Katharine Hibbert 

The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited by Stephen Armstrong – review

Echoes of the poverty witnessed by George Orwell in the 1930s remain in Britain today, writes Katharine Hibbert
  
  


Poverty of the sort George Orwell documented in The Road to Wigan Pier is history in the UK today, right? Wrong, according to Stephen Armstrong, who has loosely retraced Orwell's footsteps to mark the book's 75th anniversary, encountering squalor, hunger, abuse and addiction. Echoing the structure of the original and its combination of personal stories, statistics and opinion, Armstrong introduces us to those working-class people who have lost out most from Thatcherism and globalisation: an indebted woman who can afford nothing but biscuits to eat, a mother evicted from a damp flat by an unscrupulous landlord, salad packers whose eyes and skin are permanently puffy and red from chopping onions all day on the minimum wage. He finds some stoicism in the face of a precarious jobs situation, but little optimism. While Armstrong may overstate his case in drawing a direct parallel between the poverty experienced today and an era before the NHS, indoor toilets and free secondary education, it's hard to argue with his call for more effort from policy-makers to relieve the misery he finds.

 

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