Revisiting Booth: Llewellyn Smith and the New Survey of London

By the 1930s, London had undergone something of a transformation from the period of Booth’s survey. A Labour government had brought in many changes to improve living standards. At the same time, its economic geography had changed, with a massive growth at the urban periphery. New land uses, new technologies such as street lighting, new systems of sanitation, together with widespread slum clearances and new housing, all meant that the city was starting to be reconfigured, with migration to the suburbs both by the working classes and the more prosperous classes.³⁶ At the same time, alongside new factories in the suburban districts, small-scale production became prevalent:

. . . the [New Survey of London] discovered “a high demand on skill” and innovation among the new occupation of “machine operator” in small engineering workshops, among “specialised labourers” in wood-working, hand-cutters and designers in tailoring and leather work, printing, jewellery making and scientific and musical instruments. Apprenticeships were declining, but 23,000 were enrolled in Technical Schools within the County, and piece-workers could earn high wages for “steadiness and care” if not skill.³⁷

Many jobs, especially in light industries, shifted outside of the city’s original boundaries. A large increase in social housing, constructed by the London County Council, meant that much of the poverty found in Booth’s time was starting to be diffused or eliminated. In parallel the country’s economic recession in the late 1920s and early 1930s led to migration into London for work. Within the heart of the city, the older pattern of poor and rich living in a ‘“pre-modern”, front street-back street’ arrangement continued, due to the ongoing demands from industry for manual labourers as well as the ‘army of service workers’ who continued to serve London’s wealthy population (Figure 4.10).³⁸

The New Survey of London Life and Labour came at this juncture as a follow-up to Booth’s study by a team at the London School of Economics.³⁹ Its director was Hubert Llewellyn Smith (a former assistant on Booth’s Inquiry), who aimed to repeat Booth’s methods with a street survey. He was joined by a team that included Arthur Lyon Bowley: Bowley not only designed the research, he also personally led an additional study of the poorest eastern boroughs, which comprised a house-to-house study of a sample of 12,000 working-class households.⁴⁰ Llewellyn Smith summarised his study’s findings as follows:

It is satisfactory to find that the level of poverty in East London is now only about one-third as high as in Charles Booth’s time. It is much less satisfactory to learn that, in spite of this shrinkage, there are still more than a quarter of a million persons below the poverty line. When we consider how low and bare is the minimum of subsistence of the Booth poverty line, it is impossible to rest content with a condition of things under which one in ten in the Eastern Survey Area are living below this level. If the great progress towards extinction of poverty is matter [sic] for sincere congratulation and encouragement, the magnitude and gravity of what still remains give no ground for facile complacence, but rather for disquiet and searching of heart.⁴¹

Indeed, the study was well received – for its scope, but particularly for its attempt to revisit Booth’s study to examine the impact of several decades of urban change, and specifically to address the question of whether poverty in London was increasing or decreasing. Sally Alexander describes how it showed a general rise in income, with a shorter working day and improved literacy.⁴² The additional free time meant that people had more time to spend on leisure activities, which included the very popular cinema-going, as well as music – and gambling. She shows that access to more cash made for an easier life, but still there were a large number of people living in a state either close to or in poverty.

The nine volumes of Llewelyn Smith’s report constituted a comprehensive follow-up to Booth’s study 40 years earlier, with detailed studies on various aspects beyond the basic enquiry into poverty. Its accompanying set of six maps covered a wide area of London on a four-inch map of the County of London, coloured in a scale that reflected Booth’s methods, though while black was retained for the ‘lowest class of degraded or semi-criminal population’, Booth’s two other poverty classes were combined into blue, denoting ‘those who are living below Charles Booth’s poverty line’ (see Figure 4.11).

The report’s definition of the poverty line has drawn some criticism. First, the street survey aimed to replicate Booth’s methods, using school attendance officers, supposedly in the same vein as the School Visitors of Booth’s study. However, the officers were unlikely to have any detailed knowledge of families with children, let alone those without (as E.P. Hennock puts it rather less politely, the survey and maps were ‘conducted in the mental equivalent of historical fancy dress’.)⁴³ Similarly, Colin and Christine Linsley claim that the New Survey’s poverty line failed to replicate Booth’s survey as it included Class E, ‘which was never a poverty class under Booth’.⁴⁴ They maintain that a more precise definition of poverty would have found that only 6 per cent of the population of London was in poverty, less than the 9.8 per cent calculated by Llewelyn Smith (and in contrast with Booth’s 30 per cent). Despite this criticism, it is clear that Bowley’s research design was undertaken with great care and based on a substantial amount of prior research and testing of methods in his own work.⁴⁵ The survey avoided defining a poverty line; rather, it defined a minimal standard of living. Bearing all this in mind, the survey maps are an important snapshot in time that provides a rare opportunity to look at aspects of spatial/social continuity and change. Nevertheless, for the purposes of reading them, it helps to be aware that the light blue may cover cases where people were living a degree above the poverty line defined by the survey.

One example useful in studying continuity and change is Portland Road in west London. Looking at it on the 1898–9 Booth map of poverty, one finds that the street bisects two districts situated to its east and west. This is due to the fact that the relatively smart Ladbroke Estate (to the west) was constructed alongside the much more downmarket Norland Estate, home at the time of its construction to piggeries and potteries, alongside a gypsy encampment (to the east).⁴⁶ The Booth map also illustrates a dramatic drop from the more prosperous southern section to the northern section, coloured light blue (poor) and darker shades of dark blue and black (vicious, semi-criminal) in the back streets beyond. By the time of the New Survey of 1929, the north end had become ‘Degraded and Semi-Criminal’ – coloured black for the lowest class (Figure 4.12, with inset showing the New Survey). Shortly afterwards the tenement housing was demolished and replaced by social housing: Notting Wood and Winterbourne House. Whilst the southern section slipped down the poverty scale into multiple occupancy, the council-owned housing locked in place a class situation, which essentially has not shifted to this day. The situation in the prosperous south has been dramatically different. It would probably be classed in the top grade if Booth were to repeat his survey today.

In a similar fashion, a study of the south-eastern sections of the New Survey maps shows that despite a general uplifting in poverty levels since Booth’s time, the area around the docks is one of several instances of continuing problems with deep poverty, as can be seen in Figure 4.13, which has an inset of the same area as it was coloured up in the 1898–9 survey. So, while poverty has become more dispersed, it remained entrenched in some areas. This is confirmed by Brinley Thomas, who wrote soon after the survey’s publication that while only one fifth of the ‘Eastern Area’ population were classed as poor in the New Survey, as opposed to over three-fifths in Booth’s time, spatially, the segmentation of areas by industrial or transport infrastructure remained a problem:

The corresponding proportion in Charles Booth’s day was over three-fifths. The ugly pockets of chronic poverty still remaining are due chiefly to physical obstacles to freedom of movement. For example, “bounded by Limehouse Cut to the south, the gasworks to the west and a maze of railway lines to the east is the notoriously poor and degraded area formerly known as the ‘Fenian Barracks’” which was the subject of a vivid description by Charles Booth and still maintains something of its old reputation.⁴⁷

Figure 4.13 illustrates the area as it was assessed in both periods (with the main map showing the 1898–9 map coloured up following the above quoted remarks). It is clear how some of the streets within it remained impoverished well into the New Survey’s period.

In fact, George Duckworth’s report on ‘Fenian Barracks’ (Fenian Barracks was the local name for Furze Street) was telling, not just because it revealed how the police viewed it as troublesome, an area where people they were pursuing could disappear from view with the collusion of their neighbours; but also from the point of view of the proposed solution to the problem, namely to reconnect one of the internal streets into Bow Common Lane so that there would be more through-traffic coming down it:

This district has many bad spots and a great many very poor streets. From the police point of view the “Barracks” is the worst. This is a spot, which . . . is consistently bad, and from its size very difficult to deal with. Small streets may be bad in themselves but they can be tackled. A large block is another thing altogether.⁴⁸

The spatial structure of poverty and – in this instance, crime – is a topic that will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6. Meanwhile, it is important to note that the spatial patterning of poverty continues to be a current topic of interest. Recent work by Oliver O’Brien has an interesting angle on this, where he proposes to construct a new way of visualising poverty that harks back to Charles Booth’s methods, by overlaying UK national statistics on a map, showing demographic data according to census areas. Taking on board the limitations of choropleth maps, which tend to hide the detail of the street layout, he has created a visualisation which colours the streets across several major UK cities according to the demographic data of the area in which they are situated (Figure 4.14). Nevertheless (as O’Brien himself is at pains to point out), despite the graphic power and sophistication of the maps, they cannot replace the ability of the historical maps to distinguish between single houses (or even streets); the colour coding on an individual house is not necessarily strictly accurate.⁴⁹ This is one of many similar attempts to visualise the complexity of poverty in contemporary times. Other studies have used data on house sales to plot detailed data on housing economics, or land use patterns.⁵⁰