Where to buy a beer – or not!
If you have in your life a lover of drinks (in moderation obviously), history and maps then Drink Maps in Victorian Britain could solve your gift-giving dilemmas.
We think of the Victorian era as the ‘good old days’ but there was a movement to discourage people from indulging in the ‘demon drink’. So, what is a drinks map? It may sound like a pub guide, yet it refers to a type of late nineteenth-century British map designed specifically to shock and shame people into drinking less.
This book explores how drinks maps of particular cities were published in an attempt to fight increasingly rampant alcohol consumption, from Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield to Oxford, London and Norwich. Featuring red symbols to indicate where alcohol was sold, these special street maps were posted prominently in public places, submitted as evidence, sent to Members of Parliament and published in newspapers to show just how inebriated a neighbourhood could be. They promoted the message that having fewer places to buy alcohol was the answer to reducing widespread crime, poverty and sickness. And they worked – at first. After consulting a drinks map in one town, judges decided to close half the licensed shops because, even after that, no one had to walk more than two minutes to buy a beer.
Illustrated with original maps, advertisements and temperance propaganda, the story of their brief history is told amidst a tangle of licensing laws, rogue magistrates, irate brewers, ardent temperance organizers and accounts of the complex role alcohol played across all levels of Victorian society.
Drinks Maps in Victorian Britain is a novel look at social habits of the majority of people in the late nineteenth-century, when the temperance movement was at its most influential. People were encouraged to ‘Sign the Pledge’ as a promise to abstain from alcohol. My dad did that in the early 1930s but he confessed that it wasn’t legally binding as he was only 11 years old!
Drinks Maps in Victorian Britain
Author: Kris Butler
Published by: Bodleian Library
Price £22.00
ISBN-13: 978-1851245789