It is exciting to live here; so much history in a few square miles. I just found out that London School of Economics & Political Science had recently re-published an updated version of the highly influential ‘Descriptive Map of London Poverty’ by Charles Booth from 1898-99. This updated version displays an interactive version of Booth’s original map online, alongside a contemporary Ordnance Survey map, which makes for an exciting historical comparison! For example, noting the area around Goldsmiths College, one notices that surprisingly little has changed.

Dan Hill notes how The Economist, in their article on the publishing of this map, had picked up on the fact that there is a consistency of place even within a city in as apparently constant flux as London.
What is perhaps more striking, though, with Booth’s map is what Hill mentions was the deliberate method of taking a “necessarily impressionistic” approach to judging streets.

His researchers simply walked all over London, noting down what they saw — from the shape of the streets to the tiniest details of flotsam and jetsam of living — as well as talking to people. The streets were then coded — sometimes with facets like viciousness! — and mapped. [...] For all their lack of validity, ethics or scientific rigour, they are often far more detailed, ironically, and the subjective personal views therein often provide engaging hooks upon which to hang your own constructed response to the city.

Speaking of: Elsewhere on the web, the wonderfully esoteric Archeology of the Future writes about a quite ambitious, contemporary attempt at mapping this city in novel ways:

Christian Nold, the artist, using Global Positioning System technology and measuring galvanic skin response to indicate arousal, is engaging members of the local community in building an emotion map of the Greenwich Peninsula, home to the Millennium Dome, described by Iain Sinclair as “the tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of The Royal Naval College”. You walk, your arousal is recorded, along with your position, then when you get back the whole thing is combined and uploaded onto Google Earth, where it sits with the walk data from all of the other people who have taken part. The arousal appears as a series of peaks on the map like jagged mountain ranges. The higher the peak, the higher the emotion. Combined, the sum of the walks shows a topography of the Peninsula, a map of feeling with sloughs and heights, a physical/psychic landscape overlaying the real one. [...]
According to Iain Sinclair’s book ‘Sorry Meniscus’, the Peninsula was never a part of the Greenwich story. Formerly Bugsby’s Marshes, “The Peninsula was where the nightstuff was handled: foul-smelling industries, the manufacture of ordinance, brewing, confectionery, black smoke palls and sickly sweet perfumes… The Peninsula thrives on secrecy. For as long as anyone can remember much of this land has been hidden behind tall fences. Walkers held their breath and made a wide circuit. Terrible ghosts were trapped in the ground. A site on the west of the Peninsula, now captured by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, had once featured a gibbet where the corpse of some pirate, removed from Execution Dock in Wapping, would be left to decay.”

Interestingly, the Peninsula is not far away from where I am located writing this, and the same observation as The Economist made can be made for this part of London: it has changed, but still it hasn’t changed that much. For some inexplicable reason, the atmosphere — not in a meteorological way, but in a psychic one — appears to have remained the same throughout the centuries. Maybe there’s something in the (Thames) water, maybe it’s due to the reluctance to change implicit in British conservatism, maybe it’s the deliberate inertia in the London property market (freeholds & leaseholds y’know)? Quite weird it is, and quite wonderful.