Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation

Britons all getting poorer. What does that look like for British children, and their life chances?

If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today’s UK, who would they be? What would their stories reveal?

Seven Children is about injustice and hope. Danny Dorling’s highly original book constructs seven ＂average＂ children from millions of statistics--each child symbolizing the very middle of a parental income bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest. Dorling’s seven were born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe’s most socially divided nation. They turned 5 in 2023, amid a devastating cost-of-living crisis. Their country has Europe’s fastest-rising child poverty rates, and even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged. Yet aspirations endure.

Immersive, surprising and thought-provoking, Seven Children gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing issues. What do we miss when we focus only on the superrich and the most deprived? What kinds of lives are British children living between the extremes? Why are most British parents on below-average income? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?

Danny Dorling is a social scientist whose books include Inequality and the 1% and All That Is Solid. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm. In his spare time, he makes sandcastles.