How the term 'poverty' has changed

Interesting thread. I think drugs play a part - the conditions in which addicts survive in is probably what some people would define as poor nowadays. If you have a fairly clean and consistent place to sleep then most of society thinks you’re doing ok.

As a child in the 80s/90s it was very fashionable to have non homemade things. A knitted jumper would have not been really cheap, someone would have spent hours making it but it was embarrassing to wear - people would have preferred a Mickey Mouse jumper. Processed foods and ready meals were really popular rather than meat and two veg. I think when people made clothes they would have made them out of old sheets, or mended existing ones/hand me downs rather than going out and buying new fabrics. Expectations definitely changed - it was more normal, if you were well off or not, to do more for yourself even if you worked long hours.

I think we had quite a good period from the late 90s to the mid 2010s - material possessions, food and clothing became very cheap, but now they’re becoming more unaffordable it feels a lot worse. There still would have been poverty during this time, and I’m sure if food banks were around at the time then they would have been used.

As others have said, it’s now more unacceptable for people to share rooms and houses across generations and having lodgers.

Your example does seem relatively privileged.

My grandma post war shared a house with her extended family and her, her husband and her small children had one room plus the bathroom and kitchen was shared with her mum and dad and four siblings.

My other grandma lived in three rooms in someone else's house - shared kitchen and bathroom plus a room of her own for herself and husband.

These days there are many people who are living in very cramped accommodation in similar situations- families in temporary housing which lasts for years where they have one room plus shared kitchen and bathroom.

The quality of housing has generally gone up - all new build houses have inside toilets now, and there's double glazing so you no longer wake up to frost on the inside of the windows (although increasingly people are struggling to afford heating) but there's still people on the streets and living a family to a single room,

I agree. I get flour and yeast from Lidl. It's more expensive than cheap sliced bread but better. I also make my own clothes cheaply using fabric stall on the market and shops that sell dead stick, it's much cheaper except for jeans as good denim is hard to come by. Those things aren't totally relevant though. I have the skills and the equipment which not everyone does and it's also a hobby.

Smartphones are no longer a luxury. I volunteer at a foodbank and spoke to a man who was stuck because his phone was smashed - he showed it to me. He couldn't apply for jobs even through an agency without one and we could do nothing to help him with that. I did suggest he used computers at the library but I don't know how he got on with that.

I don't agree that a smartphone is a necessity. There must be a lot of older people who have an older mobile or a landline which suffices to contact people and can't be bothered with the internet.
In fact till roundabout the 70s there were whole rows of houses in some areas where nobody had a phone.

The biggest difference really came in the late 40s/early 50s with:

• The introduction of the NHS
• The introduction of national insurance
• The introduction of the welfare state
• secondary schooling for all

You therefore see a big difference in what "poverty" for someone living in 1910 and now would look like but, equally in what "poverty" would look like for someone living in 1910 and living in 1960. Yes, there are obviously technical differences - even poor people have mobile phones these days (they didn't exist in 1910 but are essential now). Its not very fair to say "in my day we coped without phones" because their prevalence today means you would be penalised for not having one. Its superficial. But there are now measures in place to stop children literally starving if their parents lose their jobs (there are still lots of children going hungry) or having to sell everything they have if someone breaks their leg. And that's all because of a system put in place at a time the UK was almost bankrupt by men and women who had fought a bloody, dangerous war and wanted to make the world a better place for their children/grandchildren.

But - there is rising economic inequality in the UK and that does matter in practical terms (not just envy) because the bigger the wealth gap the harder it is for ordinary people to buy "assets" since they go up in price with the income of the more wealthy leaving other people unable to e.g. buy houses when their parents could or unable to rent. Also, some of the institutions painstakingly built by the greatest generation are being eroded/slowly privatised by stealth. If we lose the NHS we go back to a world where becoming ill spells economic ruin for some.

Its fine to compare as the original poster did (and interesting). Its not really OK for people who grew up post WW2 in a world built through the sacrifices of their parent's generation to disparagingly compare the poverty faced by young people now with the poverty that their parents/grandparents faced at the start of the century. Because real responsibility would look like conserving these improvements for the future. Rather than allowing that work to be dismantled because earlier generations had it tougher than them so generations born after us should suffer too. That is incredibly selfish and self-centered. But I do think its convenient for some to have people fighting amongst themselves - boomers V millenials V genZ, or locals V asylum seekers etc, rather than looking at the bigger picture which is a concentration of wealth and creeping privatisation of public services.

I agree, but there is seriously something wrong when the people most able to afford children are the affluent (not rich) and the poor on benefits. Governments that preside over that (and both political parties have/are) are part of the problem and this latest shambolic lot are seriously embedding that even more

This is wring

Ffs what a crass post.

I promise you, those in poverty are struggling plenty - even by your standards. Most would dream of having a room spare to rent out. And baking to survive? Do you honestly think that with the cost of living, that buying the ingredients to make something that could be bought in Asda for £1 would make money?? Ridiculous to compare.

But in order to make the bread you need the ingredients.

You also need (if you don't have a bread maker) somewhere warm to prove the dough.

A working oven that you can afford to run (even if you have something else cooking in there).

The physical ability to make the bread.

I run a food bank and over this winter received a discretionary grant to offer essentials to our beneficiaries. We funded shoes, winter coats, a washing machine, a bicycle, a set of clothes for children in the next size up etc.

It always amazed me that these were all things which my status as a member of a well-off community meant that I could likely have for free or very little - our local FB and WhatsApp groups are full of them - but my beneficiaries couldn’t access. They didn’t have the time to bumble around on facebook, or the connections to be on the street WhatsApp group, or the transport to shift a washing machine.

More generally - poverty looks different here. Having lived both here and in parts of Africa I’d certainly still prefer to be in poverty in the UK than, say, Nairobi, but it doesn’t mean that poverty here doesn’t entail actual and sometimes significant hardship.

Apparently I was taken to my great-uncle's house as a baby to watch the Coronation of QE2 but I don't remember anything much about it.

Years later I was fascinated by his TV because it had doors !

We never had a TV/fridge/washing machine until many years later.

So, a little 2 bedroom house, outhouse toilet, coal fire, no electricity. My GM worked all day and night... cleaning, making clothes and took in 2 male lodgers in the downstairs 'parlour', made breakfast and evening meals for them.

A parlour??

Your grandmother sounds positively wealthy compared to mine (also 1910s births). Neither set of grandparents took in lodgers for a very practical reason: my mother’s parents raised her and her siblings in a grotty single end (one room) inner city tenement. My father’s parents were comparatively more well off - they raised their five kids in a room and kitchen (two rooms total) tenement flat. Obviously both properties were rentals as they didn’t have a bean to their names.

The idea of living in a HOUSE and being able to survive, however straightened the circumstances, on a single income, would have been pie in the sky to both families. I think your grandmother sounded relatively well off for the times. A lot of people today couldn’t afford the rent on a small house even with two salaries.

Lifestyle expectations are off the charts.

They're cheaper compared to things like housing. I think that's where the real shift has been.

I often hear people say how can people struggle for money yet have TV subscription services....I pay about £10 a month for a subscription so £120 a year. If I gave that up for the whole year, the money saved would pay for one day in nursery if I had a small DC who needed childcare. It would be a pointless saving.

I think it’s good that poverty has changed and that we have the benefits system as a safety net so that a lot fewer are in absolute poverty. I agree that expectations have changed. Some people have become more reliant on benefits and expect the state to provide everything and solve all their problems. I think some need to become less reliant and start taking responsibility themselves. Benefits should be used as a safety net. Childcare is a big barrier for some though which needs to be sorted out, in previous generations it was more acceptable to leave younger kids at home and go out to work at any hour, that is quite rightly unacceptable now. But childcare is expensive, even with the UC contributions or the funded hours it can still be a huge expense. We pay £1200 a month even with 15 funded hours, and will pay £850 a month once 30 hours kicks in.

I think OP's point isn't "benefits scroungers should open their homes to random men" but rather "even poor people today are lucky to not be forced into considering that as an option, thanks to UC etc"

Now poverty is defined as earning less than some percentage of average wage, in Victorian times and earlier if you were really poor you had literally nothing and were dying of hunger and cold and begging for a crust. Beggars now would laugh in your face if you offered them a crust of bread. Expectations are hugely different.

Food poverty has changed because the available food now is high in calories and low in nutrition, rather than the other way round. Plus, work is less manual and people in poverty are time poor so exercise is a lixury. And so it's easy to be size 18 and very poor.

It's not that new a phenomenon, Orwell talks about this in The Road to Wigan Pier.

"Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."

"They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard."

I'm not sure they are cheaper, it's just that everyone has them.

100 years ago if you lived in poverty you were very, very slim. As was every one of your children.
Now if you live in 'poverty' you get interviewed on TV saying you miss meals to feed your children whilst being at least a size 18.
Poverty has definitely changed.

I agree - in particular, this idea that you can "make and mend" your way out of poverty assumes that a person is poor because they don't have work, and therefore have time. These days, you can be in full time employment, and therefore have no time, and still not be able to afford a place to live.

Also to add...Poverty in my grandparents' age was 'be rich, a gangster, work hard or you die'. @Deeperthantheocean

Is a bit ridiculous because poverty in the past meant some would be in poor houses. Alot in jails. Deportation to Australia. Orphans in the empire schemes. Mental asylums. (Poor people rarely controlled their environments)

Your grandmother was apart of what was known as "the working poor" very far removed from the piss poor community & would have given her right arm to have access to the current provisions that are designed to help people like her out of poverty altogether

Her life was made more difficult by a lack of social mobility & debates/disputes around taxes, support, education.

The poorest people in this country are still among the richest in the world, that's how poverty has changed.