Descriptive Map of London Poverty

Charles Booth’s poverty map of London, produced between 1886 and 1903, colored every street in London according to the income and social class of its inhabitants. The seven-color scheme ranged from black (“Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal”) through dark blue, light blue, purple, pink, and red to yellow (“Upper-middle and upper classes. Wealthy”).

The maps were based on exhaustive door-to-door surveys and police interviews — a level of empirical rigor unprecedented for social research at the time. The resulting visualization made poverty visible as a geographic pattern rather than an abstract statistic.

Booth’s work directly influenced the establishment of old-age pensions in Britain. It demonstrated that visualization could serve as evidence for social policy — a tradition that continues in modern data journalism and humanitarian visualization.