I’ve been poring over the Booth Poverty Map for London (1898-1899), taking a close look at the areas in Hackney that I’m most familiar with. My house isn’t on the chart - it stops short at the bottom of Stamford Hill, whilst I live near the top. Indeed, most of the redbrick terraces that characterise much of my area had only just been built.

Charles Booth created the maps as part of his Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, which he undertook between 1886 and 1903. His broad aim was to create a detailed picture of how poverty was spread throughout the capital, and where the worst afflicted areas were. A first map, Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889, was compiled from information gathered from School Board visitors. A second series of maps, of which part of one is reproduced above, covered a wider area and was also based on the findings of social investigators who accompanied London policemen on their beats.

As you can see, the map is colour coded. Each colour represents the level of poverty or affluence to be found in the different streets and houses. Black was the most miserable coding and was used to denote:

The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink.

The shades of blue indicated poverty, pink represented people with reasonable earnings, whilst red and yellow were used respectively for middle and upper-middle class residents. You can find a more detailed breakdown here.

Booth’s work was valuable, not only in giving us a detailed economic picture of London’s inhabitants, but in helping him to push for the introduction of Old Age Pensions. The owner of a successful shipping business, Booth saw his pensions plan as a necessary step to nip socialist revolution in the bud.

You can argue amongst yourselves about whether he achieved that - for good or ill. What I find particularly fascinating is using the map to see how the different areas of late 19th-century Hackney have fared. Broadly speaking, the poorest areas on Booth’s map appear to be the parish of St Mary of Eton (the site of the former Eton College Mission, now in Hackney Wick); the area to the south and south east of the then Smallpox Hospital in Homerton; the area surrounding the southern tip of London Fields; parts of central Dalston, spreading up to the southern part of Stoke Newington; and large areas of Haggerston, Shoreditch and Hoxton.

Haggerston is, even today, one of the most run-down parts of the borough, although it is slowly being regenerated as the gentrification of Shoreditch and Hoston creeps north. Hackney Wick is in dire need of investment (so let’s hope that the small part of the 2012 Olympic Park that creeps over the Newham border in Hackney Wick does it some long term good). Homerton is still a depressed part of the borough, and the southern end of London Fields is attracting wealthier residents round the Broadway Market area.

On the other hand, areas like Lower Clapton and Clapton Pond which have suffered greatly in recent years from poverty, crime and violence, are very much on the up and - increasingly - reverting to the fairly comfortable or affluent places they were about 100 years ago.

Of course, the summaries I’ve made about these areas are massive generalisations, although they are based on what I have seen as I’ve walked the borough.

That’s why I’m going to try and find time to make a better comparison in some of these places.

As I mentioned before, Booth was able to improve his second series of maps by sending researchers out to accompany policemen on their beats. They would make detailed notes of their walks and record some of the comments made by the officers. These notebooks have been digitised and put online, and they make fascinating reading. For example the notebook relating to my own area begins:

Thorpe [the policeman] has corns on his feet so I went round this district on a bicycle & then went over the street with him on the map afterwards. There is a marked absence of Public Houses and poor streets. Olinda Road at the NE corner of Stamford Hill is the only exception.

It’s no different today, except the coppers now have cars and can get the new community support officers to do most of the walking for them. Oh, and we’ve got more poor streets than before.

What I propose to do, then, is to trace the routes of some of the walks made by the social investigators and compare what they saw with what you can see now. I’ll plot the routes out on a new map, so you can compare them side by side, and I’ll add the photos I take to the Google chart over on my Hackney photo blog.

The first walk I hope to tackle is this one, undertaken on July 26th 1897.

Walk with Inspector Fitzgerald round district bounded on the South by the North London Railway, on the East by the Hackney Marshes & the Hackney cut, on the North by Millfields Road, & on the West by the Lower Clapton Road and the Urswick Road. Starting from Homerton Station.

Come back after the weekend to see how I got on, but in the meantime here’s the district as plotted out in the investigator’s notebook:

And this is roughly the same area today:

View Larger Map

I only hope I don’t get corns on my feet: I don’t have a bicycle these days.