Queer Along the River

Queer Along the River is an ongoing project mapping queer history in South London, which I have been working on since 2023. It concentrates on the area between Southwark and Deptford in the 16th to early 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, photography, audio and mapping workshops, walks and talks. The project culminates in a collaborative exhibition at Deptford Lounge in February 2026 for LGBTQ+ history month.

Autumn 2025 from left:  queer walking tour from Goldsmiths; discussing Octavia Hill at Meet Me at The Albany;  history and drawing at the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre.

Next Queer Along the River Art and History workshops:
 
Friday 19th December 2025: 2pm - 4pm Deptford Lounge, 9 Giffin Street, Deptford, SE8 4RJ
No need to book, please arrive on time.

Monday 12th January 2026: 5pm-7pm London LGBTQ+ Community Centre 60-62 Hopton Street, SE1 9JH (next to the Tate Modern)

The workshops are aimed at LGBTQ+ individuals and allies.

If you would like to be involved in the project or have any queries please contact me at: c.hahn@gold.ac.uk

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, tanning pits 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 that my father’s family have lived here for seven generations. As a member of the queer community,  I feel at home with the LGBTQ+ people who have lived here. 

Below, I introduce four of the people who lived in the area and the Victorian myths that threaten to overwhelm local legacies.

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 trans-man, or lesbian, who was married to a woman in 19th century London.

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.

What I find compelling about James’s story are the number of jobs he 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.

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 (below), after her mother died, in Peckham.


Max Hays. Watercolour Catherine Hahn 2025
Matilda ‘Max’ Hays (1820-1895) was a radical feminist, writer, journalist, actor and 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. 

In the early 19th century this densely populated area harboured high levels of crime, dis-ease and poverty. At the same time, it provided a place to settle and new opportunities, as witnessed by James Allen’s marriage and work history and Mary Hays’ presence as a feminist author. 

Interestingly, although Dickens and Mayhew mention local people with broader origins,  a whitened, Anglicized, cis-heteronormative vision of South London has come to typify descriptions of its ‘slums’.   Queer Along the River uses images to bring its wider history back.

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, including hundreds of people in South London.
Mapping Queer Southwark, Southwark Council 2020
Aisha Arif, LGBTQIA+ Friendly Spaces in South London South London Gallery