Ending homelessness

In the last six months there have been five deaths of rough sleepers, all well known to the Thames Reach outreach workers seeking to help them build a life away from the street, each death a crushing blow. They include a Polish rough sleeper found dead on a dirty mattress along a canal tow-path. Another, a man in his early forties who discharged himself from hospital where he was being treated for pneumonia. Heroin dependency drove him back onto the street and his body was discovered at his regular begging pitch outside a south London train station. This cull of blighted lives; it can’t go on. All five were long-term rough sleepers, or ‘entrenched’ as we call them nowadays. Entrench: ‘To construct a defensive position by digging a trench’, a dehumanizing word which subliminally implies that the person has elected to sleep rough, obdurately burrowing away in order to avoid the reality of the world around them. It meshes neatly with a suite of words or phrases that places res...

In Temple Gardens with the Thames close by she sits on a bench this homeless women, slumped forward, face pressed into a mound of belongings that she has stacked on her trolley with intricate care.   Her face is pressed hard into the dirty clothing on top of her assortment of bags. Is she smothering herself?   I stop and watch, but her breathing is deep and regular; the sleep of the constantly exhausted. And, along with the Temple Court barristers and office workers, I walk on by. She is a local character, part of the scene. The outreach teams working with the homeless will certainly know her.   I might ask about her when I get back to the office, but I’ve convinced myself.   And then, with a flush of guilt, I remember Peggy. For four years in the 1980s I was an outreach worker covering a patch stretching across most of central London from Kings Cross station down to Victoria at a time when the number of rough sleepers was vastly greater than today. Under...