Charles Booth’s pioneering poverty maps of Victorian London show a vivid colour-coded warren of streets, alleyways and slums tightly packed together. Those marked black and dark blue were classed as being “very poor”, defined by “chronic want”. The light blue ones were poor – “18s to 21s a week for a moderate family”.
Pink streets housed those who were “fairly comfortable”, and those where the wealthy lived were marked in yellow. The maps by the British social reformer are the 19th-century equivalent of the modern-day indices of deprivation, which rank every geographic area of the UK by its level of social and economic disadvantage. Comparing the two shows how much has changed in the past 150 years – but also what hasn’t.
Historical slums have been cleared away and housing conditions have generally improved, but extreme poverty and extreme wealth continue to live side by side in the capital. Booth’s maps form the backbone of a new exhibition at Senate House library titled A Place to Call Home, which charts the history of housing and poverty in London over the past 200 years. People will be able to view Booth’s maps alongside a laptop displaying the current indices of deprivation, so they can see how conditions in their own postcode have changed over time.
The curators have also picked out individual stories from Booth’s notebooks detailing interviews he conducted with ordinary working Londoners, such as a chorus girl working at Drury Lane theatre who talked about how much her tights cost. They’re talking about a city 140 years ago, but there will still be things people find relatable,” says LSE curator Indy Bhullar. One of the exhibition’s rarest objects is a set of pamphlets from the Hampstead Tenants’ Defence League from 1936-39.
Some of the earliest examples of collective tenant resistance, they document protests, rent strikes, opposition to slum clearances and challenges to the local council. There’s a 1974 squatters’ handbook with practical and legal advice on how to squat, including how to change the locks, do your own plumbing and resist bailiffs. About 27% of Londoners live in relative poverty after housing costs are factored in, the highest rate in England, with high rent and housing expenses the primary driver of poverty in the region.
London has disproportionately high rates of damp and mould in social housing compared with other English regions – eight of the 10 local authorities in England receiving the highest volume of complaints are in the capital. The curators hope visitors will share their own experiences of this on the comment wall. They also call for groups who are campaigning on housing issues today to keep and donate their materials so the history of housing action can be continued.
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