ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to give the reader (particularly if a student) a sense of the town plan equivalent of ‘you are here’. Because, contrary to common opinion, or what Larkin (1974) observed in another context, social work did not begin ‘in 1963 between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. This was just the period when the legislature began to take an interest. We go back much further in fact. We bubbled up from a thick, nineteenth-century, socio-political soup and shall need to give this a quick stir if we are to get a better look at the main ingredients. However, before we do, let us address the a priori question of what social work is for.
