The Mappers and the Mapped

Abstract

The ‘Booth Maps’, showing London poverty street by street and published in the 1880s and 1890s are among some of the best-known and most important maps of the metropolis ever made. They represented a revolutionary step forward in visual representations of urban poverty and proved highly influential in subsequent attempts to show the spatial reality of migration, poverty and other social phenomena in London and elsewhere. Indeed, poverty mapping remains a technique employed worldwide to identify clusters of poverty in both urban and rural settings.