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…