In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens – himself the son of a bankrupt – described London’s insolvency court as the last refuge of all “the destitute shabby-genteel people”, a “badly lighted and worse ventilated” room with the “most especially dirty faces” packed toward the front.

The dirty faces may be gone, but more than 170 years later the dingy waiting room outside Britain’s busiest bankruptcy court is still doing a brisk trade in misery just a few days before Easter.