Seven Children: Danny Dorling and Jane Davidson at the Hay Festival 2025

We’re all getting poorer. What does that look like for British children and their life chances?

In his book Seven Children, Danny Dorling 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 would have 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?

Audio recording of a conversation held at Hay Festival on 27 May 2025 between Jane Davidson and Danny Dorling.

“The Seven Children book is sad,” Dorling acknowledges during their discussion. “It’s sad because it is detailing what we know and what we’ve learned over years and years and years. Way back in in the early 1990s, a lovely professor of sociology called Peter Townsend, – no, not the rock star. Peter Townsend argued with government and eventually won that we would have statistics released every year to allow us to know in great detail how many children were poor, how many people were poor, and their material circumstances, what was actually lacking. And he believed that if we just did this and reported every March, governments would feel obliged to make it better, on average, than it had been.

“But by now you are probably used to reading stories about child poverty. You may be shocked by them. But the problem is that you become almost immune, because the story is the same. What is it? Three million, four million – one child in three. I may tell you some things that will shock you, but once you've heard it, and when it doesn't get better, you become used to it. And so we’re now a country where we accept children growing up in destitution.”

Danny Dorling is the 1971 Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His books include Inequality and the 1% and Shattered Nation.

Jane Davidson is Pro Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country. Between 2000 and 2011, Dr Davidson was Minister for Education, and then Minister for Environment, Sustainability in the Welsh Government.

Read more about Dr Davidson’s book #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country
https://janedavidson.wales/book

Read more about Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation
https://www.dannydorling.org/books/se...