page_title: Sailortown (port)
section_title: Cardiff's Tiger Bay
hierarchical_section_title: Sailortown (port) / The seaports / Cardiff's Tiger Bay
caption_attribution_description: Norwegian Church Cardiff Bay
context_page_description: A Sailortown is a district in seaports that catered to transient seafarers. These districts frequently contained boarding houses, public houses, brothels, tattoo parlours, print shops, shops selling nautical equipment, and religious institutions offering aid to seamen; usually there was also a police station, a magistrate's court and a shipping office. Because it took several days, in the past, to unload ships, crews would spend this time in sailortown. These were "generic locations—international everyplaces existing in nearly every port." Cecily Fox Smith wrote that 'dockland, strictly speaking, is of no country—or rather it is of all countries'". Sailortowns were places where local people, immigrants, social and religious reformers, and transitory sailors met.
  Sailortowns were found in major seaports, including London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Bristol, Cardiff, Hull, Tyneside, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, New York, San Francisco and many others in Europe, North and South America, West Indies, the East, Africa, and Australia.
context_section_description: During the nineteenth century as Cardiff's coal exports grew, so did its population; as dockworkers and sailors from across the world settled in neighbourhoods close to the docks, known as Tiger Bay (see also Butetown). This included immigrants from a wide variety of nationalities including Norwegian, Somali, Yemeni, Spanish, Italian, Caribbean, and Irish, helped to create the unique multicultural character of the area.
  Tiger Bay had a reputation for being a tough and dangerous area. Merchant seamen arrived in Cardiff from all over the world, only staying for as long as it took to discharge and reload their ships. Consequently, the area became the red-light district of Cardiff, and many murders and lesser crimes went unsolved and unpunished, as the perpetrators had sailed away. However, locals who lived and stayed in the area describe a far friendlier place.
  Following the Second World War there was a major decline in the  importance of the docks and therefore of sailortown. In 1999, the area was redeveloped by the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation. This resulted in the controversial renaming of the area "Cardiff Bay".
caption: Norwegian Church Cardiff, in Tiger Bay's sailortown
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