Brown ale term "brown ale" was revived at the end of the 19th century when London brewer Mann introduced a beer with that name. However, the style only became widely brewed in the 1920s. The brown ales of this period were considerably stronger than most modern English versions. In 1926, Manns Brown Ale had an original gravity of 1.043 and an ABV of around 4%. Whitbread Double Brown was even stronger, an OG of 1.054 and more than 5% ABV. The introduction of these beers coincided with a big increase in demand for bottled beer in the UK. In the 1930s some
Whitechapel Adler wrote, "The further we penetrated into this Whitechapel, the more our hearts sank. Was this London? Never in Russia, never later in the worst slums of New York, were we to see such poverty as in the London of the 1880s." This endemic poverty drove many women to prostitution. In October 1888 the Metropolitan Police estimated that there were 1,200 prostitutes "of very low class" resident in Whitechapel and about 62 brothels. Reference is specifically made to them in Charles Booth's "Life and Labour of the People in London", specially to dwellings called Blackwall Buildings belonging to Blackwall Railway.