In 1886 Victorian social explorer Charles Booth embarked on an epic plan to record the social conditions of London’s residents.

Produced over seventeen years, his innovative maps colour-coded every street according to its position on the social scale: Yellow for the houses that kept three or more servants; Dark Blue for the ‘Vicious’ and ‘Semi-Criminal’. London was, and is, the only city in history to be mapped in this monumental, comprehensive way, house by house, street by street.

Taking Booth’s unique maps as its starting point, The Secret History of Our Streets revisits six archetypal London streets to discover how its residents’ fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the last hundred and twenty-five years.

Bringing the past to life with a wealth of records, films, photographs and powerful personal stories, each episode charts the intriguing life of a single London street and reveals the dramatic social changes that have fashioned the society we live in now.