Wiiiiiiiishlist...

"Aside from the fact that you can easily lose an afternoon looking at the streets that you have lived in and known, what is particularly interesting is the social milieu in which Booth undertook his project. The late 19th century was a time of growing concern about the very nature of urban society. As David Reeder says in his introduction to the map, "During the 1880s a new perception was being formed of London's social condition, growing out of a spate of writings on how the poor lived by journalists and city missionaries ... Middle-class anxieties were fuelled by descriptions of ... the poor as a brutalised and degenerate race of people, the victims but also the agents of the deteriorating forces in city life".

Then, as now, there was much talk about the poverty gap, and the newspapers were full of stories about violent youth and rising criminality. The social commentator Charles Masterman felt that Booth's maps showed a city "beyond the power of individual synthesis, a chaos resisting all attempts to reduce it to orderly law". Booth himself highlighted the middle-class flight from urban areas: "The red and yellow classes are leaving, and the streets which they occupied are becoming pink and pink-barred; whilst the streets which were formerly pink turn to purple and purple to light blue." Over 100 years later we read in the Guardian that "The middle classes are abandoning inner London and other cities for the countryside in a drift that threatens to cause a 'deepening racial and social' divide." Perhaps somebody ought to send John Prescott and Jacques Chirac a copy of Booth's map."

[from The Guardian, Cities of the World: A History in Maps]