Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation w/ Danny Dorling & Polly Toynbee

Social scientist and inequality expert Danny Dorling discusses his latest work, Seven Children, an immersive and highly original study of child inequality, in a conversation at Foyles with Polly Toynbee.

About the book

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 symbolising 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?

About the speakers

Danny Dorling is a social scientist and author whose books include Inequality and the 1%, All That Is Solid and Shattered Nation, among many others. He has written numerous op-eds and long reads for the Guardian, New Statesman, Financial Times, and Telegraph. Dorling is Harold Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm.

Dorling will be in conversation with Polly Toynbee. Toynbee is a Guardian columnist. Her recent books include An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals and The Only Way Is Up: How to Take Britain from Austerity to Prosperity, co-authored with David Walker.

This event will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. Doors will open from 6:45pm.