Keeping homeless patients off the streets

One way to obtain an idea of how many people are homeless is to walk about in a town centre and count those who are sleeping on the street. Statistics have been recorded since the Second World War, a night in 1949 revealing a total of 5 persons on the streets of London. In 2013 the count was 2,400, bloated by a third when compared with only 2010. Halfway into the 2010s about 6,500 persons can be found “sleeping rough” in the capital.

It cannot be overlooked that they are almost all men. Women, as a rule, are not reduced to the same fate. Women cope, men fall apart. One gender is evidently better at self-preservation than the other. Why are these men sleeping on the streets? Why do they crowd on a day in winter for a soup-kitchen to drive into the midst of Birmingham? Examined by doctors, each life is a wreckage, and bespeaks mental illness, broken relationships, a migrant’s plight, drug and alcohol abuse, a discharge from the fortressed front of prisons and mental health units. Bradford in the North of England, a city which falls into the conurbation of Leeds, has migrants from Eastern Europe holed up in dilapidated factories.

The buildings are litter-strewn, full of plastic cutlery, soiled carpets, everted umbrellas, dry lavatories, oblongs of smashed windows. Rats and pigeons meander on hills of detritus. In summer or winter the temperature inside is the same as that outside. But a roof is still preferable to the pavement. Retailers have, after all, fitted iron spikes in their shopfronts to prevent any overnight slumberings. A third of those sleeping on the streets of London are bleary-eyed rovers from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltics. Others, with less misfortune, live congestedly by the dozen in ramshackle houses. Providers of cheap labour, the migrants are exploited, paid as little as £50 a week for a cartload of work for which a Briton asks ten times as much.

The number of persons without a home has risen with arithmetical zest over the decade since 2006. Governmental data concur with the figures of the charities, but such tabulations are believed, as always, to be a partial picture. As they forage for a meal, the ones on the street are a mere puddle in a lagoon. Street-sleepers were a jot beside the total of 112,000 who told their local councils in 2013 that they were homeless. The 112,000 represented an expansion by a quarter since 2009. Universities such as York and Heriot-Watt have academics who have interestedly spied on the trends of the 2010s. The causes of homelessness they say are, chiefly, the unaffordability of housing and a shrinkage of the welfare state (“benefit cuts” after the 2005-2010 downturn).

A comparison with stretches of postwar history is informative. Such retrospection finds that the lot of the homeless was televised starkly in 1966. Aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation, the drama “Cathy Come Home” had a sizeable effect on viewers. It induced a twinge of realisation : charities for the roofless–– Crisis, Shelter and Centrepoint––were founded in the late 1960s as a response. A decade later, the rights of a homeless person were concretised in the Housing Act of 1977. The 1980s and 1990s were an era in which families could buy their council-owned houses, and attain security. And the mid-2010s has hordes who are sans roof in the prevailing demographic.

Next to the televisuals and cinematics is the sapience in the books. Presenting the author as not only an artist, an escapist, an entertainer, but as a chronicler of the past who breathes in the present, are the nonfictions of George Orwell. A monolith of British literature, his “The Road to Wigan Pier” (1937) has an entire disquisition on the matter of housing shortage.

Born in India, Orwell by orientation was a southerner. From the writers of the last century, he is thus separable from the northern Englishmen, like John Braine of Bradford and Anthony Burgess of Manchester, literates who were acutely aware of their northernness in a society run by the Hooray Henrys from The South. By propensity not a fictionist, but a journalist and an intellectual, Orwell was au courant with the hardships of the proletariat. A social gradient exists in every town, but he wanted to see the vertical gradient in a longitudinal country. Bearing his southern sensibilities, he trundled to The North.

Standards of living are higher than Orwell’s day, but the issue of housing, with a larger share of the young renting than a decade ago, is patently as fulminant in the 2010s as it was in the 1930s :

‘Housing shortage’ is a phrase that has been bandied about pretty freely since the war, but it means very little to anyone with an income of more than £10 a week, or even £5 a week for that matter........... But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty.

I am told that it is bad form for a writer to quote his own reviews, but I want here to contradict a reviewer in the Manchester Guardian who says apropos of one of my books :

Set down in Wigan or Whitechapel Mr Orwell would still exercise an unerring power of closing his vision to all that is good in order to proceed with his wholehearted vilification of humanity.

Wrong. Mr Orwell was ‘set down’ in Wigan for quite a while and it did not inspire him with any wish to vilify humanity. He liked Wigan very much–the people, not the scenery. Indeed, he has only one fault to find with it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he had set his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan Pier had been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.

––from the classic nonfiction “The Road to Wigan Pier” (1937) by George Orwell