For six years Marc Davenant worked with the charity Shelter, making portraits of and interviews with people experiencing homelessness or inadequate living conditions in the United Kingdom. What is here is their testimony to the hardship they face — the hunger, discomfort, uncertainty and danger — and to the way they are ignored and treated by a society that sees them as less than human.

“Long before I ever dreamed I would work for Shelter, the pictures of Nick Hedges — his unflinching but compassionate images of poverty and unliveable conditions in the 1960s — forced me to confront injustice I would never otherwise have seen. I believe the beautiful, arresting and human images in this book can do the same for a new generation. It shames us all that half a century has passed between the creation of these two collections, because in half a century so little has changed. Millions of people simply cannot afford a decent home. Despite a widespread perception that new buildings are going up everywhere, the reality is that year after year virtually no homes are built that ordinary people on low incomes can afford to live in.” — from the foreword by Polly Neate