Hello, this is Business Daily and I'm Elizabeth Hotson. On today's program, we're taking a closer look at a beverage with a long and controversial history, but which is now becoming a booming global market, gin.

I think people are increasingly trying out new flavours and I would like to open them up to what Africa are for.

From the grubby streets of 18th century London.

The people that were panicking about it weren't panicking because of public health issues.

They were panicking because they didn't like the idea that the poor should have leisure,

that they'd stopped working,

and particularly that women played such a big part in the business of gin.

To a truly global craze, can the gin boom keep its fizz?

This is Business Daily on the BBC. I'm walking around St Giles, just north of Covent Garden in central London.

It's a busy working day and as you can hear, the traffic behind me is rumbling away.

Nowadays, you can't move for expensive shops and fancy bars, and the

headquarters of a huge global tech company bears down over what were once some of the least

salubrious streets in London. This area was the heart of London's supposed gin craze in the 18th

century. It was immortalised in William Hogarth's painting, Gin Lane,

which depicts an intoxicated mother dropping her baby, an incapacitated drinker slumped in a wheelbarrow

and a general sense of booze-soaked chaos. And this perceived excess created a gin-induced

moral panic,

centred on the idea, now disputed,

that the working classes especially were threatening the very stability of the nation.

A series of taxes was piled on to gin to curb sales,

but the taste for it never really went away. And centuries later, it's contributing to a business boom

which has been going on,

...