No doubt you make a Pavlovian association between Booth and gin. Well the link has been broken since production ceased in 2017.
Now put gin to the back of your mind while we turn to Charles Booth, Victorian businessman and philanthropist. Concerned about the appalling living conditions and poverty in much of London and the inadequacy of census data, he undertook a survey and produced “poverty maps”. He didn’t need to draw the maps as they were already being produced by the Ordnance Survey. What he did was to assess the living conditions of Londoners first using reports by School Board Visitors and then volunteers accompanying policemen on their beats. It was an immense project lasting from 1886 until 1903. Here is an example of the information he amassed.
The colours denote his findings and here is his classification code.
Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal. Black
Very poor, casual. Chronic want. Dark blue
Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family. Light blue
Mixed. Some comfortable others poor. Purple
Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings. Pink
Middle class. Well-to-do. Red
Upper-middle and upper classes. Wealthy. Yellow
All the maps are available here if you are interested. Hogarth established the link between gin and poverty in 1751 in his Gin Lane print. It is ironic that gin is now drunk in somewhat higher social echelons. Here is what is in my store cupboard. My street was pink on Booth’s first map – today it would be red.
Wilkin & Sons are only responsible for the strawberries; they source the gin from Hayman’s. I don’t know Marjorie.
If you are from Co Louth you will associate Booth with Darver Castle, near Ardee where a branch of the family lived from 1789 until 1980. So many families move from Charles Booth’s yellow to his purple but in the great Snakes & Ladders game of life some move up the ladder from black to yellow as Trollope, for one, chronicled in The Way We Live Now.
Thank you for this Christopher. My building is pin-pointable, despite every secondary street nearby having a new name. It was an island of dark blue then and until my acquisition in 2009. Now I am sure it would be firmly yellow thus illustrating that the only constant thread over the years is the consumption of generous measures of gin. Alan
There surely ought be a daub of yellow at Number 56. Although, considering how many of the homes in the vacinity of the author have been subsequently subdivided into box room flats, one wonders about the bourgeoisie effect.
Read your post before Church Parade on PalmSunday and realized I was reading about Little Scarlet gin as I was devouring LS jam on my baguette. Decided in honor of the day and in keen vivid anticipation of the Stormy Daniels interview that night—an interview that was upstaging both Christ and Trump—I would come up with a stormy satisfying cocktail despite absence of HAYMANS.
It worked …steely Stormy was luridly on point and the drink quaffable. Simply Tankeray, angostura with a smidge of LittleScarlet and a dash of Amaro. Avanti dear Miss Clifford and a solid contribution to getting through next 8 months. Avanti