Queer Along the River

Queer Along the River is an ongoing project mapping queer history in South East London. It concentrates on the area between Southwark and Deptford in the 16th to 20th century, as imagined on the map above. It aims to draw out the area’s diverse, migrant, working-class queer roots.

Queer Along the River includes drawing workshops, walks and talks at The Albany, LGBTQ+ Community Centre and Goldsmiths and a collaborative exhibition at Deptford Lounge in February 2026. The next public walking tour and workshop is at the LGBTQ+ Community Centre on the 16th November 2025. If you would like to come, please book tickets through their site.

South East London

Queer Along the River emerged from mapping South East London, which is fraught with past connections. Powerful juxtapositions of land and water, market gardens, factories and imperial docks, summon its working-class and colonial inheritance. Records reveal a diverse population, including African, Asian, Dutch, Flemish, French and Irish inhabitants from the 16th– 17th c.. Many of the rules of the city did not apply here, in particular in the outsider ‘liberties’ in Bridge Without (now part of Southwark).

For many people the area holds personal connections. For example, I was drawn to start the project after learning my father’s family lived here for seven generations and then finding the queer people who lived here. 

Below, I introduce four of the people who lived in the area and the threat of Victorian myths.

James Allen is known as a ‘female-husband’. He lived in Dock Head with his wife Abigail Mary Allen, who he was married to for 21 yrs. In 1829 James had an accident at his workplace, a sawmill on Jacob’s Island, and died from his injuries. He was then ‘discovered’ to have female anatomy. His story attracted international attention, with salacious speculation about the couple’s married life. In recent years he has attracted new interest as (in contemporary language) a lesbian, or trans-man, who was married to a woman in 19th century London.

What I find compelling about his story are the number of jobs James did in male industries. By the time he died at around 40 years old, he had worked in seven professions, at least three of which required apprenticeships. The couple’s marriage and James’s work provides evidence of the opportunities the neighbourhood offered for skilled labour and different ways of living.

James Allen’s Working-life

Top row (left to right):  Groom, Farrier, Tavern landlord ‘The Star’ with Abigail.
Bottom row: Pitch-boiler, Vitriol Manufactuary worker, Shipwright’s labourer, Sawpit box-man.

The Hays’ Family

Mary Hays (1759-1843), radical feminist writer and proponent of women’s independence, was born in Southwark and in the early 19th century lived in Mill Street next to Jacob’s Island. Her writing includes Female Biography the first encyclopaedia of women’s history. Mary Hays is an essential component in the queer history of South London, as she raised and educated her niece Matilda ‘Max’ Hays, after her mother died, in Peckham.

Matilda ‘Max’ Hays (1820-1895) was a radical feminist, writer, journalist, actor and mixed-race, lesbian, described as ‘half-Creole’ (a term used in London at the time to describe someone of Caribbean/African/French heritage). Matilda’s life was shaped by transgressive border crossing. She often wore male clothing on the top half of her body and female on the bottom. She had long and short-term public relationships with women, including her ‘female marriage’ to the American actress Charlotte Cushman and was the lover of the sculptor Harriet Hosmer.

Max also played a fundamental role in queer and female publishing. She translated the French feminist writer and proponent of ‘free love’ George Sands into English. She also co-produced the first UK publication by a feminist network English Woman’s Journal with the lesbian publisher Emily Faithfull, Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Bodichon. Thus, Max co-created alternative ways to live and the foundations for future queer and women writers.

Although South East London has a rich history, it is threatened with dispossession by sensationalist Victorian accounts, in particular those about Jacob’s Island (now part of Bermondsey), where James Allen, Mary Hays and two generations of my family once lived.

Jacob’s Island has been made notorious though Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, as the place where Bill Sykes met his end. Charles Dickens describes it as ‘the filthiest, strangest’ locale in London, empty ‘apart from criminals’ ([1837] 1999 402-3). In A Visit To The Cholera Districts Of Bermondsey, the social reformer Henry Mayhew represented Jacob’s Island as ‘a loathsome place’ of ‘indescribable filth’ (1849). In painting this bleak picture, the authors overlooked some of the actualities of living here, including the work opportunities it created. Likewise, although some of the characters mentioned had broader origins,  the texts offered a whitened, Anglicized, cis-heteronormative vision of South London that came to typify descriptions of its ‘slums’. 

In the early 19th century this densely populated area harboured high levels of crime, dis-ease and poverty. At the same time, it provided new ways of living and opportunities, as witnessed by James Allen’s marriage and work history and Mary Hays’ presence as a feminist author. Queer Along the River will use images to bring its wider history back.

Queer Along the River is indebted to the people who have mapped, researched and written about queer lives in South London.

References
Jen Manion. Female Husbands: A Trans History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020
Mary Spongberg, Gina Luria Walker  (eds). Mary Hays' 'Female Biography': Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism, London: Routledge  2019
Southwark LGBTQ+ Network. Southwark Queerstory, Peckham Levels 2018
Mapping Black London: contains a map of historic London with 3,302 people listed, over 500 of them in South London.
Mapping Queer Southwark, Southwark Council 2020
Aisha Arif, LGBTQIA+ Friendly Spaces in South London South London Gallery