Mr. Charles Booth's Inquiry

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Maps Descriptive of London Poverty

NEW: a trial version is now available of the online Booth poverty map, digitised from the 1889-99 published maps.

Data from Charles Booth's Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London was also used to classify and map out levels of poverty within the London boroughs. Seven classes were defined, from "Lowest class: vicious and semi-criminal" to "Upper-middle and upper classes: wealthy" and streets received a colour coding indicating their classification.

	Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.
	Very poor, casual. Chronic want.
	Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family.
	Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor.
	Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.
	Middle-class. Well-to-do.
	Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy
A combination of colours - as dark blue or black, or pink and red - indicates that the street contains a fair proportion of each of the classes represented by the respective colours.

Fig.1: Booth map colour code

The notebooks and papers associated with the survey help illustrate the process by which streets were classified.

There are four sets of maps produced by the survey:

Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889

• The original working maps. These are hand-coloured, and the base map is the 1869 Ordnance Survey 1:2,500 maps. Held at the Museum of London.
• Four maps at 1:10,560, published in 1889.

Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898-1899

• The original working maps. These are hand-coloured, and the base map is the 1894 to 1896 Ordnance Survey 1:2,500 maps. The sixty map sheets are held in the Archives of the London School of Economics.
• Twelve maps at 1:10,560, published in 1898-1899.

The twelve maps in the series entitled Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898-1899 will form the basis of the digital map data in the Online Guide to the Papers of Charles Booth.

For more information on the maps, and examples of modern research using the same data, see Ifan Shepherd's web pages at Middlesex University.

Sample

The following is a small section of one of the Booth maps, showing how the colour coding was applied to Ordnance Survey street maps of the period. A complete, digitised version of the 12 original maps will be available later in the year.

Fig.2: Sample of map around the present site of the LSE.

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