Victorian "poverty maps" of London
Charles Booth's groundbreaking "Poverty Maps" of London from 1886 to 1903 used survey data to visually represent the quality of life for Londoners across a city that was characterized by enormous economic disparity. The LSE maintains an archive of the maps, zoomable and overlaid with the contemporary London map. The maps are colored from black ("Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.") to yellow ("Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.") Link
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The category "STEAMPUNK" is an ever widening gyre, isn't it?
These maps are on display in Bishopsgate Library, or were at the turn of the century, it's probably all plasma screens and DVD hire now, and books are a distant memory. Cory, you will be rather pleased to see that the Brick Lane area is coloured black for the highest rates of poverty, mortality and crime. There are some great contemporary essays about the area here: http://www.eastlondonhistory.com/
You're welcome ;)
my thought exactly, moon... steampunk? i guess i'm just not quite understanding the term anymore...
Dupe!
Fascinating stuff that bears repeating, nevertheless...
I hope that Buckingham Palace is coloured black - the royal family has always been the biggest draw on the British economy - worst thieves of the lot! Did you know that the queen doesn't pay income tax!!!! (as it is Her Majesty's government.!) She now pays a voluntary sum decided by her accountants. Bloomin' terrible if you ask me guvnor!
Danny Dorling and others published an interesting study in the 2000 Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal comparing Booth maps from 1896 with deprivation maps derived from the 1991 UK census. They found “there has been little change in the distribution of poverty in inner London between the 19th and 20th centuries” and go on to show how the map of death rates in the 1990s also looks nearly the same as the proverty map in either 1896 or 1991. They conclude rather soberingly “The key message of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that redistribution of wealth reduces inequalities in mortality is as relevant today as when it was written over 150 years ago; the fact that inequalities in health persist and match the 19th century pattern of inequalities in wealth so well suggests that that message has yet to be heeded.”
The full article is available on PubMed Central at www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=11124169
You can also find some of these on display at the Museum of London.
Given the subprime crisis and the tremendous bonuses and options excecutives are making for driving companies into the ground or outsourcing a modern map might have the classification:
"Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy. Vicious, semi-criminal."
And here's a contemporary variation (though US focused)
Oooh - early information visualisations. Edward Tufte has written a few books on IV that incorporate a lot of the history, including early cartography, Japanese art and various other fascinating pre-computer era visualisations. Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte (Amazon).
A particularly awesome one is this 19th century French representation of Napoleon's Russian campaign losses.
Fuck me, 'gyre' is a bloody awesome word. Sorry, just had to comment that.
Ecobore:
You're right! In financial year 2005-06, for example, they cost the taxpayer minus £182.9 million!
I remember Erik Larsen mentioning this in Thunderstruck.
Looks interesting.
The place I'm staying at next week is on a street noted either as Purple (Mixed. Some comfortable others poor) or Pink (Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings).
Hard to tell with the fading of the colours...
;-)
Interesting. I just scanned a set of these (I have a large-format, high-resolution scanner) for a gentleman. They were original paper copies in a leather-bound folder. Wonder if these came from my scans.
@Monopole #9
So tolerant, so thoughtful. Anyone above your level has to be evil.
Subprime and outsourcing... u know.
A little Lewis Carroll for Niteowl:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe... ;o)
(Carroll did have a great way with words!)
Kobraki,
Doubtful these are from your scans, these maps have been online for some time now. I remember seeing the Booth archive site and marvelling at them several years ago. (They have these as original records in their archives, and you can purchase reproductions from the museum, according to their site.)
#17, Peterus, Monopole's got a point, though. A year ago, there were billions of dollars worth of bonuses because everyone in the finance sector was doing so well with their sub-prime mortgages. This year, the sub-prime bubble burst and all the low level people were laid off.
And the rest of us are suffering. But the people who got the multi-million dollar bonuses? Still working. Oh, they suffer a bit - they didn't get multi-million dollar bonuses this year.
Every balmy summer, colera would kill first 1000, then 10K, then 70K a year. And *that* is what started the mapping of London. The further up, in the sky, people were from the Thames, the lack of cholera they had. This is all in James Burke's 'Connections' documentary series, so I didn't like make it up. But he has computer models (in 1980!) showing the contours that they figured out in 1850! So what did they do? Spent today's equivalent of about ten or twenty Space Stations worth of "do it now!!!" cash on draining the sewers out to high tide sea instead of into the Thames. And that was a pretty cool thing to do, and saved about a million lives a year for decades, to this day.
I thought it was padlocking the public pump that saved them