Up the Junction – Nell Dunn

The girls might be sparky and game, but what very little they had going for them. Nell Dunn’s snapshots at least made these young women visible, but what a sad story is theirs, what absence of prospect. The crude bleakness of 1960s Battersea, factory jobs, a shag in a ruined house and a botched abortion.
 
If you like reading just for local voices (I do), you get proper London alright; life is day to day, a missed payment away from destitution; muck and sickness on every street, prison as the price to pay for chancing your luck, innocence undermining the survival skills of the young, the power station “puffing mauve clouds into the cloudless summer evening.”