Over a period of eighteen months Tony Parker interviewed the residents of an ordinary housing estate in South London.
He listened to an assorted mixture of personalities – including a vagrant, two policemen, an often-convicted fence who was the mother of five children, a pro-flogging magistrate, a local doctor, and a 75-year-old widower who spent ‘an hour or two in bed each week with one or other of about twelve different ladies I meet at our church’.
The inhabitants of ‘Providence’ opened their hearts, revealing all their quirks, emotions and prejudices. These interviews prove that extraordinary stories are found not only in deserts and jungles: even amid the bleak sprawl of South London, Tony Parker discovered a community that is diverse and enthralling.
The Tape-recorder Man
In the mid-twentieth century a new device came into common use, enabling every Tom, Dick and Harry to record and play back sounds stored on magnetic tape. Arriving some 500 years after Gutenberg, the...
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