Interesting to read that Ancoats in Manchester now has a “food quarter” (My weird year of eating out – and in, 18 December). When I was a student at Elizabeth Gaskell College in Manchester in the early 1960s, my education lecturer suggested that I visit Every Street in Ancoats, then an extremely deprived part of the city, to see a flat which had been set up by Manchester University Settlement to train girls from disadvantaged backgrounds in household management.
This involved answering the door, offering refreshments to visitors and putting a basic but healthy meal on the table at regular times each day for all to share. Social skills indeed, and managed by the firm but caring hand of a teacher whose name I now forget. I sometimes think of those girls and I want to ask: “Did it help?” To this day in our house, I try to have some cake in a tin for visitors.
I suppose this pragmatic and imaginative form of teaching was closed down long ago. Now we have food banks. Home economics has always been an expensive subject, but I still think a very good investment. Happily, throughout my career I taught both boys and girls.
Jennifer Kennerley
(Retired home economics teacher), Norwich
