The Modern Plague of London

Hundreds of orange dots scattered across this map demonstrate the huge number of public houses in Victorian London. Published by the National Temperance Publication Depot in 1886, the map was intended to visualise the modern moral ‘plague’ of alcohol drinking. The map covers the area from Stoke Newington in the north to Brixton in the south, and Paddington in the west to Bow in the east. It uses Bacon’s Map of London & Suburbs as its base, with the plotting of the dots based on the listing of public houses in the London Directory.

The title and manner of plotting information may have been inspired by John Stowe’s map of cholera deaths in Soho in 1854, and is thus suggestive of the ‘contagious’ effect of drink. During the 1880s, the National Temprance Publication Depot published a series of books promoting sobriety through real life and fictional moral stories. Although a prohibition of alcohol never took place in Britain, the temperance movement had some success in this period, recruiting thousands of individuals to pledge not to drink, influencing social attitudes towards alcohol and persuading the government to change licencing laws.