Black Limehouse Lives
An exhibition, Black Limehouse Lives, The Black Experience and Parish Life through the Lens of St Anne’s Records (1730-1830), runs at St Anne’s Limehouse on Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays from 10am-4pm until 20th February. Below, Wink Lorch, curator, introduces the project.
‘Our newly launched exhibition has been curated by a volunteer team of writers and editors from Care for St Anne’s working with the Mapping Black London team of students led by Professor Olly Ayers at Northeastern University London who assisted with research, writing and design.
The exhibition explores the lives of Black people who arrived in Limehouse in Georgian times and were baptised at St Anne’s, during the first hundred years of the church. It examines why and how they arrived here, why they were baptised, where they lived, and who they worked for, plus importantly whether they were still enslaved or free. These individuals include servants of ships’ captains and other wealthy people, as well as black people who most likely fought in the American Revolutionary War and were given freedom and a passage to London at the end of the war. Old Bailey records extended our research to further individuals located in Limehouse at the time. The exhibition also explores briefly the Lascars in Limehouse, two of whom were recorded on the first page of the burial register for St Anne’s.
We decided to put the lives of these Black individuals into context by focussing on the early years of St Anne’s church and its new Limehouse parish. We have unearthed information never displayed before, including the church’s ancient connections with Brasenose College, Oxford. With help from the Northeastern students, we also included information discovered from archives at Lambeth Palace Library. This includes indentures (property contracts) relating to the church, a ‘visitation return’ from 1787, which documents numbers residing in the parish, those adhering to other faiths, and how the poor were looked after. We also reveal a case of brawling between a Curate of St Anne’s and a Churchwarden.’ Wink Lorch
