The People of Providence: A housing estate and some of its inhabitants Book

Over a period of eighteen months in the early 1980s, Tony Parker interviewed the residents of a housing estate in South London. He succeeded in getting a wide assortment of personalities to talk freely – a vagrant, two policemen, an oft-convicted fence and mother of five, a pro-flogging magistrate, a local doctor and a 75-year-old widower, who spent an hour or two a week in bed with any of a dozen women he had met at church. The interviews are continuously surprising, and prove that extraordinary stories, insight and articulacy are to be found in the most ordinary of places. Tony Parker recorded these individuals so faithfully that you feel you can hear their voices. Together they create a human symphony of the everyday, in all its courageous diversity.