London Poverty by Kiran Sandhu

While working on a brief about practitioners I became fascinated with the work of Charles Booth. I underwent in-depth research into Booth's diaries that he kept. Looking into the archive compiled by LSE I was fascinated that the map was based on the individual streets and the people that live in street. I started to wonder what this map would look like today?

I became intrigued by all the information I was finding. While looking into poverty today I came across a large range of statistics this I then compiled this into a large database and from this, the poverty index was created. The poverty index I created was made up of several factors from Infant mortality, Minimum wage, house prices etc. Data was taken from open data sources and trust from London. As I couldn't go to every street in London instead I broke them down into boroughs. I started with circles of data from population and then started to expand them according to the index I collected.

The visual representation of the pieces is about highlighting and illuminating areas of London which are in poverty. The larger the heads of the nails and holes are the areas of higher poverty. Each map is handmade taking around 10 hours to make.