The Chicken Run

The year is 1955. Bill Haley is rocking the charts and teddy boys are emerging from shadowy street corners. It’s a year of great change and, for four families in Churchill Street, East London, it’s a year that none of them will ever forget. ‘The Chicken Run’ is set on a council estate built after the Second World War. Most of the story takes place in 1955 and 56. The main characters are the Potter family Billy, Kate and their nine year old son Jimmy. The Chicken Run is a story of children and adults who inhabit the same physical space but live in totally different worlds as most children in that era did. It takes the reader into an extreme scenario where fact and fiction become confused and lead to potentially disastrous conclusions. Throughout the novel there is a strong vein of East End humour, even in the darkest moments. On the surface it was maybe a much more brutal and prejudiced world than now but this is also a story about community spirit; how people stood together and supported each other.