Street life | 16 August 2018

‘What can you tell me just now,’ asks Audrey Gillan. She’s talking to Tara, who’s been sleeping rough on Fournier Street in Spitalfields, close to Gillan’s home. Tara, aged 47, sounds like a man, so deep and growly is her voice, ruined by drink, cigarettes and the hardness of her life. Gillan wants to know how and why she ended up living on the street. But beyond explaining that she was slung out by her mum when she was 14 there’s little that Tara can or is prepared to tell Gillan.

In Tara and George on Radio 4 (produced by Gillan and Johnny Miller) we are taken on to the street and some way inside the lives of those we see nowadays in town, not even camping with cardboard boxes and newspaper but just lying on the pavement, no longer part of the whirling world around them, while we carry on, walking by.