The aim of this chapter is to explore begging and the related occupations of busking and Big Issue selling as marginal economic activities that are conducted in time and space. Temporal and spatial activities have been addressed in relation to marginal – primarily homeless – street populations (see, for example, Duncan, 1983; Murray, 1984), but this chapter is distinctive both in its attempt to focus on economic dimensions of the temporal and spatial structuring of street life, and in its adoption of ‘the rural’ as a spatial focus and site of sociological enquiry in relation to the question of begging as an economic activity. Studies of homelessness and related phenomena such as begging have long been predominantly urban in focus, although more recently there has been a growing body of work on rural homelessness (Button, 1992; Lambert et al, 1992; Ford et al, 1997; Jones, 1997). Recent work by post-modern critical geographers has begun to deconstruct the binary divide between country and city, to address the complexity and diversity of rural culture and society, and to develop a focus on the marginalised rural ‘other’ (Philo, 1992; Soja, 1997; Milbourne, 1997).

The question of defining rurality is both complex and contested: objective measures such as population density and economic activity are counterposed against such sociocultural factors as community and identity (Halfacree, 1993; Cloke et al, 1997). For the purposes of this study we have adopted a working definition of rurality. Our concern has been primarily to contrast North Wales as a rural region with urban-based studies of begging. This is not to deny the existence of urban centres within the region, but is simply to begin by asking the question whether economic, social and cultural life is qualitatively different in rural and urban areas. At the same time, we recognise degrees of rurality, and therefore, while we define the region as a whole as rural, we distinguish between ‘semi-rural’ areas such as the coastal towns, and the ‘deeply-rural’ villages and hamlets of the valleys of Snowdonia.

Our approach is necessarily exploratory, given the dearth of studies on begging and other marginal economic activities in rural areas, and our sample is small, reflecting the scattered nature of the population of North Wales in general and of deviant sub-groups in particular.