had a maritime background.Footnote ⁴⁰ Also, in Antwerp lodging housekeepers had diverse backgrounds. Take for example Catharina Bach from Rohrbach, Germany. Somewhere in the early 1880s, her husband had died. Being in her late forties and already having resided in Antwerp for several years, Bach opened a lodging house on the Brouwersvliet nearby the harbour. Neither her deceased husband, nor Bach appeared to be active in the maritime labour market before.Footnote ⁴¹ Her career change needs to be understood as opportunistic, a response to the economic necessity of providing for the livelihood of herself and her son after the death of her husband.

Given their origins, we can assume that Anderson’s and Bach’s lodging houses were targeted at Scandinavians and Germans respectively, although this does not imply that other guests were not welcome. Lodging houses in sailortown had names that referred to the origins of residents, luring them with national flags, illuminated signs, fellow-country waitresses and music reminiscent of home.Footnote ⁴² Literature indeed often highlights how lodging was a service for and by immigrants, providing a network away from home.Footnote ⁴³ In general, the composition of the origin of the entire lodging house sector in Antwerp mirrored the city’s migration field, with Antwerp’s surroundings and neighbouring countries as main recruitment areas (see Figure 2).Footnote ⁴⁴

Figure 2.

Regions of origin of lodging housekeepers in Antwerp (1883).

Source: Database Lodging Antwerp.

Sailortown clearly attracted more foreign lodging housekeepers compared to the rest of the city, especially from Scandinavia, Germany and Britain. Scandinavian and British lodging housekeepers even exclusively ran establishments in sailortown, but the number of Dutch and French lodging houses remained rather limited. Their geographical origins also ran parallel with the overall flow of shipping and the composition of seamen in Antwerp. Most of the incoming tonnage of shipping in the port of Antwerp in the late nineteenth century came from British and, to a lesser extent, German vessels and the Antwerp fleet relied heavily on labour from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Britain.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet crucially, the report indicates that lodging was primarily a Belgian affair, both in the entire city and in sailortown. In both contexts, Belgians outnumbered foreigners (79 per cent and 59 per cent respectively). Urban historiography often emphasizes the global character of sailortowns, stressing their vastly foreign constitution, but the findings indicate how much harbour districts were simultaneously rooted in their local urban environments.

The multi-layered functions of lodging houses

In Sleeckx’ novel at the onset of this article, we saw how lodging houses took on multiple auxiliary roles. Next to providing room and board, these places could also offer information on the labour market and create a home away from home. In this section, we will further scrutinize these functions and their applicability in general. In doing so, we will explore these interactions through a variety of sources that are less studied in this context. First, we will focus on the position of lodging housekeepers in Antwerp’s maritime labour market through a detailed undercover study by a contemporary journalist. Then, we turn to marriage records, police reports and popular contemporary literature to reveal socio-cultural ties between lodging housekeepers and their clientele.

As mentioned, the maritime labour market in Antwerp, as was the case in many other ports around the world, was largely controlled by informal recruiters, also known as crimps.Footnote ⁴⁶ These middlemen controlled the labour and wages of seafarers and therefore worked closely together with lodging housekeepers (some of whom combined both professions), runners (who lured seafarers at the harbour) and other associates, such as tailors and cobblers (who also often aimed their services at transients in sailortown).Footnote ⁴⁷ As testimonies on abuse and exploitation by crimps in sailortown increased in the late nineteenth century, the Dutch journalist Marie Joseph Brusse decided to go undercover as a steward in Antwerp to uncover how the seafarer spent his time ashore and how employment was acquired.Footnote ⁴⁸

Brusse, or Jaap Harms as his alter ego was called, detailed how he had not left the Antwerp train station before he was besieged by coachmen shouting: ‘For three francs I’ll show you the way’; ‘Come on, boys, enough of these, get a coach’; ‘I will show you a good lodging’; ‘Surely you have just disembarked, come with me, I’ll help you find a ship.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Jaap ignored these coachmen and instead followed his informer Toon – a seaman who was aware of his real identity – to a sailortown inn. Here again, they were approached by a man who offered them a ‘reliable’ boarding house and work aboard a Red Star Line vessel, Belgium’s main ocean liner service to the United States. On the insistence of Toon, Jaap again declined, replying they were going to lodge in the International Seamen’s Home (ISH).Footnote ⁵⁰ Once there, Jaap and Toon easily secured lodging in a room for two. Finding a ship to board proved more challenging. The ISH had some permanent runners, but these offered fewer positions than there were seafarers in the ISH. Their professional network – partnerships with captains and shipping companies – was limited compared to the informal crimps.Footnote ⁵¹ Therefore, one of the clerks suggested they should walk around the docks themselves to find employment. Later, in a sailortown inn, they were quickly approached by a man who promised to help them contact a shipping master in return for some gin. Brusse then described an excruciating journey to various inns in search of employment, although the answer was always that the shipping master was currently elsewhere.Footnote ⁵²

Brusse described a crimping system wherein various actors – coachmen, runners, shipping masters, innkeepers and lodging housekeepers – worked in conjunction to exploit the seafarer ashore of as much of his money as possible. In essence, Brusse’s account promoted the ISH, which, at least from his point of view, was the only place that offered a safe haven. He confirmed contemporary middle-class views that considered sailortown as an area with a unique culture where danger could be around every corner. To some extent, these perceptions were grounded. As noted by Stan Hugill, ‘one had to be careful where one boarded in Antwerp, for crimps would dope and shanghai [the practice to intoxicate or drug seafarers and then abduct them unto a ship and force them to work under harsh working conditions] a man without the bat of an eyelid’.Footnote ⁵³

We can assume that observations like Brusse’s and Hugill’s reflected a reality, but we should be vigilant about generalizations. While exploitative practices were indeed prevalent, these took shape next to equally and mutually beneficial interactions. After all, lodging housekeepers and their associates had much to gain from good relationships with their clientele. This would, after all, guarantee returning customers. As noted by the Antwerp poet Victor Brunclair, the landlady of a lodging house ‘knows that even if they [seafarers] do not call at this port again until ten years from now, their first steps will always go to her home’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the fictional novel Tille, the Antwerp writer Lode Baekelmans also described how Niels, a Norwegian lodging housekeeper, ‘was constantly on the move, going from the English consulate to the maritime commissioner for payment and hiring, visiting shops and exchange offices with his lodgers’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Seafarers who often disembarked in ports could familiarize with its urban specificities and from experience learn which inns, lodging houses and crimps to approach and, above all, which ones to avoid. The importance of word-of-mouth advertising in this respect cannot be underestimated. The longevity of the crimping process, well into the twentieth century, means that it was an effective way of structuring port labour markets.Footnote ⁵⁶

Nostalgic writings are thus indicative of more meaningful relationships between landlords and their guests and emphasize how lodgers, despite their temporary presence, could become part of the household. The parental relationship described in the opening example of Jan Savoir appears to be, at least to some extent, grounded, although reciprocal relationships remain difficult to substantiate empirically. Ongoing research on marriages of seafarers in Antwerp provides a glimpse into their social networks. A database, which consists of about 1,900 seamen’s marriages in Antwerp between 1850 and 1899, reveals that many witnesses ran lodging establishments, particularly when foreign seafarers married. If we include professions that traditionally worked closely together with keepers of lodging houses, inns and taverns, such as coachmen, tailors and cobblers, no less than a quarter of all witnesses at marriages of foreign seafarers had one of these professions throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁷ Some seafarers built relationships with their hosts that were based on a degree of confidence, which could even result in friendships. In 1899, Laura Olivia, the daughter of the Danish lodging housekeeper Lars Olsen Rasmussen, married Friedrich Krohn, a German fireman who had been sailing from Antwerp for more than six months. Most likely, Krohn met his future wife while staying at Rasmussen’s lodging house.Footnote ⁵⁸

Shared culture and/or origin could foster meaningful relations, but this inherent trust could just as easily be exploited. In 1901, the German seafarer Hermann Knoblik reported to the Antwerp police that his lodging housekeeper and fellow countryman Carl Weissenborn was a swindler (bedrieger). Not only had Weissenborn and his wife made him pay the same bill on multiple occasions, they had resorted to violence when he refused to pay. Furthermore, Knoblik testified that a few days ago two German seafarers started lodging with Weissenborn. Knoblik wanted to provide them a position aboard the next Red Star Line voyage, but the housekeeper resisted: ‘let those men stay here because they have a lot of money; I first want to see what will happen with it’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Lodging housekeepers had to strike a careful balance between, on the one hand, providing a good service to guarantee positive word-of-mouth advertisements and returning customers and, on the other hand, keeping their lodgers under their roof as long as possible to guarantee income. This could result in more durable patterns of co-habitation, as shown in the next section.

Visiting a sailortown lodging house: 10 Blauwbroekstraat

The previous sections explored the organization of lodging houses and their functions, highlighting their intricate ties with urban space. Yet the question of who made use of lodging houses in sailortown largely remains open. It has been suggested that many of these places were aimed at transient seamen, but the lack of empirical evidence requires more in-depth research. As such, it is useful to zoom in by exploring a single lodging house in Antwerp’s sailortown. This focus does not only allow us to paint a more detailed picture of lodging housekeepers and their clientele, it also provides more insight into the lodging sector’s role as a facilitator of global and local entanglements.

We investigate 10 Blauwbroekstraat, a property in the heart of Antwerp’s sailortown, for two reasons. First, the establishment remained a lodging house throughout most of the period. This longevity was rather rare, but it allows us to analyse its inhabitants in the long term. On the other hand, a comparison with other lodging houses reveals that this was an ‘average’ sailortown lodging house. The property got its function from 1860 onward, when Cornelius Peeters, who was born in the surroundings of Antwerp, moved to this address together with his wife and two daughters. The house, as advertised in an auction in 1914, consisted of two separate buildings: a row house and a backhouse. The row house had three floors, each with two rooms, and an attic. The ground floor consisted of a kitchen, taproom and toilet, while the backhouse had two floors with one bedroom each and an attic.Footnote ⁶⁰ The 1883 inspection report of the Antwerp police indicated that there were two rooms available for guests, namely one on the ground floor and one in the attic, most likely in the backhouse. Each room had four twin beds, allowing 16 guests to spend the night. Room and board would have cost around 75 BFR per month.Footnote ⁶¹

To identify residents at 10 Blauwbroekstraat, we mined the Belgian population registers between 1846 and 1900 (Blauwbroek 10 Database). This dynamic source registered all inhabitants, who, at least in theory, resided in Belgium for more than two weeks and subsequently documented every change of residence.Footnote ⁶² Transient seafarers thus elude our gaze, but a perspective on relatively durable forms of habitation is exactly what is needed to further complicate the notion of sailortown as a neighbourhood of exclusive transience. To visualize the data, we explore the analytical potential of the Vistime-function in R (Figure 3). Each line represents the stay of an individual at 10 Blauwbroekstraat, its length being an indicator of the duration of stay, while the colours reflect residents’ occupations.Footnote ⁶³ The vertical red line marks the opening of the lodging house by the Peeters family. The analysis is based on three categories of residents. The first category consists of everyone who either arrived and left along with someone else or carried the same surname as another inhabitant, which we marked as ‘Group’. Members of the Peeters family constitute the second category. A final category encompasses everyone who did not fit into the other two categories, indicated as ‘Single’.

Figure 3.

Residents of 10 Blauwbroekstraat based on population registers between 1846 and 1900. N = 310 (38 had no entry and/or exit date and therefore could not be plotted).

Source: Blauwbroek 10 Database.

Between 1846 and 1900, 10 Blauwbroekstraat accommodated no less than 332 different residents, marking a total of 348 different stays. Eleven inhabitants returned once and two did so twice. This translates to an average of one new inhabitant every two months. Transient seafarers were not recorded in the source, but we can clearly see how arrival was not a constant phenomenon. After the Peeters family opened the lodging house in 1860, there was a significant rise in single arrivals. It is impossible to accord everyone after 1860 a lodger status as this was not recorded in the source, but most of these singles likely were. On the other hand, many groups – families or otherwise related – persisted in living there, often staying for multiple years, in an unclear relationship with the Peeterses.

Furthermore, the population residing at 10 Blauwbroekstraat was quite diverse. Unspecified labourers (18.7 per cent) and non-maritime occupations (14.7 per cent), such as millers, smiths, shoemakers and barbers, took up residence at the lodging house of the Peeters family. For their part, seamen and port-related occupations, such as shipbuilders and rowers, were almost equally divided and accounted for 17.8 per cent in total. Seafarers appeared more often in a family connection and not as singles, challenging the perception of lodging houses as catering exclusively to single, transient sailors. However, percentages might differ to some extent because population registers did not always record occupations, while, albeit less pronounced, several residents simply had no occupation (a total of 9.8 per cent).

The presence of families at 10 Blauwbroekstraat accounted for a significant proportion of children; 22.7 per cent of the inhabitants was less than 15 years old upon arrival. Children, like elsewhere in the city, were omnipresent in sailortown, yet they are rarely considered in sailortown historiography. Other strongly represented groups were ‘housewives’ (9.2 per cent). Their description as housewife in the sources, however, did not do justice to the variety of activities these women performed. According to the population registers, landlady Maria Peeters was initially considered a housewife, even though we can assume that she, together with her children and/or maids, served guests and would have done the domestic work in the lodging house. Only rarely were women registered in another occupational role and when this was the case, it was mostly as a servant.

The gender dynamics skewed drastically when the Peeters family established a lodging house in the Blauwbroekstraat. Before 1860, we see a relatively static population, with every age until 40 years equally represented among both genders (57 per cent male and 43 per cent female). After the Peeters family moved in, the number of middle-aged men (between 20 and 40 years old) increased significantly and overall proportions skewed to 70 per cent male and 30 per cent female. This demography inclines to other findings on lodger populations.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, young single men were not the only group that increased in size during the period under consideration. A total of eight residents above the age of 60 years old, who were absent before 1860, also resided in the house. As such, it seems that lodging houses could also function as a sort of pension for the elderly, like Joanna Carpentier who definitively moved in alone at 70 years of age in November 1893.Footnote ⁶⁵ On the other side of the spectrum, many infants added to the size of already present families in the house.

Finally, as mentioned, the perception of sailortown as an exclusively international neighbourhood conflicts with our observation that more than half of the lodging housekeepers were Belgians. Does this imply that lodgers had similar geographical backgrounds, as suggested by the literature?Footnote ⁶⁶ Figure 4 shows the birthplaces of the residents at 10 Blauwbroekstraat before and after 1860. By far, most inhabitants were Belgians. Before 1860, over half of the inhabitants were born in Antwerp (58 per cent), with the port city of Ostend as second (16 per cent) and the remainder spread evenly across a diverse collection of inland Belgian and some foreign – mostly Dutch – towns. After the opening of the lodging house, the migration field of the house densified towards the immediate eastern hinterland of Antwerp. Admittedly, the largest segment was still born in Antwerp (34 per cent), although this figure is certainly amplified by high birth rates. Most of the population, however, was born in nearby polder villages, similar to where the housekeeper family hailed from. Only seven people (3 per cent) came from beyond the Belgian border. Six of these were born in the Dutch border region, in similar polder villages. The last one, William James Holland, was a labourer from Liverpool who married Melania, the youngest daughter of the Peeters family. Perhaps William met Melania as a seafarer during one of his earlier undocumented short stays at the lodging house? Transient seamen are undoubtedly under-represented, but our analysis demonstrates that lodging houses in sailortown were not only places where foreign seafarers came and went. As homes, they also housed a local population of labourers and small entrepreneurs, often for longer periods. The lodging sector in sailortown was characterized by diversity and adaptability, a testament to the unprecedented demographic and urban transformations of port cities in their age.

Figure 4.

Birthplaces of inhabitants before and after the opening of the lodging house at 10 Blauwbroekstraat in 1860. N = 304 (30 could not be plotted due to an unclear place of birth or entry date; the remaining 4 are beyond the geographical scope of the map).

Source: Blauwbroek 10 Database.