Indeed, that seems partly true — but not entirely — speaking as someone who worked in the lowest rungs, the poorest levels of the underclass in these areas, in sweat shops and warehouses, barely making enough to buy the most basic of food ( bread, milk) and to struggle to pay fifty pence into the gas metre, I know there’ll always be strugglers in the hidden underside of London…I recognise all these people from the 50s and 60s, because I ‘knew them all’ in different bodies, but just as poor bodies, in the 1980s.

I recognise my own role and presence, and that of my friends, in all these pictures.

I just thank the Lord ( or whatever Spinozan presence is aware of us) that I made it through — not all my companions did.

And that is not at all cheap bluster, rhetoric or hyperbole : the underbelly of London is a cruel and unforgiving place.

I will never forget my years there, because I see it in my dreams all these decades later. Being poor either destroys a person, dulls their wits, or makes them conscious, sharpens their sensitivities, even politicises them in ways they can never forget.

Hard times.