It’s Gin Lane all over again

28 October 2009

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Hogarth’s satire is as appropriate now as it was 250 years ago, says Dan Jones. What we need is a new approach to our age-old drinking problem

In 1751, as the great Gin Craze was winding down, William Hogarth produced a series of six prints. It included ‘Gin Lane’, his cruel masterpiece. In the foreground a syphilitic old slapper lolls across a dirty flight of steps, pinching from the snuffbox as her baby tumbles to its death in the cellar of a gin shop. Behind her kale-eyed rioters tear themselves and their surroundings to pieces. Brawlers wield furniture as weapons. As Hogarth later wrote, ‘In Gin Lane... nothing but idleness, poverty, misery and ruin are to be seen; distress even to madness and death, and not a house in tolerable condition but Pawnbrokers and the Gin shop.’

Sound familiar? It should, because there’s still a Gin Lane in every town and city centre you care to look at. This week the Sun has launched an investigation into Britain’s binge-drinking girls, with a series of horrifying snaps from around the UK: a girl dancing with her knickers round her ankles in Cardiff, another vomiting in front of a ‘drink awareness’ poster in Manchester. One of the clearest symptoms of what David Cameron has labelled ‘Broken Britain’ is the collapse between the concepts of sociable drinking and public drunkenness. Our modern Gin Lane — let’s call it Puke Alley — has been caricatured to the point of parody: hair gel and vomit, fighters and fat slags, alcopops and police-wagons, pairs of mugs doing bad coke in nightclub toilets and the bouncers issuing licks out back by the bins.

But just because it has been parodied doesn’t mean it ain’t so. The drinks have changed a bit. The squalor remains. Now, on Puke Street, they drink alcopops and two-for-one shots, topping up on the early evening’s super-strength cider and cheap spirits sold as loss-leaders in supermarkets. And spread-legged, dead-eyed birds still slump on steps — now as then still instinctively more shocking than blokes doing the same thing. (Sexist? Yes, but true.)

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