“The parish is essentially sober but very immoral,” the Reverend H Bloomer told one of social reformer Charles Booth’s researchers at the end of the 19th century. He claimed to have been personally responsible for closing 20 brothels, though four to his knowledge remained.
It’s not very shocking that my neighbourhood in Jeremy Corbyn’s North Islington constituency was a den of vice in late Victorian times. After all, Hornsey Road was formerly known as the Devil’s Lane and frequented by highwaymen. The superb Hornsey Road blog once attempted to exorcise my manor’s diabolical reputation with the ironic tag line “probably not over a hell mouth”.
But maybe it is. Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography argued that neighbourhoods retained their venerable spirits. “[T]here are areas of London where time seems to have come to an end,” he wrote, “or ceaselessly to repeat itself.” St Giles was a case in point: the impoverished district near Covent Garden inspired Hogarth’s Gin Lane, and 250 years later Ackroyd found striking similarities in the 21st-century rough sleepers in its churchyard.
That suggestion of eternal recurrence would explain a lot about Hornsey Road – why present-day highwaymen on mopeds nicked the phone from my hands a few years ago; why a London knife crime map would require a lot of ink in that section; why the Hamlet Cafe, whose walls feature a reproduction of Delacroix’s graveyard scene, captures the manor’s gloomy vibe; and why police and councillors clamped down on Aqua Sauna in 2013, saying the feared Romanian women found working there would be be “harmed or exploited”.
More likely my manor isn’t cursed, just historically struggling against poverty.
That’s what Booth tried to capture between 1886 and 1903 by surveying the capital. He and his team of researchers walked every street in London, filling 450 notebooks with their finds and producing 60 maps, hand-coloured to indicate the level of poverty. Now those maps and edited highlights from their reports are being republished with input from researchers at the London School of Economics. The LSE has an online facility to compare then with the current situation, with modern underlay maps beneath Booth’s poverty maps.
“Surely this is the right moment,” argues Iain Sinclair in the book’s foreword, “when divisions between the visibly wretched and the invisibly rich in corporate, de-localised London are becoming critical, to publish a handsome, reconfigured presentation of Charles Booth’s inspirational reckoning?”
Poverty is no longer quite so prevalent as in Booth’s day: Booth concluded that 35% of Londoners lived in poverty at the end of the 19th century, and the Trust for London’s latest figures indicate that 27% do so today. But compare that with a national average of 21% and it’s clear there is a problem.
Some things have not changed hugely in London. The map indicates a huge workhouse on Cornwallis Road; like so many other smithies and factories, it’s long gone, and the site is now an adventure playground and park.
But in November 1897, one of Booth’s researchers, George H Duckworth – who was not only an Etonian, a Cambridge cricket blue but also Virginia Woolf’s half-brother – strolled up Hornsey Road with Insp William Dyball, describing it as “a road of small shops that depend for their existence on local knowledge: they give credit which the large houses on Holloway Rd and 7 Sisters Rd will not do”. That sounds about right: even today, chain stores are rare and buying products “on tick” is possible, as long as the proprietors know you.
On Booth’s poverty map, terraces running perpendicular to Hornsey Road are coloured brown, which means: “Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor.” My cul de sac, running parallel to Hornsey Road, still fits that description. We’ve got all sorts down here – Poles, Afghans, Pakistanis, City traders, tube train drivers, Nigerians, Cypriots, Muslims worshipping at the mosque round the corner, non-Muslims worshipping at the William Hill next door, council tenants, a declining number of people of Irish descent, Hooray Henry private tenants. Not to mention people like me who bought cheaply these modest late Victorian ex-council houses after Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy legislation and are now sitting on nest eggs that scramble the property market so as to exclude younger people.
Beyond my garden fence, there was once a street of grander houses coloured red for “Middle class, well to do”. The Luftwaffe did for them as they did for many of the homes in Booth’s map. Today Tollington Place’s bomb site is Wray Crescent Open Space, with cricket pitch, playground, and community-maintained raised beds. Let’s not overstate the bucolic makeover, however: the leafy corners have long proved handy for drug deals.
Not far away from Tollington Place on Booth’s map is a street that sticks out like a sore thumb, since it is coloured black, signifying as Booth put it: “Lower class. Vicious, semi-criminal”. That was Campbell Road, aka the Bunk, which from the 1860s until it was cleared as a slum in the 1950s was known as the worst street in London. Nearby, next to Hornsey Road Baths are two streets coloured light blue, defined as: “Poor. 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family.” On the other side of Hornsey Road are two streets coloured dark blue, defined as: “Very poor, casual. Chronic want.”
These mean streets have been disappeared, but the neighbourhood still retains some of its earlier character. Those light blue streets, Marcellus Road and Orpingley Road, were both demolished in 1972 to make way for the Andover Estate, where Ann Widdecombe once made an exploitation doc about her battle with “the hoodies”, to which the local youth responded with their own YouTube documentary Beyond the Hoodie.
The dark blue streets, Denmark Terrace and Ellenborough Road have also gone, replaced by the jewel in my neighbourhood’s social housing crown: Sussex Place, described in Pevsner as “an eight-storey crescent in red brick with lower blocks enclosing a garden: an ambitious post-war Islington scheme of 1950 by Monson, spaciously laid out, in startling contrast to the tight street of low stuccoed houses which then existed all around.” It’s as though the council was trying to lift the historic curse.
In other parts of the city, however, the change to London has been dramatic. I look at Booth’s map of King’s Cross: the black-coloured streets are gone as gentrification sweeps across the formerly desolate railway land behind the station; the then functioning gasometers, Booth would have been astounded to discover, have been repurposed as luxury flats – £810,000 for a studio and rising into the many millions for a penthouse, but handy for workers at Google’s London HQ nearby.
Similarly, Booth’s researchers found Shoreditch to be “a very poor and overcrowded district … the Jewish quarters particularly poor”. But today Shoreditch is a byword for artist-catalysed gentrification and buy-to-let speculation. Typical of the latter is the Atlas Building, a 302-unit newbuild project that completed in June and where 70% of sales have been investment purchases.
One of Booth’s volunteers asked a police constable to describe Clerkenwell, just up the road from Shoreditch. He responded that it was a “melting pot” of London. Which sounds like a lovely meeting point for migrant communities, prefiguring the cosmopolitan London of the 21st century. Not really: what he meant was that Clerkenwell was “where all the stolen silver or jewels come to be melted or disassembled”. It’s less Dickensian and more genteel than that today.
I wander off Seven Sisters Road to find out what happened to the Bunk. Today it is called Whadcoat Street, an anonymous dead end that became briefly notorious a couple of years ago when a terrorist drove into a crowd of Muslim worshippers nearby, killing a man.
What’s striking about the site of the Bunk today is that it’s caught in a gentrification pincer movement. On one side is a new housing development of 22 private one- and two-bedroom flats called the Cottonworks, claiming to be “close to Upper Street, one of London’s trendiest neighbourhood” [sic]. (Upper Street isn’t close, not really.)
On the other is City North, a vast new development around and above Finsbury Park tube, where flats of up to £850,000 are being advertised overseas, as if the better to attract the speculative investors who have already put much of London’s property beyond its citizens, thus adding to the inequality and poverty in the capital identified by Trust for London.
What Booth’s poverty maps ultimately show is a London where rich and poor lived right next door to each other: in that sense, at least, today’s London is no different. While only 47 of City North’s 308 apartments are classed as “affordable” homes under the absurd definition of 80% of market rate, just yards away there has been a rise in rough sleepers under the railway bridge on Stroud Green Road. The Bunk may have gone, but poverty in my neighbourhood – and London – certainly hasn’t.
• Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps is published on 31 October by Thames and Hudson
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