Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

Booth Poverty Map & Modern map (Charles Booth Online Archive)  Booth’s Poverty map is famous as it mapped London in 1898-9, classifying residential areas and essentially mapping wealth and poverty across the capital.  If you follow the link you can browse the 1898-9 map in comparison to a contemporary map of London - particularly if you know London well this is fascinating as you can look at how the social mix of the capital has changed (or not) over the past 100 years.  From this you can find out a fair amount about social mobility in the area, the gentrification of some areas of London.  Also, particularly if you look at the East End, especially around Wapping,  you can see some interesting evidence of how the occupational structure of the capital has changed, with the disappearance of many of the dock basins and if you walk those streets now you will note that there is much more residential housing now than in 1898, as warehouses have been converted into expensive flats.  You can also see how London was essentially segregated by social class - it would be interesting to see a map like this for London today and see whether such class segregation has decreased or is much the same.

If you click on “Home” you can browse the site further and there is lots of fascinating information on how the data was collected, people’s living conditions at the time and other aspects of Booth’s work.

The Economist also had a fascinating article on this on May 6th 2006 (pp.31-32), looking in detail at how Chelsea has changed.  They have created their own modern Booth map of Chelsea using Census data and talk about some of the social changes that have occurred in the area.  Unfortunately you need a subscription to access this on-line but any library worth its salt will have a hard copy of The Economist and the article is well worth reading.