As I recount the many stories and experiences I have been part of in St Ann’s, I am aware that even in the short amount of time between undertaking the research and writing the book there has been a decline in the real value of people’s incomes and standards of living in recent years, particularly for those in the bottom 10 per cent of British society. There are many reasons for this, such as rising food and energy prices, the halt in pay rises for the average worker, the loss of low-paid but reliable work in the public sector, and the more draconian changes during the current austerity measures in welfare benefits, including tax credits, housing benefits and disability payments. At the same time, however, the highest earners are seeing their income levels rise. A study from the High Pay Centre, a think tank set up in the wake of an inquiry into escalating executive pay, says that the nation has returned to levels of income inequality last seen in the 1930s, with the share of the national income going to the top 1 per cent more than doubling since 1979, to 14.5 per cent (Hirsch, 2013). Danny Dorling’s book Injustice (2010) gets to the heart of why social inequality and social injustice persists, but also explains that when levels of inequality are this stark, there is always a devastating effect on society as whole. It becomes especially debilitating for those in the bottom 10 per cent as they become financially, and socially, excluded, eventually becoming culturally excluded, and finding it difficult to take part in the same society as everyone else.

The road to Wigan Pier (1962) is George Orwell’s narrative account of working-class Britain during the 1930s, when levels of inequality were staggering. He raised contentious issues relating to how the poor spent their money and conducted their social lives. This is a debate that is still raging today in the pages of the daily tabloid newspapers and in the pseudo-documentary style television programmes about ‘the poor’. There appears to be an obsession in the British media in knowing how the working class and the non-working working class spend their money, choose their clothing, how and what they eat, and how they speak.