Gordon returned to Britain and rented a flat on 8 Victoria Grove in London. In October 1880 Gordon paid a two-week visit to Ireland, landing at Cork and travelling over much of the island. Gordon was sickened by the poverty of the Irish farmers, which led him to write a six-page memo to the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, urging land reforms in Ireland. Gordon wrote: "The peasantry of the Northwest and Southwest of Ireland are much worse off than any of the inhabitants of Bulgaria, Asia Minor, China, India or the Sudan". Having been to all of those places and thus speaking with some authority, Gordon announced the "scandal" of poverty in Ireland could only be ended if the government were to buy the land of the Ascendency families, as the Anglo-Irish elite was known, and give it to their poor Irish tenant farmers.