The year is 1933 and William Woodruff, sixteen years old and passionately idealistic, is leaving the Lancashire of his childhood so vividly portrayed in The Road to Nab End and now in the depths of economic depression. He is going to London, hoping to get a job as a steelworker, determined to make his way in the world. Set down in the East End of London, William discovers no streets paved with gold, but filthy tenements and the seedy glamour of the Sunday picture house, the squalor that only a great city can conceal. He finds himself a beer-swilling landlady with a predatory daughter and a tattooed madman of a son with whom he has to share his bed. And as Mosley's blackshirts provoke street fighting, Woodruff witnesses the stoicism and courage of ordinary people in the face of impending war: a war in which he himself will soon be fighting . . .