Thank you very much, as a pleasure to be with you all today at the Tusker conference.
So the title of my talk refers to the pressing question of Victorian social reform, particularly in the city of London.
And I want to take you back to 19th century London, because the question on everybody's lips was why in the greatest city,
in the greatest nation on Earth, why on earth was there so much poverty, so much squalor, so much disease and so much immorality?
As you can imagine, people weren't reticent about giving answers to that questions.
And as we can see on the left, all sorts of people gave their opinions more or less well-informed in the forms that you see there on the left.
And they used various media. The hope amongst them proves statistics, graphs, photographs, paintings and maps.
And it's there on these maps that I'd like to concentrate today.
You may be familiar with one of the most famous map surveys of enquiries into London poverty,
which happened in the 80s, 80s and 80s, 90s when the question was really current.
It was under the leadership of Charles Booth. And from the start, the idea was to investigate and then to map poverty.
He used working maps which were hand coloured ordnance survey maps at a particularly large scale one to 2500.
And the result of print maps, which you may well be familiar with. I'll show you some examples in a moment.
Were printed on Stanford's library map of London and its suburbs at six inches to a mile.
So Booth didn't originate cartography originate maps in the sense of surveying and drawing his own maps.
What he did was exhaustively to find out social information and to plot it onto maps.
And here's the point of his survey, was to find out who exactly was in London, where they lived and what kind of people they were.
And he was absolutely exhaustive. He and his team in gathering information and he classified that and their families that
he investigated into a classification system that had both economic aspects and moral.
So we can see here, for example, that some people are described in economic terms as very poor,
poor, wealthy, but other people are described in moral terms,
the lowest class of the semi criminal who are so poor that they're really living on the margins of society in all senses spatially,
but also in terms of shared norms. So here's one of Booth's maps of London.
There were many of them, and they went through a couple of additions and she may be familiar with this because it's a particularly well known.
And in this one, we can see the red areas of the wealthy people who are on the west side of London, where there are near to a park, you can see.
And as we move further eastwards, we get to encounter more poverty and get blue areas and black areas.
I can place up. That's what that looks like. Red areas, certainly, particularly on street fronts.
In more back streets, we get poorer people.
And here we can see poor people clustering in that black area towards the bottom just here by the railway line where we might expect to find them.
So some say I'm sure many of you will be familiar with these maps because they're particularly well known.
Now, there had been earlier poverty maps. The English economist William Javins made a poverty map of Sydney and Australia in the eighteen fifties.
And in the same decade, a clergyman in Liverpool made this map here,
which we can see shaded on a pre-existing map showing areas of poverty in the city.
But the wealth project was on a completely different scale and completely different level of information,
which was really exhaustively compiled and then mapped.
As you've seen in amazing detail. And the booth maps were very widely imitated.
This is one again, another map, which he may well be familiar with,
that one of the whole house maps of Chicago in the following decade, in the 80s, 90s.
And this was made by the women was one of several examples made by the women of Holehouse
in Chicago plotting the various characteristics of the family in the city of Chicago.
Jane Adams was the leading light of Holehouse and Florence Kelly was very important in the cartography.
And they explicitly took their took their method and their inspiration from Booth.
So it's nice to have women directly inspired by this famous famous survey.
And women were very closely involved in Booth's survey.
They supplied information on all topics. He and his investigators went round the streets relying on local people,
particularly local middle class people who were involved in things like school boards and other aspects of life in different areas.
And women particularly were employed on the project to investigate women subjects.
So inverted commas, of course, looking particularly at things like women's characteristic girls, what girls were doing, how people were educated.
The fate of domestic servants.
The condition of domestic servants of all domestic homely topics which women were thought naturally are better able to investigate,
partly because they could get the confidence of women. And partly because they were thought to have some kind of natural affinity for these topics.
So women were really heavily involved in all aspects of the servant of the survey.
We see here a family group of the booths. And we can see Mary Booth here, Charles's wife.
And she was really central to the operation as an editor, as an adviser, as a coordinator throughout the whole duration.
But perhaps particularly when it got to the publishing stages, people involved,
women involved in the investigative stages included Alice Stopford Green, the historian who was involved in the women's work sex section.
Beatrice Potter, a cousin of Mary Booth, who was famous in her own right as a sociologist and reformer,
but was roped in by Charlie, who wanted me to do women's work in East End, as she recalls in her diary.
Another woman, famous woman in her own right as an economist and a civil servant, was Clah Collett,
and she worked again on the things you can see that say things in which women were thought naturally to have some affinity.
She didn't necessarily enjoy it, as you can see the quotation at the bottom.
This investigative work, she said, I would give it up whenever I see a chance of earning a certain 60 pounds, even by lectures on economics.
So she was one of the key figures in the survey, even though she didn't really enjoy it particularly.
And another person involved in the survey was Octavia Hill, the subject of our talk today.
She was a very famous housing reformer. And so she was she was a friend of booths.
And so she was asked to contribute to the section on housing.
But did these women draw maps? Well, that's something that I think and that's a question.
I think no one's ever asked before. And so it's not surprising that we don't know the answer to that.
So, as I say, we knew that they were very heavily involved in all the different sections of the the stages of the of the investigation.
But we don't actually know whether they drew maps or not.
So this is work in progress. As soon as the archive opens up again, I have plans to go up to London,
look at the original notebooks of all the investigators and see if we can actually get more insight into the map making process.
We know a tremendous amount about the information gathering process. We know a tremendous amount about the maps themselves.
But we know actually curiously little about the personnel drawing the maps and whether women were part of that.
But what we do know is about another map, because at the same time as all these women were working on Boutte's map projects,
Octavia Hill was, in fact, herself making a map of London and its social problems.
So a little bit about Octavia Hill. She was a really important housing and charity reformer.
You may have come across her if you're British in connexion with the National Trust,
because she was one of three founders of that venerable institution.
And we seeing here a very fine oil painting of her. And I think it sort of gives some idea of her eminence that in the British National
Portrait Gallery in the section of 19th century word is the Victorian gallery.
There are two women, one of whom is Queen Victoria and the other of whom is Octavia Hill.
And that gives us some idea of really quite how eminent she was.
And she wanted to she was involved in all kinds of social projects,
and we know in detail because she tells us about one particular mapping project that she has.
We took one of Stanford's maps, she says, and this is the outcome of her having taken the map, what she was plotting onto the map.
So same idea as being taking a pre-existing map and using it for a particular social purpose.
She was mapping parks and open spaces within six miles of Charing Cross, the centre of London.
So taking her was very, very good at galvanising volunteers.
So she galvanised all her volunteers, many of the women, and she got them to plot open space in London,
but not just any old open space that happened to be coloured green. What she wanted to get them to plot was accessible open space.
So not private gardens or private squares, for example, accessible space and preserved space.
So space that was going to be permanently available for all for recreation.
And she published her results in an article in the 19th century,
which was a really important journal in Victorian Britain with a circulation of 20000, which was really rather significant.
And her findings were very striking. She found out that in the western half of London, so the rich part were booths,
red areas had been the number of residents per acre of preserved open space was 682.
Whereas in the poorer eastern half, it was seven thousand four hundred eighty one.
So a combination of demographic statistics and cartographic work revealed
quite how unequal the access to open space was in nineteenth century England,
19th century London. So why did she make this one map?
Because this is the only map we know about that she did she she made.
Well, we can sense her personal preference, as her biographies biographer said.
Octavia always enjoyed a map. And we know that she used maps a tremendous amount.
And she certainly had an eye for the visual because she was trained as an artist originally.
So she she had an eye for these things. And we can see her use of maps in various of her projects to the left.
We can see one of her housing projects. She built these rather charming cottages in the middle of a very poor part of London.
And she and the architects were working together. And the architect was remark that he was very patient,
as she was always investigating and changing his plans so that she she was used to seeing
building plans and envisaging envisaging what they would look like in in practise.
And on the right, we can see another of her, the fruits of her labours in the 1880 as she laid out this garden.
And in really poor part of of London, indebted. And she laid out the garden to be a pleasure garden for the local people.
And she must have had access to a map to do that because it's really well thought of in terms of some rather picturesque winding paths and so on.
So she used maps and she used plants. She had an eye for the visual.
And I think she made and publish this particular map because of the occasion.
She regarded it as a once in a lifetime chance to bid for a large amount of money to save large areas of open space in London after
this particular act of parliament had been passed and there was a there was money available for and people could bid for it.
And as she said in the 19th century, I must use all ways open to me to get her slice of this money.
So the novelty of the medium, the kind of graphic medium fitted the novelty of the situation.
Normally, she would rely very much on words, the spoken word,
as she was an experienced public speaker or the published word as she was an incorrigible
essayist and and and a writer of chapters in other people's books and indeed in her own.
But here she must use always opened for me. So she draws a map.
But it's the only map she didn't make. So why did she make no other maps? And I think but there are various answers to that.
And I think partly she felt that the map lacked the emotive power of prose.
We can see here, she says,
cast your eye on the eastern semicircle on the map and transform the darkened surface where the houses are back into real life.
So the map goes only so far. Ultimately, you have to translate it back into real life.
And again, she says. But now translate all that from tables or statistics or a map back into real life.
So she then paints a word picture of what the unequal access to open space actually means for poor people.
So I think she feels that a map can go so far, but prose carries her further.
We can see to the difficulties of reproduction the map was in black and white,
where actually she wanted a colour to be able to show where the green, accessible, open space was.
It was a full that Martin got damaged very easily. And the publisher of the magazine was experienced in publishing prose, but not maps.
And I found it extraordinarily difficult, actually, to get a good quality reproduction of the map because so many of them have been damaged.
And perhaps the final reason why she made no other maps was that this campaign failed.
She didn't get the large injection of money that she wanted permanently to transfer
to trons form access or by poor people in the east end of London to open space.
So research continues.
I'm looking forward to getting back into the archives, to finding out whether the women of the Booth survey actually carried on.
I actually actually contributed to the cartography. And I want to find out what happened to Octavia Hill's map.
So I'm looking forward, as I'm sure many others are, to the reopening of the archives and some more answers to this contribution to women and mapping.
Thank you very much. Arculus, absolutely terrific stuff and a great way back after the coffee break.
I've I've really got to start off with a point which goes against the cartographic grain, if you like, that towards the end.
You mentioned that the Octavia Hills assumption was that like maps lacked the emotive power of those.
Yet we're all map people. I'm guessing most people on this conference are amongst people.
What are the lines which I often turn out is that a map is worth a thousand words.
Isn't this going against the cartographic grain? Oh, certainly.
I'll take the Hill was actually remarkably adept in using all kinds of media for examples statistics she would pitch
up before the Royal Statistical Society and sort of these statistics around with all the other men in the room.
So she and she, as we know, she was used a map.
But I think she always felt that ultimately she could evoke the personal when she was writing or speaking.
She had one of her particular characteristics is that she always brings things down to a particular personal example.
So she talks about ECAs and she talks about statistics.
But then she says, I want to take you now into a court and I want to take you now into a room, into one of my courts.
And you can see the old woman who's been living there for 20 years or whatever,
and she paints that a word picture of this very particular, very personal, very emotive,
emotive scene that that she finds that she always wants to find a sort of chord with her readers,
not least because there are very few occasions when Octavia Hill writes that she doesn't want people to contribute to one of her campaigns.
She was always raising money for everything.
So she wants Pete to tug at people's heartstrings and make them reach into their pockets or to devote time.
And ultimately, I think she she feels that for all the fact that she likes visible media, she finds that the spoken word word carries her through.
And she had a particularly fine speaking voice. Suddenly, she knew how to hold a room and she knew how to how to talk to to write emotively.
And I think I think ultimately she wasn't she wasn't persuaded by it, by the power of the magazine.
That's not to say I'm not persuaded that something big to fail was a convincing answer.
I can see where Octavia Hill's coming from, this next question. It's got nothing to do with Octavia Hill whatsoever.
Our book. Are there any poverty maps or similar of Welsh towns?
That I don't know. I mean, there are things like we start to get sanitary maps at around this time and it's it's likely,
but in things like medical boards of health, you will have had the starts of sanitary maps.
But I don't know of any particular mapping projects of poff of poverty explicitly.
I think the focus in poverty was in the national press and in the national I was in was in London.
And and I think that's why we get the best known examples there.
But a good question, and it would be very nice to find out making a comment really, which I'd like you to comment on.
It's surprising that she didn't use her drawing skills to utter Cartouche.
Yes, I think she was in rather sort of business like mode here.
So I think she was held back from that.
As I said, she had trained as an artist and she trained under John Ruskin in the same way as she knew any number of influential people.
She she trained under sort of the foremost art critic, social critic in the 19th century.
And for 12 years, she was employed by Ruskin as a copyist. So.
So she certainly could have supplied a cartouche.
But I think that she does write in her description of how the map was made, how it how it had taken a huge amount of time.
And she was very busy. So who knows?
Had she had more time, had it taken less time actually to compile the map, maybe she would have drawn a drawn a cottage.
But I think in any sense, she's trying to be businesslike in order to persuade the people dispensing this charity money to to give her someone
she might have thought it was a little bit fanciful if she'd if she'd sort of indulged in decorative effects.
I don't know that that's pure, pure speculation. But I know that she was busy amassing,
sort of bristling with statistics and so on in order to try to make a watertight case to to the people dispensing the fund.