Sathnam Sanghera: Poverty was cosy on my Wolverhampton 'Benefits Street'

Now Wolverhampton-born author Sathnam Sanghera suggests the opposite can be true, 'poverty can be cosy'.

He grew up on a street which draws comparisons with the now infamous Benefits Street of the Channel 4 documentary.

For Sathnam, aged 37, Prosser Street in Park Village had that same mix of terrace houses, a population largely made up of Caribbean and Indian subcontinent immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, but also one with a tight sense of community.

Writing in The Times, the author of acclaimed books The Boy With The Topknot and Marriage Material said there was no reason for people to be surprised by the sense of community displayed by the 'stars' of Benefits Street. The residents of James Turner Street in Birmingham were doing the same as those who lived on Prosser Street when Sathnam was growing up.

"That's the thing about poverty," he said. "As well as being degrading, it can be cosy.

"Sometimes you have to huddle together to save money on heating. And while on paper it doesn't sound great that there were small houses on Prosser Street with more than 20 residents, that some rooms were rented out on a shift basis to night and day workers, that I had to share a room with my parents until the age of 12, as a kid it was just nice to have company."

And like the children of James Turner Street, Sathnam said: "We were largely oblivious to our underprivilege.

"When I saw a National Front sign graffitied on an Indian shop, I liked the cool way in which the F hung off the N so much that I scrawled the symbol onto a balloon.

"And when, in my first week at Wolverhampton Grammar School that saved my life, a geography teacher asked those of us lived in a 'village' to raise our hands, I did so, not understanding why my posh white classmates found it so amusing." But it is the 'poverty of ambition' that has worried Sathnam.

He lives in London now but returns to Wolverhampton regularly to visit his family.

He made a short film a few years ago to promote his memoir, The Boy With The Topknot, and was shocked to find overgrown gardens, shops closed down, a crack den and a brothel. "Frankly, it made James Turner Street look like Mayfair," he said.

Speaking to the Express & Star, he added: "Wolverhampton is a different place. Whatever situation someone used to be in, they could get a job as a labourer or in a factory. But those jobs don't exist as much any more."