I looked at the current London street map and found there is no Cambridge Street in Soho any more, and that was the end of my curiosity.

Skip forward to last week, and I finally got around to reading Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.

Johnson takes as his central theme the story of John Snow, and his pioneering work with Henry Whitehead during and after the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho which proved for the first time that cholera was a water-borne infection.

One of the key tools used by Snow was to plot the course of the outbreak on a map. Looking at the map I realised I had found Cambridge Street – the old name for the upper part of what is now Lexington Street.

The slightly more detailed general Board of Health Map based on Snow’s work also shows the old house numbers – and this shows number 13, just 7 doors down from the infamous pump which spread the disease.

The coincidence is that a direct ancestor of my wife lived in a house which, three years after evidence of their residence, was in the centre of a particularly virulent and well-documented outbreak of cholera. Today, in a modern city, that would be worthy of comment: in Victorian London perhaps less so.

We have no way of knowing if they were still in residence three years after the census, and thus survivors of the outbreak, but even if they had moved on, the descriptions of the Broad Street area provide a fascinating insight into the circumstances in which they lived.

More interesting, to me at least, are the aspects of my curiosity which set up this piece of serendipitous discovery – family history, networks of connections, a lifelong fascination with maps and the story they tell, and the ever-fascinating mental game of “What if… ?”

That might be the sort of question you ask after reading a study published in the Journal of Religion & Society which suggests that a high level of religious belief may harm a society.

As reported in the Times, the study, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies looks at data across the first world Western democracies, and examines both the level of overt belief in God / disbelief in evolution and the occurrence of various societal measures such as homicides, early mortality, STDs, teenage pregancy and abortion. The paper finds strong correlations between the general level of religiosity in a society and high levels of these negative measures.

The author is clear that this is an initial study of the correlation between data sets, and does not hypothesise a causal link, however he does include a call to arms for social sicences to examine these issues more closely.

Ironically, the scientific method, which to-date has been shown to be the most effective way of exploring links between events “out there” and putative causes is, I suspect, likely to be the last thing that members of a highly religious society will turn to.

Print version of paper [PDF]

[ via Voidstar]

Four main themes emerge from the report:

The British economy will (be forced to) move up the value chain, changing the nature of the jobs that are available. There will be an amplification of the “hourglass effect”, as jobs in the middle disappear, leading to an economy divided between highly-skilled, high-value work and low-paid service workers.

The UK labour market will continue to be tight, squeezing the supply of key skills and leading to attempts to try and boost labour supply. Areas of likely change are an increase in older workers, an increasing reliance on workers from outside the UK and further moves to greater equality of opportunity for women.

The way people will work will be subject to drastic change (for example a huge rise in mobile working, enabled by technology) but there will be less change in the way they are employed – the authors see a majority remaining in full-time employment. The organisations which provide that employment are likely to adopt a range of structures, from the traditional to newer forms such as virtual and networked organisations.

The nature of work and the management-worker relationship will change as new forms of motivation become the norm, at least at the high-value end of the economy. Here the report authors see that companies will be forced to allow greater autonomy and worker empowerment in order to meet the market demand for customised, responsive services. By contrast, companies providing services in the low-wage, low-value, low-skill service areas are unlikely to see the need to take on the cost of more flexible management methods.

There’s a Tomorrow Project event to discuss the book on 6th October – so I should be blogging some more after that.