On 11 July 2016, a few weeks after the UK voted to leave the European Union – the culmination of a bitterly divisive referendum campaign – David Cameron resigned as prime minister. After giving a short speech in which he asserted his belief that the country had emerged stronger under his leadership, Cameron strolled back into No. 10 Downing Street humming a carefree tune to himself. After leaving office, the overseer of austerity Britain retreated to his £25,000 designer garden shed to write a ‘tell all’ memoir, while the legacy he created continues to wreak havoc on workingclass and low-income lives. In six years as prime minister, David Cameron oversaw a suite of policies that decimated the lives of many. Child poverty in particular rose from 27 per cent to 30 per cent between 2011/12 and 2016/17 (Bourquin et al 2020), the public cost of which has risen by over 20 per cent since 2013 (Hirsch 2021). And yet, in the years since Cameron's departure the ongoing consequences of his austerity agenda have been sidelined as other, more eye-catching political and social changes such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic took precedence. In the midst of these events consuming media attention, the continued lived experience of austerity is slowly being forgotten. Indeed, in 2018 then-Prime Minister Theresa May went so far as to declare that “austerity is over” (PoliticsHome 2018). More recently, this was echoed by former Chancellor of the Exchequer, now Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who in his October 2021 autumn budget speech declared that Boris Johnson's government had established “an economy fit for a new age of optimism” (Sunak 2021).

And yet, the consequences of austerity politics continue to ricochet through the lives of ordinary people. At the 2021 Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, I attended sessions organised by geographers Sander van Lanen and Sarah Marie Hall that reflected on the myriad legacies of austerity. Topics ranged from Tom Disney and Ian Robson's research on the erosion of state family support; to Stephanie Denning's work examining the vital role of foodbanks in feeding low-income people; to Meredith Whitten's exploration of how austerity cuts have led to the commercialisation and declining quality of public green spaces.