Hackney

W.G. Runciman

Inside the Inner City by Paul Harrison
Pelican, 444 pp, £3.95, August 1983, ISBN 0 14 022419 X
Brighton on the Rocks: Monetarism and the Local State
Queens Park Rates Book Group, 192 pp, £3.95, May 1983, ISBN 0 904733 00 9
The Wealth Report edited by Frank Field
Routledge, 164 pp, £6.95, June 1983, ISBN 0 7100 9452 3

Paul Harrison is at pains to make clear that his impassioned report on poverty and social conflict in the Borough of Hackney is not an academic survey. It is journalism, and proud of it. It would be totally inappropriate for a reviewer to cavil at the lack of cross-tabulations, or details of the conduct of interviews, or sampling techniques which might have proved that his selection of informants is as representative of the disadvantaged as he says it is. He is treading geographically but not methodologically in the footsteps of Charles Booth. His aim is to convey to his readers as vividly as he can just how awful are the lives of the poor and powerless inhabitants of the inner cities of a supposedly civilised nation which ought to be a great deal more ashamed of allowing such conditions to persist than it shows any signs of being.

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Vol. 5 No. 19 · 20 October 1983 » W.G. Runciman » Hackney (print version)
pages 11-12 | 2403 words