“ANINFERNAL CONSTELLATION.” THAT was how the health campaigner Dr Thomas Nichols described the pubs, breweries and distilleries marked on the eight-foot-square map he displayed at his public talks. As it only covered a half-mile area of London, and contained 276 black dots, you can see how visually striking it must have been. But did it, and the other “drink maps” of late Victorian Britain, actually have any effect on the country’s boozing?
This is the question Kris Butler has set out to answer. His book will certainly appeal to cartophiles, illustrated as it is with the maps of British towns and cities used by temperance campaigners. Indeed their beauty was part of the strategy: inspired by John Snow’s famous “cholera” map of Soho (which plotted cases of the disease, centred around…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2024