I grew up with a loving family on the edge of Manchester in a Dickensian environment of terraced houses built to house Victorian era industrial workers.  We had a scrap yard less than fifty meters away, a council yard with twenty-meter-high walls at the back, and a huge factory wall just across the road at the front. When we left the house we had to watch that we didn't get flattened by double-decker buses as they cut the corner on their way to the bus depot at the end of our road.

We were on the poor side of a town that was one of the richest in England, at a time when the industrial era was coming to a close, and most of the terraced houses around us were being demolished. This was the world I grew up in, and I believe it is a story worth telling.