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A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now by Frank Cottrell Boyce

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 22 Jun 2026

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781035080755

“Drawing on stories gathered across the country, alongside memories of his own Liverpool upbringing, Cottrell-Boyce examines what childhood in Britain looks like now. Part memoir, part manifesto, it is especially powerful on poverty, reading and imagination.” The I
“Lively and frequently moving . . . Some of the book’s most evocative passages recall Cottrell-Boyce’s childhood . . . A British Childhood makes a stirring case for children as central to any national story.” The Times
“Frank Cottrell Boyce is truly a great champion for children and childhood. His book is a truth-telling, shameful tale of neglect, and yet it is also an anthem of hope and faith that that says we can and must put things right for all our children. No home, no school, and especially no library should be without this story and this book.” Michael Morpurgo
“Original, surprising and compassionate without being earnest . . . Frank’s book left me enraged, informed and moved.” Sathnam Sanghera
“This clarion call about the loss of delight and safety in children’s lives is also a reminder of the sheer magic of reading . . . He makes the case for how British childhood has changed, and why that matters, with trenchancy and heart. The children whose school assemblies he graces are lucky to have him.” Guardian
“[Cottrell-Boyce’s] urgent and heartfelt new book always feels close to home. There is a wonderful moment early on in that book when all his hunches and instincts about the intangible things he has devoted his life to – family and storytelling and human connection – are given rigorous scientific grounding.” Observer

Blessed have we been to have had Frank Cottrell-Boyce as our Children’s Laureate for the past two years.  Just as he prepares to hand over Laureate duties to a successor, Cottrell-Boyce has bequeathed us this hugely heartfelt survey.

Despite nonchalantly suggesting the book is a mere amalgamation of notes written on trains and in Premier Inns during his laureate travels, it is a highly considered construct, told in ten chapters, each one taking as its overarching theme a different children’s book or, in the case of one of them, a poem. “I’ve tried to arrange each chapter around an encounter with a child… and also around a children’s book.”

The book kept me enthralled over the course of a weekend. I read the first half on Saturday and the rest of the book on Sunday. I notice the subtitle “How Our Children Live Now” appears only on the book’s cover and not on the title page. It is better that the book is known by its main title, for it provides a good deal of memoir-style insights into Frank’s own childhood, as well as commentary on children of today.

Frank and his brother Paul spent their early childhood in a flat close to the docks in Liverpool. “It was a ground-floor flat on a main road. The pavements outside were thronged with people from all over the world. People from the docks and from the sea. Lascar sailors in turbans or fezzes. Merchant sailors in white. We were seeing stories that had been told for thousands of years. A sailor comes into a port, far from home, ready for fun and adventure. He could be Sinbad. He could be Gene Kelly taking Manhattan in On The Town. He could be Odysseus.” Don’t you just thrill to that? This is writing in the spirit of Melville, Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac.

Did you know that as recently as the 1970s babies were routinely operated on without anaesthesia because doctors thought their nervous systems did not feel pain? I didn’t. I checked — it’s true. 

Using One Thousand and One Nights as the theme for Chapter One, he notes, “As a society we sentimentalise the bedtime story, forgetting how fraught and draining it can be.” Not only that, it presupposes the existence of a bed. His visits to schools have made him aware of a significant number of children who are growing up in temporary housing and go to sleep on bags of their own clothes rather than in a real bed. “In a conversation with Clare Donovan of Merseyside Charity Time for Bed, we wondered how often a child had been diagnosed with some unmanageable, expensive special need when their real need was a good night’s sleep.” He goes on to say, “I don’t know how we’ve got into a situation where, in one of the richest countries on Earth, bed poverty is a thing. Time for Bed gave out 582 beds on Merseyside in 2025.  Five hundred and eighty-two.” There is passion in the repetition.

In America, apparently, people in tenements “having no access to gardens, hung their babies out in cages high above the pavement, like canaries.” Fascinating though such details are, the core of this book lies in the experiences Frank has had during his duties as Laureate. He ends the description of an extravagant, musical welcome he received when visiting Riverside Primary, Wallasey, with the words, “It was joyous. It did not look like the national curriculum.”

I’m delighted that one of the chapters uses ‘Timothy Winters’, a poem by Charles Causley, as its theme. “Causley is a terrific poet,” Frank asserts, “underestimated because his work is so approachable.” I agree.

Recalling the early stages of planning the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony with a small group of colleagues, he writes: “We were back in Year 6, the most creative period of any of our lives.” Having spent most of my class teaching years  in Year 6, I concur.

Of course you would expect there to be much here about the importance of books, reading and library spaces. At the same time, Frank is not afraid to say, “I gained as much from children’s TV as I did from reading books.” Yet he laments the demise of the TV shows (he has particular fondness for Top Cat) that entertained him when he was young and growing up. While acknowledging the quality and appeal of a show like Bluey, he worries that much of what children now consume on YouTube amounts to sedation rather than entertainment. 

There are welcome surprises along the way. Not the whiplash cliche writer’s objection to AI for Frank. “We talk a lot about AI slop, but what about all the slop — the posts, the tweets, TikTok’s and chats — that we have put on the internet, which AI is taking and using to build often useful and beautiful things?” 

Frank has been a Reading Ambassador for a decade or more, so his connection with schools is possibly much more grounded than that of previous Laureates has been. In some schools children have grown affectionately familiar with him. One of the last notes I made while reading the book was on p158. “On one occasion, a few years ago, a little girl stopped me as I walked by the library and said, ‘Frankie, listen to this…’ before reciting Lewis Carroll’s  ‘Jabberwocky’ to me and then walking on.” As you do. Frank is an emotional man, and I imagine his eyes welled up as she walked away, much as they do whenever he hears the words “Daddy, my daddy” at the end of The Railway Children. 

Nowhere in the book is he more angry than when writing about riots that resulted in the burning down of a library in Liverpool. The fact that many of the adolescents, caught on camera throwing rocks and committing other violence, received custodial sentences appals him. He blames austerity. The facts are there. On p161.

Frank’s natural voice is very strong, so you notice it when it very very occasionally lapses into the kind of writing found in long New Yorker features. It comes back quick enough and as a reader you think to yourself, “Good to have you back, Frank.”

What will he do now? Return to writing fiction no doubt. And yet there is something in this book that suggests to me he may have a role to play in helping what looks likely to be our new Prime Minister achieve a New Deal for the North of England, advocating for libraries, schools and youth provision in Liverpool and beyond.

On second thoughts, perhaps he can be allowed a short break.

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