Book Review : Urban Grimshaw And The Shed Crew - Bernard Hare***** How the other half live. The true story of the forgotten half, the underclass, prossies, smackheads, twockers, scum, scutters, sluts, muggers and assorted humans largely ignored by the rest of society. The Shed Crew are a gang of mostly illiterate, teen and pre-teens hanging out together, drinking, smoking and taking, shagging and stealing their wa around the inner city estates of Leeds in the late 90's. Chop, a dropped out social worker with a drink, drug and authority problem comes into their little world. He's an altruistic sort, and takes the violent, promiscuous kids under his wing as best he can. He offers them a safe place to sleep over, with strict rules that the girls cannot visit him alone, he feeds them, keeps up a running verbal education for them, and realising he cannot prevent them (as he cannot prevent himself) from sampling the dubious delights of various narcotics, he at least tries to educate them in safer drug use. Hare paints a bleak portrait of England's inner city life. In his late 30's he sees his generation as the last one with any moral vestiges, the next generations run riot, thieving, drug taking, drinking, acting with no morals and zero responsibility, family and social structure having broken down. He plants the blame for this squarely at the feet of Margerat Thatcher, easy target, we all know there was no social deprivation or inner city poverty before Thatcher. Urban Grimshaw is the teenage boy Chop feels closest to, he works hardest with him, striving to educate him and lift the boy up from the social morass he is mired in, as the Shed Crew grow and and the group splinters, Urban and Chop stick together, mostly, through thin and thinner. This really is an eye-opening book, to think that people are living in this sort of squalor, both physical and mental, only a dozen miles from my front door, it brings a measure of shame on us all. UG is, in it's own way, uplifting and positive whilst at the same time being bleak and depressing. The tales of other folk's everday lives are shocking and sobering, Hare doesn't provide solutions for this modern dilemma, but he does paint a gruesome portrait of inner city life. Whether it's 12 year old girls with a dozen sexual partners, babies born with smack habits or knife wielding teenage boys, Hare's true tales of other people's lives are gripping and distressing, that we are allowing a generation of city children to exist like this is disgraceful. Christina Patterson writing in the Indy said that 'Every politician - and every voter - should read it', she's spot on, this is a compelling social commentary that we should all be aware of.