Deer Island

At the beginning of the 1980s Neil Ansell chose a life of voluntary poverty working for the Simon Community, a charity with radical approaches to helping homeless people. He lived in squats and ‘derries’ across London, becoming part of a floating community of volunteers and rough sleepers whose purpose was to offer companionship and support for each other. But around them Britain was changing. It was becoming the decade of the individual. Soon there would be ‘no such thing’ as society. In spare and beautiful prose Neil Ansell overlaps two contrasting journeys through the streets of London and the wilds of Jura, building a powerful and moving meditation on what it means to belong.