ABSTRACT
The papers being delivered at this Centenary Conference cover a wide variety of themes, historical and contemporary. Some, the most ambitious, point to the future. Most have policy implications - as Seebohm Rowntree himself would have wished. Some have technical aspects which he did not anticipate and which he would not necessarily have understood or liked. All deal with issues and problems in more detail than I have time to do in this opening plenary session, when my task is to place one book by Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, in historical perspective.
