It will take modern thinking to solve the age-old problem of rough sleeping

The Black Cat cafe down a side street in Chelsea was at most times full of men eating food that would eventually destroy their health; big breakfasts off a greasy spoon menu. Doris befriended me because I was rough sleeping and my dishevelled and dirtied appearance brought out her humanity, 63 years ago. Surrounded by men from the roughest of places, doing the roughest of jobs, eating the worst of all food.

Even now after all these years I can’t pass by the little Chelsea street, the area now gentrified into hundreds of millionaires’ rows, without having a kind of pang of memory. A memory of the beauty of humans helping humans. Doris feeding me for free and plasterers, scaffolders, plumbers and drivers tolerating a boy from a Dickensian London. Dropped out of the class system that surrounded us. Sunk into street squalor. 

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Street ruffians were almost as ancient as London itself. Each age threw up the troubled poor who lived in the cracks and canyons of a shambolic city. But by 1961 a rigid socialising of the streets, administered by an army of constables on the beat, meant neither begging or rough sleeping would be tolerated. This underclass that had thrived in Victorian and Georgian times was disallowed. 

The First World War and the earlier Boer War, and the even earlier Crimean War, had brought government slap bang into contact with ‘the people’. Meaning that increasingly, because of needing large armies of thousands, and later millions of men, it was necessary to get involved in the people’s lives. The officer class could look after themselves. But the rank and file had to be healthy and with some form of education in order to fight the wars of the future. So hospitals and some kind of decent housing had to be given, as well as education. 

Imperialism demanded a neater and healthier and more subordinate people. Government was in the face of the working classes, especially after hundreds of thousand were injured by the Great War. The laissez faire approach of Victorian London, where parks and back streets could harbour masses of homeless workers, was ended. Streets were cleansed. Mental asylums were filled with the mentally and physically ill. NFA (no fixed abode) was an offence leading to fines and imprisonment. The Vagrancy Act from 1824 was utilised. 

1961 is significant; because it is from then onward, or certainly about this time that what you might call a more ‘liberal’ attitude towards street living, rough sleeping, became acceptable. As a rough sleeper in 1961, I had to hide myself from the eyes of constables. But by the decade’s end I could sleep in most of Central London without hindrance. 

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‘The golden age’ – golden only in the sense of there was a free for all – was in the closing stages of the Thatcher regime. Her government’s closing down of the Victorian asylums, leaving thousands to fill up our prisons and hospitals also helped fill up the streets. Over 6,000 rough sleepers were to be found in the West End of London by 1991, 30 years after my own domicile on the streets of London. Out of this social quagmire The Big Issue was born. 

Rough sleeping has increased every year over the last 14 years. Now we are moving back into the unhappy reality of former times. But rough sleeping has vectored out from the ‘magnet’ cities that were always a draw to the homeless: London, Brighton, Bournemouth, Bristol, Bath. Now you can see the displaced in many cities that had not seen rough sleeping in modern times. 

Social displacement that is the key to homelessness has increased alarmingly. Covid knocked a bigger hole in wellbeing and stability than we have imagined; add to that the attrition of the coalition government that stripped much social support from the many in need. 

The social pickle we are in is a long accumulation of politics, economics and an inability to address the causes of poverty. But also a reflection of the leaving of our streets to themselves to become the extension of the A&E department, an overflow of need into full public view. 

Thinking back to my childhood of running away and vagrancy is only to underline how much has changed around homelessness. It has become an acceptable condition of modern life. 

Our new government assures us that to the blight of homelessness they are not indifferent. Angela Rayner is creating a unit that will bring government departments, local authorities, charities and advocates together to end rough sleeping; or at least make a big dent in it. Will this unit do more than past units?  My suspicions are that it will throw itself at the task with great brio. But without a prioritising of poverty policy and actions into one department it may go the way of all the other failed attempts. 

We started to give up on the streets 60 years ago. Prosperity has stalked the land. A prosperity that was laced with social failure, poverty and need. I wish the unit good luck. But I will continue to be a pain in the arse and call for a central body to converge all poverty efforts, energies and resources into one whole. 

Certainly a reworking of the welfare state, a careful look at what works and what doesn’t, would be a good starting point. For the holes within it have produced much of the harshness of modern poverty. Our nine million economically inactive citizens are an expression of the problem. A great weight on a welfare state that is sinking under such a weight.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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