Quaker Social Action highlights life on the streets
‘What is at once striking is how little has changed in the intervening 160 years.'
The reality of life on the streets was put under the spotlight this week at a talk hosted by Quaker Social Action (QSA).
Quaker Jennifer Kavanagh spoke on 30 June about the people and situations she had encountered while researching her book Let Me Take You By The Hand. Mirroring the journalist Henry Mayhew’s 1861 London Labour and the London Poor, a four-volume account of Victorian poverty, Jennifer Kavanagh set out on her own journey across her native London, interviewing people who live and work on the city’s streets and finding the stories beneath.
According to Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian: ‘What is at once striking is how little has changed in the intervening 160 years… What is even more troubling is the number of people with steady office jobs who are nonetheless obliged to wait tables or busk in order to pay their basic living costs.’
The QSA event also included a question and answer session with Jennifer Kavanagh.
