From the accounts written in this book it might be easy to surmise that the British working class are in a sorry state; known and represented as ‘lacking’ and ‘deficit’, they struggle to find work, constantly fight with social services in order to maintain any type of decent existence, sell drugs, dodge the police, and are eventually filled with so much anger and frustration that they turn their anger on each other and within their own communities. They are known and named as feral, underclass, scum, and living on ‘Benefits Street’. This book may appear as a depressing account of contemporary life in Britain. However, from the beginning, I explained this that was a complex story, filled with complex narratives from people who manage to ‘get by’ despite the inherent structural problems that unequal Britain bestows on them. Some of those problems are the way the people in this book, the poorest 10 per cent of the population, and those who live in this council estate in Nottingham, are seen and known by the rest of the British population.

Narratives are important – the ways that narratives are constructed about different groups affect their life chances, and also in the ways these groups see themselves. In recent years there has been a clear and definite return to the imagery of the ‘underclass’, with council estates representing a modern version of Hogarth’s Gin Lane. This version is clear and has characters who are recognisable – the dangerous and violent gang member and the welfare-absorbing single mother. The discourses that surround these characters are their assumed lack of common societal values and morality, and their wilful self-destruction. It is their self-destructive behaviour, through their own practices, tastes, what they wear, how they speak and who they decide to share their beds with that begins to represent a real threat to British values and national life, with seemingly the only rational answer that this danger to British society coming from below must be curbed through punitive measures – benefits cuts – reawakening the whole ‘deserving versus undeserving’ debate.

What I have also shown throughout this book, through the narratives and the stories that people have told me about themselves and their community, is that local narratives linked to local identities are important.