AT THE end of the 19th century, an intrepid social scientist visited Stockwell, in south London. He was involved in an ambitious project, led by the shipping magnate Charles Booth, to colour-code every street in the capital according to its social make-up. In general, the area struck him as comfortable. But just east of Stockwell Road he found a pocket of filth and squalor, with rowdy residents and broken windows. It was, he believed, “far the worst place in the division”.

Since then, the area has been transformed. Dismal two-storey cottages have been swept away and replaced by grass and the apartment blocks of the Stockwell Park Estate. But the appearance of the neighbourhood has changed more than its character. Julie Fawcett, who lives in one of the blocks, characterises her neighbours as “the mad, the bad and the sad”. Unemployment is more than double the borough average. Next to the very street that appalled the Victorian social scientist is one nicknamed Heroin Alley.

In many ways, London has changed dramatically in the past century. It has sprawled far beyond its 1898 boundaries. The network of underground transport has expanded, and cars have appeared. The city has been bombed in two world wars. The middle classes fled, then returned. Yet when Booth's maps are updated using data from the last census, the changes are less striking than what has stayed the same. Not only do the broad patterns found in the 19th century hold—the East End is still poor, the West End still rich—but so do many local ones.

Booth's method of judging streets was necessarily impressionistic. Researchers peered through windows and into back gardens in search of clues. A torn waistcoat on a clothes line in Kentish Town, north London, “told clearly of working-class occupants”. Police officers were asked their opinions. Of the residents of one street in the south London neighbourhood of Battersea, the local copper asserted: “People have improved their houses but not their manners.” That road was coded black, for “vicious, semi-criminal”—the lowest of seven categories.

Sadly, the 2001 census does not measure viciousness. But it does measure people's socio-economic status. By collapsing its eight categories, and Booth's seven, into four, it is possible to see how a neighbourhood has changed (or not changed) over a century.* The map on this page shows the results for one area that has altered more than most: north Chelsea.

In 1898, Chelsea was socially mixed, and neither especially rich nor especially poor. Booth's researchers found some well-to-do residents in the Georgian terraces and on the main roads; before the advent of cars, busy roads were often smart. Dodgier folk crowded into the squalid courts and alleys. Worst was a now-demolished street southeast of the Fulham Road, the neighbourhood's main drag, which featured “evil looking drink sodden old Irish women”.

Chelsea is now one of the toniest parts of London. Had they walked the same streets a century later, Booth's researchers would no doubt have noticed designer clothes shops and a high concentration of Porsches and BMWs. Managerial and professional workers are now the dominant group in the area. Many streets that were middling in Booth's day are now wealthy, and some pockets of deep poverty have disappeared.

But poverty has not been altogether banished from this part of Chelsea, nor has it moved much. Most of the poorest areas in 2001 were also poor in 1898, and in almost exactly the same places. The reason is that the worst Victorian slums have been knocked down and replaced with tracts of social housing. Some of this housing was built by charitable trusts in the early 20th century; a nastier, post-war edifice just north of Draycott Avenue is the responsibility of the council.

When Chelsea's mean streets escaped the wrecking ball, they invariably went up-market. The houses of Caroline Place were “poor and rather rough”, with “some Irish” inhabitants, in 1898. Two- and three-bedroom houses in the street, since renamed Donne Place, now sell for £1.5m ($2.8m), according to Nick Boden, a local estate agent. (He describes the neighbourhood as “prime, prime, prime”.)

The same trend can be seen in many parts of the capital. Dubious areas that kept their housing stock have often improved. The terraced streets of Islington, which were patchy in Booth's day and later became patchier still (in 1971, fewer households had exclusive use of a bathroom than anywhere else in London), are now notoriously middle-class. But where vertical social housing replaced slums, poverty has been fossilised. So has some of the viciousness that Booth found.

Scott Orford of Cardiff University says that London's social housing has become “residualised” in the past few decades. The better council properties, and those in areas where most homes are privately owned, have often been sold to their residents under the “right to buy” scheme introduced by the last Conservative government. Flats on high-rise estates have proved less popular, and are more likely to have stayed in the hands of local authorities. The public housing that remains in London thus contrasts more sharply with its surroundings.

The social geography of London may change even less in the next 108 years than it has done since 1898. There are, after all, fewer poor neighbourhoods with pretty housing, of the kind that may be colonised by middle-class pioneers. The supply was beginning to dry up even in the mid-1960s, when the hero of Michael Frayn's novel “Towards the End of the Morning” tries to find one. Following a frustrating search, he admitted defeat: “There was no shortage of slums; but they were not Georgian or Regency slums.”





*A full explanation of the method used is available here