Hachette India

Urban Grimshaw and The Shed Crew

Bernard Hare

You're twelve years old. Your mother's a junkie and your father might as well be dead. You can't read or write, and you don't go to school. An average day means sitting round a bonfire with your mates smoking drugs, or stealing cars.

Welcome to Urban's world.

Bernard Hare was on society's margins, living on one of Leeds' roughest estates and with a liking for drink and drugs. So he knew what life in the underclass was like in '90s Britain. But even he was shocked when he met Urban, an illiterate, glue-sniffing twelve-year-old. And through Urban he got to know the Shed Crew - an anarchic gang of kids between the ages of ten and fourteen; joy-riding, thieving runaways, who were no strangers to drugs or sex. Nearly all had been in care, but few adults really cared.

Bernard decided to do what he could. He didn't know what he was letting himself in for.

Bernard Hare

Bernard Hare was born in 1958 into a Leeds mining family. After gaining a BA in Applied Social Studies at Hatfield Polytechnic he became a social worker but after the miners' strike of 1984 he dropped out of the system and has since worked variously as a mechanic community worker and removal man. He now writes plays chess and works in community arts: he has edited Reflections a collection of pieces by the creative writing class at East Leeds Family Learning Centre and Flatlands an anthology of writing and a CD of music by local people put together by the Flatlands Community Arts Group which he co-founded.