So if you're happy to just to tell us a little bit about your background, your upbringing and perhaps how working class identity featured within your childhood.

So, yeah, my name is Matthew, go by Matt.

I was born and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent.

I am a mixed kind of brown man so I have a white British mum and then a Caribbean white British dad and I grew up in a single parent household so I didn't know my dad so I just grew up with my mum and I guess to think about my experience I guess it's then really important to think about hers as well and basically my mum's experience growing up was that she was very much in a in a working class area so she grew up in in so soak and trent i guess is is already um an area of very very high deprivation you know that used to be well and still is called the pop trees but very much it's its work and its trade was around some mining and then some pottery yes in recent years the the pop trees and the pottery industry closed down that's had quite a big impact on the way that the city exists, the opportunities for people there as well.

So that's the context of my family.

So my mum grew up in a specific part of Stoke-on-Trent which was also quite high deprivation and I think that her experience was there being kind of like fights outside of her street and there being lots of I guess difficult things that were going on around in the area when she was growing up and she ended up basically spending a lot of time doing a lot of reading and kind of education was really a strongly held value I guess for her from her father that was passed down to her but she kind of ended up being one of the first people to go to university and my family but unfortunately for a few different reasons she didn't finish that and then she ended up getting a job in in an office until she ended up having me quite a few years later unexpectedly and then she decided to go back to university to train to be a teacher and in that sense i guess this is where working class feels like it's an interesting thing for me because when i kind of came onto the scene my mum was then training to be a teacher which is i guess traditionally seen as more of a like middle class of profession but at the same time she was a single mother who who had grown up very much from in working class roots in an area of very high deprivation and who had now a mixed brown son and i guess that that's one of the things that for me is probably more interesting and I guess makes the idea of working class a bit trickier for me because there's some parts of my experience which actually I guess fit with that but there's other parts that very much feel like they don't so you know growing up it was was just me and my mum but I didn't have that sense of I was really, really struggling.

I mean, she did a really good job.

who,