How do you remember a street that has disappeared off the map?
Liverpool is home to one of the earliest Chinese communities in Europe. The establishment of the Blue Funnel shipping line in 1866 brought seafarers from Canton, Shanghai, Ningpo, and Hong Kong to its shores.
What started as a transient community of seamen began to settle around the Cleveland Square and Pitt Street area, just a stone’s throw away from the docks, to take up employment onshore and set up laundries, boarding houses, grocery shops and restaurants. Material traces of these histories have now disappeared and rendered invisible in the present day.
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“Pitt street is an era as much as a place.”
Narrated from the perspective of a semi-fictional character, An Imaginary Archive of Pitt Street follows a young woman searching for a man known in the family only as “Ah Sam”. As she traces the elusive presence of Ah Sam in the archives, it marks the beginning of a speculative journey that led the narrator to reimagine the histories of Pitt Street and its inhabitants. One of the most common Chinese names recorded in the UK archives, the tens of thousands of entries makes it an impossible task to unpick the life of one Ah Sam from another. Soon, the parallel lives of the Ah Sam become entangled in the histories of Pitt street.