The world is changing rapidly. A century ago almost all accounts of the lives of the poor were written by the rich and often for the rich. Occasional exceptions, such as The ragged trousered philanthropists (Tressell, 1914), proved the rule. Lisa Mckenzie begins her account of life in St Ann’s with her reaction to reading George Orwell’s observation that the poor smelt.

Fifty years ago social observation had become the territory of the concerned middle class and other only slightly less affluent outsiders. In this book Lisa talks more warmly of Ken Coates’ and Richard Silburn’s studies of St Ann’s, published as Poverty: The forgotten Englishmen by Penguin in 1970. But these were still outsiders’ perspectives, shocking the English middle class of the day by revealing that areas remained in England where not all children had shoes. Ken had been a Nottinghamshire miner, but only came to that because he refused to be conscripted into the army.

Today those who have been poor increasingly write their own stories of living in poverty. Lisa’s family were Derbyshire agricultural labourers and Nottinghamshire miners with few other employment opportunities. From leaving school around the age of 15 she worked at the Pretty Polly factory making tights until she was 25, then worked part time in shops in Nottingham city centre. She has been homeless, and afraid. She did too much too young. She had a mixed-race child and lived in St Ann’s as a young mother.

Lisa later spent many years at Nottingham University becoming a social scientist – learning how to use long words, to anonymise the identities of her interviewees, to call people by their surnames when writing, to read obscure texts, to produce a PhD thesis and to get funding to study the estate she lived on – but she didn’t have to struggle to know what she was talking about. She only had to struggle to learn how to talk about it in the ways expected for a largely middle-class, academic readership.

Today we translate. We describe the different worlds we live in to each other as those worlds move apart. More and more people try to span these worlds. Observation is not longer enough; immersion is no longer enough. As the gaps between our experiences grow it becomes ever more necessary to hear largely first-hand, unadulterated accounts, the descriptions from the inside.