If you’ve lived or worked in any of England's major cities over the last 25 years and had any contact with young people, you will probably have heard them use the phrase ‘on-road’ to refer to their experiences. Each of the editors has encountered this phrase and appreciated the uncertain urgencies of its meaning to young people (Earle, 2011; Hallsworth and Young, 2011; Levell, 2019). Our concern has been to listen more closely and explore the meanings evoked in the term ‘on-road’. As young people appropriate language to express new meanings they shine a light on the limitations of our existing conceptual lexicon and this book hopes to expand it by attending to what they are feeling and experiencing. ‘On-road’ tells us of a travelling vitality by invoking familiar and implicit sociological tropes of youthful ‘street culture’. It is a creative phrase which accommodates the complexity and fluidity of youthful urban life but, as we argue in this book, even as its use has become widespread among young people, as a concept it has largely escaped sociological scrutiny. In this collection, we gather diverse research on experiences of life on-road that reflects part of the vibrant urban diversity of young working-class people in Britain's multicultural cities. Part of our objective is to disrupt criminological assumptions that stereotype young people's lives as violent, or criminalise or racialise routine aspects of their everyday life, particularly when they are not White. The vernacular use of ‘on-road’ has become a popular shorthand that refers to the myriad ways that some young people move into and out of home life, school life and income-generating activity of various kinds. It encompasses streets and clubs, pavements and takeaways, social and work life, worklessness, recreation, leisure, boredom, and random ways of making a living.

‘On-road’ creatively evokes open vistas of a life propelled, going somewhere out there, but in a way that is uncontained; a direction without a destination. Being ‘on-road’ or, for some young men, becoming a ‘roadman’, is not the same as being in a gang, or becoming gang affiliated, but each of these conditions are relevant to it by reference or proximate reality.