Abstract: After paying homage to Townsend in section 1, the next two sections broach his most important contribution: the conception of relative poverty. In section 2 his role in the resistance against the idea that poverty had been eradicated in postwar Britain (associated with his lifetime fi ght against minimalism) is described. Section 3 narrates the Townsend-Sen polemic on absolute/relative poverty. In sections 4-5 the Townsend-Piachaud polemic and its consequences are analysed. Piachaud argued that some deprivation indicators used by Townsend were rather tasted related and rejected Townsend’s aspiration to scientific objectivity. This debate stimulated the development, by Mack & Lansley, of the concept of enforced lack of socially perceived necessities which separates tastes from deprivation and which has become a central element in British research on poverty. These authors rejected Townsend’s derivation of an objective poverty line from deprivation data, but were unable to establish an alternative, non-arbitrary, poverty criterion, leaving thus the door opened for the development by Nolan/Whelan and Gordon et al., of the truly poor approach which defifi nes as poor only those which are identififi ed as such both by income and by deprivation (sets intersection), and which implies that for not being poor it is enough not to be identifi ed as poor in one of the two partial approaches (sets union). This is an asymmetric position which underestimates poverty. In section 6, fi nally, it is stated that Townsend’s followers, by adopting the intersection criterion, abandoned his fi ght against minimalism. It is also stated that Townsend’s operationalisation of his relative poverty conception, consisting of increasing the poverty line in the same proportion as the average/median household income, is ill-defi ned, as income increase do not refl ect changes in accustomed patterns of life. An alternative operationalisation, based on the family budget methodology approach incorporating to it the social perceptions on necessities, is proposed. And going beyond this, a proposal is raised to develop a generalised budgeting approach which adds to the monetary family budget, a time budget, the knowledge/skills requirements and the public social budget.