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.
The Poverty Maps
Great grandparents are, on the whole, remote creatures. To most of us they tend to be mythical, distant, or just plain forgotten. Good lord – did Granny have a mother? Who knew? Intellectually, if we ever bother to think about our forebears, we know that each one of us has a quota of eight, genetically connected great grandparents. This may seem like a ridiculous oversupply for a generation about which we may know very little.
By now you are wondering what this has to do with the concept of terroir and the mission of this blog. Have we turned Terroir into an homage for the BBC series ‘Who do you think you are?’ The essence of ‘somewhereness’, however, is as much about the people who influenced, guided and developed ‘somewhere’ in the past, as it is about those who currently inhabit it. So more nearly, we are talking about ‘Where do you think you are?’ or, in in today’s blog, ‘Where do you think you were?’
For Terroir does not spring from generations of Surrey farm labourers, millers, land owners or stockbrokers. We are the product of generations of economic migrants. Our multiplicity of great, great grandparents and great grandparents came from as far afield as rural Kent, Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Montgomeryshire and Caernarvonshire. And they were drawn through the industrial sweatshops of places like Wolverhampton, Liverpool, and Nottingham on their journey to a very much more diverse range of employments and locations in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
But all this talk of ancestor’s journeys is also a vehicle to explore something of national significance and interest - The Booth Poverty Maps of London - housed at the London School of Economics https://booth.lse.ac.uk/ and which must be one of the most extraordinary social mapping archives in the country.
Extract from Booth’s Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898-9 Thames-side from Battersea Bridge to Vauxhall Bridge
The eponymous Charles Booth was born in Liverpool, the son of a corn merchant and, at the age of 16, was apprenticed to a shipping company. Up to this point he could perhaps have passed for one of Terroir’s ancestors, although I suspect that, in 1856, most of Terroir’s lot left school a whole lot earlier and were more likely to have been apprenticed to shop keepers.
Thereafter the story is very different from Terroir’s. Booth seems to have combined a sound business acumen with a desire for fair play, and developed ‘a profound sense of obligation and responsibility towards the poor and to the improvement of social conditions.’ https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/who-was-charles-booth After experiencing the shocking condition of the Liverpool slums it is hardly surprising that by 1886, he was proposing an inquiry into living conditions in London. Full details can be found on the LSE website noted above. If you don’t already know the archive, delve deeply. It is utterly fascinating.
So, let’s return to Great Granny and explain where she fits into Terroir’s exploration of the Booth maps. Terroir can just remember her – a terrifying, upright, fur clad, Victorian matriarch. There is a photograph of her and her extended family (she was one of thirteen children), at an event (party is too uninhibited a concept) to celebrate a significant parental wedding anniversary (golly - Great, Great Granny and Great, Great Grandad). It is summer and she is some 50 years younger than the fur clad memory, but there she is, a terrifying, upright, Victorian matriarch, having a bad hair day. All the other women present are having a bad hair day too, so it is obviously the fashion.
‘Scary Great Granny’ is important, not only because I can remember her, but also because she was the only Terroir ancestor living in London when Booth was surveying and mapping poverty. Actually, that’s not strictly true; another branch of the family had also made it to London by then, but they were living in Willesden, north of the railway station, and outside Booth’s area. So it was Scary GG (aka Millie) who became our focus for exploring the Booth maps and for comparing her late 1888/9 habitat with the same street in the early part of the 21st century.
According to the 1891 census, Millie and husband Charles, with their one year old daughter, were living at 29, Beaufort Street, Chelsea, London. It sounds promising. Millie was born in Cambridge, the daughter of an upwardly mobile shop keeper. Charles came from Sussex, probably St Leonards, or possibly Kent, maybe Maidstone (depending which census return you happen to be reading). Charles is described as a painter (he was never an ‘RA’ but he was more than proficient), organist and teacher of music. Laudable, but hardly a high earner, one would imagine. Millie is described, of course, as ‘wife’.
Beaufort Street runs from the northern side of Battersea Bridge, where the Chelsea Embankment meets Cheyne Walk (yes, really, the Cheyne Walk), and heads north westwards, crossing the Kings Road, to end at its junction with the Fulham Road (the A308). Feed that address into Google Maps and it takes you to flat 29, Beaufort Mansions, one of a spectacular line of purpose built apartments which just shouts Chelsea.
For various reasons (!) none of this feels right, so the next stop is the Ordnance Survey Six-inch England and Wales series, 1842-1952, which produces two contrasting images: the 1912/13 revision (left) shows the layout of Beaufort Road as we know it today, but the 1893/95 edition (right) shows a completely different layout. Welcome to the world of Millie and Charles in 1891.
'Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland' https://maps.nls.uk/index.html
So what did the Poverty Survey make of Beaufort Road in the late 1890s? The Poverty Map – which also confirms the layout shown on the Ordnance Survey 1893/95 edition - indicates that Millie and Charles were on a street labelled ‘Middle Class, Well to do’, no doubt to the relief of Millie’s father who had by now trained himself as an accountant and was a pillar of Cambridge society. But the area is not homogeneous. Yes, there is a lot of red shadings (from Millie’s ‘Well to do’ to ‘fairly comfortable/good ordinary earnings’ to ‘mixed, some comfortable, others poor’ but the blue/greys of the ‘poor’ are certainly in evidence and the local work house (now the Westminster and Chelsea Hospital) is only half a mile away. The ‘vicious, semi criminal class’ is not a significant element of the locality and there is only slight evidence of the ‘wealthy’, although an enclave of yellow, around Elm Park Gardens (just north of the words Park Chapel, on the map), is a similar distance from Millie and Charles as the work house. Perhaps the best conclusion one can draw is that the inhabitants of the area around Beaufort Street, in the middle 1890s, was a classic London socio economic mix.
Extract from Booth’s Maps Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898-9 Beaufort Street, Chelsea and local area
But there is somethig else you need to know about Millie’s life in Beaufort Sreet. Millie, Charles and the baby did not live alone. According to the 1891 census, no less than nine poeple lived at No. 29, and Millie (for it surely it would have been Millie’s role?) was responsible for four boarders and two domestic servants. Unsurprisingly, she probably needed to raise an income, to keep their little ship afloat. The boarders were all male and each poses intriuging questions about the locality. The first mentioned is described as ‘Professor [sic] d’Ecole Normal [sic]’ which would usually translate as a teacher or lecturer at a teacher training college. Was Emile working for, or linked to, the Institut Francais, just a mile away in South Kensington? Or did Chelsea boast a French training college of it’s own? If you know, please tell us in the comment box below. William (28) and Henry (18) are both listed as students of metallurgy. Again, where did they study? Was this the Royal School of Mines (later to become a component of Imperial College when it was founded in 1907), also in Kensington? Again, information please. Finally, 21 year old Hubert is listed as a ‘jeweller’s assistant’ and someone has pencilled in the word ‘gold’ on the census return, lest you should think he was just any old jeweller’s assistant. Perhaps Millie chose her tenants with care. Two teenagers, Elizabeth and Sarah Jane (described as servants), were no doubt Millie’s subordinates in what must have felt like a never ending campaign to keep the house clean, the boarders fed and the family clothed and out of debt. She may also have been pregnant with their second child at the time of the census. Poor Millie - it sounds as though she is working far harder than her artistic husband, while he is probably exacerbating things by taking a money earning room out of commission to use as studio. Millie is not unusual. however. Next door, at no. 31, there is a similar arrangement: a widow with two grown up daughters, four boarders (two men and two women) and a single domestic servant.
By 1901, Millie, Charles and the children have moved on to Fulham (and we will explore the implications of this relocation another time) but what has happened to Beaufort Street, in the meantime? We know that by the early part of the century, large sections of the road had been redeveloped with blocks of flats. Currently a one room studio flat with small kitchen and bathroom is valued at around £400,000 and a four bedroom flat for around £1.6 million pounds. But has the pattern of a comfortable Beaufort Street located within a mixed area continued, or do the 2019 Indices of Deprivation maps tell a different story?
2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation for Beaufort Street and Neighbourhood From: Indices of Deprivation: 2019 and 2015 http://dclgapps.communities.gov.uk/imd/iod_index.html#
Obviously any superficial comparison between the current Multiple Deprivation Indices (above) and the Booth Poverty Maps for the same area, is laughably crude, but Terroir could not resist the temptation of illustrating both representations of our society’s assessment of poverty and deprivation. We leave you to draw your own conclusions. There does, however, seem to be a prima facie case for saying that the area is still a complex mix and that a thougoughly modern Millie might still be taking in lodgers.