Danny Dorling talks to Jane Davidson

We’re all getting poorer. What does that look like for British children and their life chances? Social scientist Danny Dorling’s highly original approach constructs seven ‘average’ children from millions of statistics – each child symbolising the middle of a parental income bracket. Born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe’s most socially divided nation, these ‘children’ turned five in 2023, amid a devastating cost-of-living crisis.

Getting to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing issues, Dorling asks: what do we miss when we focus only on the super-rich and the most deprived? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?

Dorling is the 1971 Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His books include Inequality and the 1% and All That is Solid.

In conversation with Jane Davidson, Pro Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country.