More or Less Poverty?
Last week’s blog on poverty in London featured Scary Great Granny and her family at home in Beaufort Street Chelsea. Of somewhat greater importance, however, the blog also featured the Booth Poverty maps, that extraordinary and detailed archive of information on London’s poverty plight in the late 1890s. Housed at the London School of Economics, the archive can be accessed on line at https://booth.lse.ac.uk/. Here is a reminder of both the Booth Maps, and of Millie, before she became a Great Granny. She was probably always scary.
In 1891, Millie, Charles and their elder daughter lived in a comfortable street in an area of Chelsea which Booth’s surveys recorded as fairly mixed in terms of poverty. The map (above) shows evidence of wealthy inhabitants (yellow/gold) on the river front, with ‘poor’ and ‘very poor’ neighbours (blues and greys) in relatively close proximity to Millie’s comfortable red..
By 1901, Millie and family had moved from Beaufort Street, to the edge of Hammersmith (or to the edge of Fulham, depending on your perspective; Terroir suspects that Millie’s perspective favoured Hammersmith!), about 2 miles to the north west. We know that Beaufort Street was redeveloped in the early 20th century so this may have been the reason for their move. Their new abode, at No. 2 Perham Road, has not been redeveloped, so for once we can see what it looked like. I wonder if she would recognise it now? Were the windows above the front door false or bricked up?
As with Beaufort Street, the Booth Poverty map for Perham Road shows a diverse area. There is a core of mixed, fairly comfortable, and middle class areas, but the ‘poor’ are also close by. This time the wealthy are on the other side of the Earls Court railway tracks. But as we noted in Chelsea, this is London, where poverty and comfort often lie close together, sometimes interwoven. And again, there is a little more to Millie’s ‘comfort’ than meets the eye. Remember the artist/musician husband? Remember the probable need, in Beaufort Street, to have two income streams? Yes, you’ve guessed it, Millie is still taking lodgers. But things do seem to have changed. The Perham Street house may have to pull it’s weight, economically, but apparently they are getting by with just one boarder: 28 year old Lilian who, the census notes, is ‘living on own means’. By this time, the two daughters are aged eleven and nine and there is only one ‘general domestic servant’, 21 year old Amy, born in Battersea.
Extract from Booth’s Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898-9 Perham Road, Hammersmith and local area
Looking at the same area in 2019, there is evidence, again, of diversity in the poverty stakes although the pattern of variation and the degree of deprivation is different. The modern indices of deprivation are of course based on different criteria from those used by Booth and I doubt those collecting and assessing the 2019 data walked the Streets with a local police officer as Booth’s surveyors were wont to do (hence the reference to the [Police] ‘Notebooks’ on the heading of the above ilustration).
It is also important to realise that the current indices do not concentrate soley on poverty or lack of it. The large image below shows the results for all deprivation indices for 2 Perham Road, and places Millie’s house on the edge of a small island of pale green, meaning it lies within the 50% of least deprived neighbourhoods, albeit surrounded on three sides by areas of gretaer deprivation. The smaller images below the main image, however, show the results for very specific types of deprivation. Four have been selected out of the available eight, and some very different patterns suddenly emerge. The Income deprivation map indicates a similar layout to the overall multiple indices map, but educational attainment shows a significant improvement. In contrast, concentrating on access to housing and services shoots the neighbourhood well down into the more deprived blues, as does quality of environment. Perham Road is obviously not close to accessible green space. Things have certainly not improved since Millie left the area.
Images above and Below: 2019 Index of Multiple or Specific Deprivation for Perham Road and Neighbourhood From: Indices of Deprivation: 2019 and 2015 http://dclgapps.communities.gov.uk/imd/iod_index.html#
So where did Millie and her family go next? The 1911 census places them at 10 West Kensington Gardens, close to West Kensington Mews. This address does not appear in any of the obvious places such as Google Maps, the post code finders or good old-fashioned, hard copy volumes of the London A to Z; this presented Terroir with quite a challenge. In fact, Millie had only moved a mile away, to the Kensington Hammersmith border. Thanks to a digitised Post Office Directory of 1902, we finally located West Kensington Gardens on the north side of the Hammersmith Road, hard up against the Olympia exhibition centre. No. 10 (by the look of it quite a des res) is clearly visible on the 1893/4 revision of the Ordnance Survey 6 inch edition and again on the 1912/14 revision (both shown below), but the area was obviously changing even then (look at the massive Post Office Savings Bank development on the back of the RC College). By the 1938 map revision, the Olympia halls had spread right to the edge of the Hammersmith Road, engulfing West Kensigton Gardens. so, somewhere between 1914 and 1938, saw poor old Millie on the move again.
Both map images 'Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland' https://maps.nls.uk/index.html
The 21st century images for the site of West Kensington Gardens (below) present an almost shocking contrast to the genteel, domestic layout depicted on the map images above.
Google Maps UK downloaded 20/1/21 Google Maps UK Street View downloaded 20/1/21.
If you have recovered from the shock of the demolition of yet another of Millie and Charles’ homes, let us take a look at what Charles Booth made of the area in 1898/9. Strangely, Booth’s base map bears no resemblence to the location as recorded by the relevant Ordnance Survey maps, but I think we must put this anomoly to one side for the moment. The area is solidly ‘red’ in Booth mapping terms, in other words it consists, in the main, of the well-to-do middle class, the fairly comfortable with ‘good ordinary’ earnings, and mixed - some comfortable, some poor. The wealthy are nearby if, yet again, on the other side of the railway tracks. Finally, Millie seems to have found some element of uniformity in which to bring up her daughters and ready them, unknowlingly and unfortunately, for the war work which will take over their lives in just three or four years. At the time of the census the girls are 21 and 19, single and living at home. Charles is still described as an artist (painter) and Millie as, of course, ‘wife’. They have no boarders, and two domestic servants, a cook, no less, and a house maid. Portait painting must be on the up.
Charles and Millie also have a social life and census night has brought visitors. Remember Hubert, the Jeweller’s assistant, who boarded with them in Beaufort Street? On cLose examination, he turned out to be one of Millie’s younger brothers. He is present tonight along with a sister-in-law, who is descibed as a book keeper to a taylor, working from home in Bury St Edmunds. All very proper. In addition to the ‘grown ups’ there are also a couple of twenty somethings, perhaps invited by Millie’s daughters. Elizabeth Hermes (22) is German and Robert Dale Deniston (British) is 21. One wonders who is courting who.
Extract from Booth’s Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898-9 Hammersmith Road, West Kensington and local area
Interestingly, the uniformity shown in the Booth map (above) is also evident to some degree on the 2019 Indices of Deprivation Map (below). The core of the area in 2019 is clearly in the green, less deprived, part of the scale. The areas on the ‘other side of the railway tracks’ have, however, suffered greater deprivation than they appear to have warranted in 1898/9. There is, however, one area of blue (more deprived) to the south of where 10 West Kensington Gardens once stood. On the Booth map, the area is small, and backs onto the garden of Otto House (just to the right of the arrow head on the Booth map above). On the 2019 map, the area is much larger, and engulfs nearly the whole of the former Otto House and garden. In 1928, this area became the site of a substantial Samuel Lewis Housing Trust Estate, called Lisgar Terrace. Now part of the Southern Housing Group, Lisgar Terrace is being given a £50million revamp and extension. According to their website, the Trust has ‘completed 154 new affordable homes the majority of which have been offered to existing customers. Phase 5, currently underway, will provide 72 homes for private sale to help fund the project. (https://www.shgroup.org.uk/about-us/latest-news/latest-developments/lisgar-terrace/plans-for-lisgar-terrace/). It will be interesting to see what this does to the neighbourhood deprivation trends in the future.
2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation for Hammersmith Road, West Kensington and Neighbourhood From: Indices of Deprivation: 2019 and 2015 http://dclgapps.communities.gov.uk/imd/iod_index.html#
Terroir’s exploration of the Booth Poverty maps, courtesy of Millie, Charles and family is now complete. It is impossible to make meaningful comparisons between conditions in 1899 and 2019, but it is clear that poverty, however it is classified or described, still exists. Sadly, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Many more of Terroir’s ancestor’s have come to London since then; some stayed, many also left again, acording to job or retirement opportunities. As far as we know, most, like Millie, have found satisfaction and sufficient resources to enjoy their lives. But there are no guarantees.