Danny Dorling | Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation
Sat 26 Apr 2025 | 10:00am - 11:00am
In Seven Children, Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, offers a highly original exploration of inequality and hope through the lens of seven ‘typical’ children. Drawing from millions of statistics, he constructs these children as symbols of the average experience, representing the full spectrum of parental income in the UK, from the poorest to the wealthiest.
Born in 2018, during a time when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression, these children turned five in 2023, amidst a devastating cost-of-living crisis. Despite the rapid rise in child poverty and the country’s growing social divide, Dorling’s immersive and thought-provoking book reveals that hope can still endure.
Through these seven children, Seven Children explores the complex issues affecting post-pandemic Britain, from the overlooked middle to the extremes of wealth and deprivation. Dorling challenges us to think beyond the narratives of the superrich and the most deprived, asking critical questions about what life is like for the majority of British children, and how we can reverse the damaging trends affecting their future.
In conversation with Melissa Benn
Venue: Old Divinity School
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biography
Danny Dorling is a social scientist whose books include Inequality and the 1% and All That Is Solid. He is Harold Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm. Danny appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and other papers. He advises the government and the office for national statistics. In his spare time, he makes sandcastles
Chair Biography
Melissa Benn is a writer, journalist, and campaigner. As a freelance writer, her essays and journalism have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Independent, The Times, Public Finance, Marxism Today, The London Review of Books, Cosmopolitan, and Public Finance. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian and New Statesman. She has published eight books, including two novels. One of Us, published in 2008, was widely praised and shortlisted for a British Book Award in 2008. In September 2013 she published What Should We Tell Our Daughters? The Pleasures and Pressures of Growing Up Female, an exploration of young women’s lives from the perspective of a mother and feminist in mid-life, which was shortlisted for a Politico’s Book of the Year in 2014.
