Policy-makers in security, social work and health have been drawn to street work and to detached youth work as offering access to the ‘hard to reach’ in order to fix social problems’, leading in France to the heavily ironic name, M.Bricolage. The developing European ‘community of practice’ around street work as socio-cultural accompaniment is caught up with questions and tensions at a societal and professional as well as personal level which arise from histories of street work across Europe practiced in and against the system. The ‘communities of the street’ themselves can be seen alternately as in need of rescue or reform, or, more romantically, as offering insights into alternative sustainable ways of living in the context of precarite and the critical impact on the continuing crises on young. Drawing on research in the UK and Barcelona on the meanings and practices connected with the provision of food in street work contexts, this paper will explore the questions of what it means to work ‘critically’ in such contexts. It will ask what dialogue might be established between street workers and those who are revisiting the practices of ethnography and the traditions of radical education and the common school.