Shadwell is a district in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London, UK. It gained parish status in 1669 when Thomas Neale, a project-manager and politician, built a waterworks on large ponds in the area and developed the waterfront so that Shadwell became a maritime hamlet. In 1801, the waterworks were sold to the London Dock Company and later the East London Waterwork Company in 1808. It became the site of the London Docks and in the nineteenth century was a dangerous area associated with slums, prostitution, and opium dens. Today, Shadwell Basin, a housing and leisure complex built around an old dock that was one of the London Docks, has been retained as a leisure and housing development.

In London Labour and the London Poor edition: 

Phase 1

Meeting of the Ballast-Heavers’ Wives. (Volume 3): "It is the wife and children who are the real sufferers from the intemperance of the working-man; and being anxious to give the public some idea of the amount of misery entailed upon these poor creatures by the compulsory and induced drunkenness of the husbands, I requested as many as could leave their homes to meet me at the British and Foreign School, in Shakespeare-walk, Shadwell. The meeting consisted of the wives of ballast-heavers and coal-whippers."

Phase 2

The St. Katherine’s Dock (Volume 3)

Rosemary-lane. (Volume 2)

Meeting of Thieves. (Volume 1)

Of the Trades and Localities of the Street-Jews. (Volume 2)