Homeless in London

A Night on the Slabs Originally published in Time Out London

In the summer of 2004 I lived homeless and penniless on the streets of New York. My aim was to write a book that would capture, without drama and urban myth, the true reality of the life on the streets of New York City. To celebrate the UK release of ’31 Days – A New York Street Diary’ I took to the streets of London with a blanket and a disposable camera.


Day ONE - Wednesday 13th

I had completely forgotten about the boredom. Homelessness, not much fun at the best of times, is a time stopper when you’re without a companion. Since getting off the tube at Tottenham Court Road I have ambled restlessly.

Normally, when in the city alone, I go to a café and eat lunch. I make phone calls. I go shopping.

Today I walk up and down Charring Cross Road six times.

I queue in a McDonald’s on Oxford Street for the use of their toilet.

I sit in Soho Square watching students conduct surveys. .

It’s 3:45 pm, I’ve normally had lunch by now.


It’s late in the evening, around midnight, maybe later, when I find myself walking down Villiers Street towards the Embankment tube station. There are only a few people about, but when it starts raining heavily they quickly disappear. I take shelter in the doorway of the Pompidou Patisserie, which has been kind enough to leave the sun shade down.

The rain, getting heavier and heavier, bombs the pavement creating a wall of sound. Just as the first flashes of lightening fill the sky a man, smartly dressed and carrying a shoulder bag and umbrella, stops in the doorway. “Are you homeless?” he asks.

I am not into naff plot tricks, but there really is lightning in the sky and when it flashes and turns the man into a dark silhouette, I too think it is ridiculous, a lazy Hollywood film trick.

I am slow in answering. I don’t want to talk to anybody on my first night. I want to acclimatise first, to be alone. I certainly don’t want to explain my project now, late on a stormy night, to a silhouetted man. Being homeless in London scares me enough. In New York, I was always a bit of a novelty, my English accent cut me a lot of slack. Here in London my accent holds no value. So not wanting to explain myself, I lie, I say, “Yes, I’m homeless” thinking this will be his cue to move on and leave me alone.

“You lying cunt!” the man screams. “You ain’t fucking homeless, I should rip your fucking face off you cunt.”

While the level of aggression is shocking, I can’t fault him: after all, I am not homeless. It was naïve of me to think that my being slumped in a doorway with a backpack and a sour expression might be worth something in the way of validation. The man starts to walk up the hill, shouting as he goes, “I’m gonna come back here and fucking kill ya while I your sleeping. Y-o-u…”


Day TWO - Thursday 14th

Waking up is a big surprise. In New York I hadn’t slept at all on the first night, or for many nights thereafter. Even then it was never sleep, sleep. So while I feel relieved and a little excited to have survived my first night in London, to have slept even, I wake up exhausted and already sore.


I sit dozing in and out of sleep on Trafalgar Square at 7am. I watch two people feed pigeons from big sacks. The pigeons swoop and dive and swirl in great packs.

A man approaches the pigeon feeders and says something. One feeder turns to the other, “I don’t understand what he’s saying, do you speak any Russian?”

I don’t speak any Russian either, but going by the young man’s incredulous expression at the sight of two people feeding pigeons on a mass scale, I am pretty sure I could, with some accuracy, translate his meaning, if not his actual words.

But I don’t. I am too tired and not feeling very social or helpful. I decide to stop dozing and go into full on sleep mode.


Down on the Strand at 11pm a homeless crowd stands waiting for a scheduled food drop.

One homeless man looks at me as I shuffle on my feet. “It will be here,” he says. “They’re just running late.”

The man, I am guessing mid forties wearing a lumberjack shirt over a grey T-shirt, seems friendly and talkative. His name is Michael. He doesn’t flinch when I tell him about my project. Instead he asks where I slept last night.

“Look,” he says. “I am sleeping near hear in a theatre doorway, there’s a few of us there, but the guy who has the middle doorway is away, he’s gone to Basingstoke for three weeks, you can take his space if you like?”

It’s an offer I don’t refuse.


Day THREE – Friday 15th

The Strand has food drops most nights of the week. Tonight the crowd is well over 100 people, on account of it being ‘Rice & Chicken’ night. When the food arrives I am surprised by the neat and orderly queue that forms. Any shouting, pushing or shoving tends to come from people after they have collected their steaming polystyrene parcel.

“Fork? Where do ya fink I got the fucking fork? From the fucking Air?” shouts a pregnant girl as she barges her way back through the throng.

I start talking to a homeless man called James who, in his late twenties, peers out from under a fishing hat. James and I walk back along the Strand to find a doorway where we can sit and eat.

James asks me for the names of other publications I have written for; I mention the New York Post.

“Is that the same as the Washington Post?” he asks.

“Not quite,” I tell him. “The Washington Post is more credible.”

“Would Noam Chomsky think it was credible?”

“Does Noam Chomsky think any newspaper is credible?”

James laughs. I sit wondering, are we really discussing Noam Chomsky? If we are it’s going to be a short lived conversation, my knowledge of the bugger is very limited.

At this point a youngish guy, over weight with cropped hair and dark sunken eyes, who I also saw fighting on Trafalgar Square earlier today, stops in front of me.

He points a finger at my face and screams as loud as he can, “YOU! What’s you’re fucking name?”

“Alan,” I say as he stares angrily down at me. “What’s yours?” I ask, trying to keep things chatty. I watch as pure rage spreads across his face. “I was only going to say hello,” I tell him, offering him my hand. He stares angrily at first and then very daintily shakes my hand, or really just the finger tips and says, calmly, “Danny.”

Relief washes over me as Danny says, again calmly, “Give me a light.”

“Sorry,” I tell him. “I don’t smoke.”

“GIVE ME A FUCKING LIGHT!” he screams, bending into the shout.

Two of his friends come over. One, a girl I realise now and who I also (but thinking it was a boy) saw fighting earlier, turns and kicks the metal grill right next to James’ head. A nasty metallic crash fills the night. The girl keeps kicking.

James looks up between kicks, “Do you mind,” he says. “I’m leaning against that.”

The girl bends and shouts into James’ face, “I don’t fucking give a shit!” and goes back to kicking.

Danny is still shouting at me, though all I can hear is the crash of the metal grill.

James turns to me and with a slight grin asks rather loudly, “So have you read much Chomsky?”

I stare at him half frozen with fear; expecting any second to feel the full wrath of junky rage. But then I have another thought, James told me he’s been homeless for nine years, he must know better than me.

“I’ve read one of his books,” I say.

“I’ve read a few,” James tells me. “There’s a web site where you can read all his articles. I’ll give you the url.”

For the first minute of the conversation Danny continues to shout at me while his female doppelganger continues to kick the metal grill as hard as she can. She turns and says something to Danny, who screams back at her a torrent of expletives. She does the same back to Danny and very quickly they are in their own shouting match. A minute later they walk down the road, towards Trafalgar Square, not arm in arm, but peaceful at least.

I giggle nervously at James, “I thought that was going to turn into a fight then.”

“Nah, as long as you don’t say anything to them they soon get bored and move away. That’s the important thing, don’t say anything, But I said something, I couldn’t believe I was opening my mouth, I was so annoyed with myself when I heard my voice. Because these fuckers will stick a screwdriver in you without hesitation.”

“Really?” I ask.

“I’ve seen it happen!”


Back in the doorway of the Theatre Royal, (currently showing the Producers) I wake up at 4am. I watch as a young skinny guy with a can of beer peers into the doorways. He comes up close and stares, first to the un-named man in the furthest door, then Richy (who has retuned from Basingstoke but said it is okay for me to stay) then me (as I pretend to be asleep) and then on to Marijona, a Lithuanian, and then Michael. He then scurries off down the road suspiciously.

That’s one of them, I think in a moment of paranoia. Now they know where I’m sleeping. I lie awake and scared, until the sky starts to lighten.


Day FOUR – Saturday 16th

One homeless guy tells me Hyde Park is a safe place to sleep.

He says, “You have to hide inside at midnight, when the wardens come to lock the gates,”

Fair do’s. I stop off at Marble Arch first, thinking I will sit and catch up with some notes. When I get there I am greeted by a large yellow sign. It says ‘MURDER’.


We are looking for witnesses, can you help?

MURDER

On the 30th of August at about 00:30am a male was assaulted

Near to the subway entrance to Marble Arch. He died

From his injuries.

In strictest confidence, please phone 0207 321 7228


I walk back through the subway tunnel and ask a young homeless guys with long hair, a beard and a smattering of low denomination coins at his feet if he knows anything about this murder. Specifically, I ask him if it was a homeless man that was murdered?

“Yeah, I think it was,” he tells me.

The murder is two weeks old. I tell myself that it’ll be okay to sleep here. Then I slap myself on the side of the head: think wife, think daughter, and I start walking, quickly, back towards the Covent Garden and another night treading the boards, or the steps I should say, of the Theatre Royal.


On the theatre steps Michael is teasing Marijona about the likelihood of him getting an flat. Marijona holds a piece of paper with apartment listings, he asks, “What does it mean, this 280 points?”

“It’s like this,” Michael begins. “You need a lot of points to get a flat on welfare. If you’re a young girl and have nowhere to live, you get points. If you are an old lady without a home you get even more points. If you are a young girl and pregnant or with a child, you get even more points.”

“And me?” Marijona asks. “What is my points?”

“You,” Michael laughs. “A single working foreign male? You have no points.”

As we sit there laughing, with our cardboard beds set out for the evening, a group of young boys turn the corner and walk towards us. They are smartly dressed, like Ben Sherman adverts and though out in the big city haven’t quite mastered the art of hair gel. As they pass the lad at the back, while keeping his legs and hips in a forward motion, turns his upper body and his spiky little head towards us and says, thumbs raised, “Alright boys?” To signify that this is not a rhetorical question he arches his eyebrows, he says, “Sweet as a nut?”

Some time passes before the four of us have control of our laughter.


4am. The streets of London, or at least Covent Garden… no, let me narrow that down further, Catherine-Bloody-Street, should be clean enough to eat off. Is it really possible that those little road sweeping buggies, with their awful racket, are passing by my head every thirty minutes? Or am I at this point just going mad? Is it a bad dream? I grab my camera from my backpack and without sitting up take a quick picture as yet another one scrapes its way by. I must be sure its real.


Day FIVE – Sunday 17th

After a quick wash in the 24 hour toilets in Covent Garden, Michael, Richy and myself head off for a number 25 bus. We wait for one of the ‘Bendy Buses’ or the ‘Homeless Express’ as Michael likes to call them on account of being able to step on and off without a ticket. We take the bus to Bank. From there we walk, with the intention of catching another bus, to London Bridge. But a lack of Homeless Express’ forces us to cross the bridge by foot. We cut through the main station and enter a maze of back roads, (passing through one of the worst urine smelling stairwells in the world) weaving our way to Mellor Street and the Manna Centre, which is a day centre that is open five mornings a week, including weekends.


As we enter we are handed a bowl of porridge. Richy and I (Michael goes off to shower) collect a cup of tea and sit at a table along the right hand wall. Our eating is fast and sloppy. After which Richy sits reading the Racing Post, scribbling his picks on the front cover. I sit and watch the room, which is deep, tatty and packed with around 100 people.

Somebody brings out boxes and places them in the middle of the floor. There’s a rush as people go through them, searching for things they need like quilts, shoes etc.

Exhausted already I start drifting, am about to nod off, when…

“Sorry, what was that?” I hear myself asking to the man opposite. He sits with a shaved head and a black T-shirt tucked into his jeans, listening to an old walkman that he has clipped to his belt.

“What?” he says back.

“Oh, sorry, I thought you said something,” I say feeling confused.

The penny drops. It’s Richy’s giggling that gives it away. The man had been talking to himself, and I, apparently, was answering him.

“Oh,” the man says. “I was… it was… I was just saying… you know,” and with that he too has a little giggle and goes back to his music.

A minute later he leans forward and points at me, “Have you heard Madonna’s new album?” he asks.

“No,” I tell him, “I haven’t.”

Now, with what I believe to be a trace of Scottish, he says, “Yooo should get ya’self a copy, it’s fucking greeeeeaat!”


Michael appears with little pieces of tissue stuck all over his face.

The three of us move to the back of the room where a group of men sit around a bright yellow topped table playing chess. While I sit falling in and out of sleep, Michael and Richy manage to play several games while we wait for lunch. The standard of chess seems pretty high. I am offered a game but decline, knowing it will be know fun for my opponent.

The smell of food fills the air and I look up to see plates of pasta with meat sauce and sausage bobbing in different directions around the room. There’s a lot of pasta and rice in this business, carb’s a plenty.

We eat quick and take our leave. Richy is keen to get to Ladbrokes on Trafalgar Square, he doesn’t want to miss the first races.


Day SIX – Monday 18th

Monday to Saturday we have to wait for the theatre crowd to leave before we can make our beds. (If I were truly homeless it would be safe to say I have well and truly moved in moved into this space for good.) Then we have to wait for the crowd from the pub opposite to go home before we can get any sleep. Tonight we kill an hour or so playing chess with a small travel chess set.

After getting a thrashing from Michael and then beating Richy by making all the moves Michael calls out over my shoulder, I find myself in an architectural quandary. I am trying to build a little card wall, for privacy. But I am having problems: the card I have selected is too long and falls down easily. Michael and Richy offer advice.

“No, no, no, not like that,” Michael says as I take an un-flattened wine box and make a split half way down one of the long sides. I then feed the length of card I want to use as my wall into the torn slot. The box works as a stabiliser and my wall holds firm.

“Oh, that’s pretty smart,” Michael says and we all laugh at my little camp.

Richy sets his alarm for 5:30am.

He says, “I am off to Woking in the morning to sell the Big Issue.”

“Why do you always go out of town?” I ask.

“It’s easier,” he tells me. “There are too many Big Issue sellers and beggars in Central London, it makes it too hard. It’s not worth it. I go all over, Basingstoke, Romford.”

Richy and I bid each other farewell and get down to the business of sleeping.


When a group of Japanese men, wearing suits and ties, come and take over the steps between the doorways where Michael, Richy and I are trying to sleep, I am a little pissed to say the least. I am exhausted. In fact having not got close to a normal nights sleep since coming out to the streets all I do now is doze in and out of reality. Every time I stop moving I fall asleep. Whether I sit on the floor, on a bench or lean against the wall, my eyes start fluttering. What sleep I do get at night, I look forward to.

But the Japanese are loud and drunk and partying right next to my head. One second they kick over their half full wine bottle, the next they are dropping and smashing glasses. One of them even goes as far to try and take a piece of my card.

“Hey!” I say. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He speaks English now, “Oh, sorry mate, sorry.”

The Japanese, known for their manners, don’t appear perturbed by the fact that there are three people trying to sleep. In fact I find it hard to believe, given their shouting, that they are not being purposely loud. After about thirty minutes I hear Michael fidgeting. I am expecting him to say something, but he doesn’t, he is soon still again. Whatever hint he dropped worked. A few minutes later the drunken Japanese men move on.


Day SEVEN – Tuesday 19th

Michael and I sit on the steps of the theatre at 7am.

“Did you notice I got rid of the Japanese last night?” he asks.

“Yeah, I did. How did you manage that?”

“I took my socks off.”

We sit there laughing.

My main thought though, is with the fact that I am done. Today, day number 7, I am going home, or at least to my sisters house so I can get cleaned up and sleep. I think it’s a good thing I am stopping now. My feet really hurt. My underpants are the things of experiments and the delicate skin tissue between my testicles and my thighs is very sore, I guess my greasy under crackers have been sticking while I walk (I am so glad I am married and don’t have to worry about any potential lovers reading this).

I have a stiff neck.

I have tummy troubles too. Dietary issues. Meaning I haven’t had a shit in four days.

Sure, I could go to the Berwick Street Market tomorrow at closing time and get free fruit. I could go to the Manna Centre and get showered, pick up a pair of fresh under garments. But really…


The two occasions I have lived homeless have been by my own choice, part of a journalistic endeavour. For those of you who question the morality of these projects, of my eating food from soup kitchens, food meant for the homeless, I can assure you my activities had zero effect on the survival of the homeless. My doing this without money was not out of a sense of challenge, nor was it taken lightly, but simply because I don’t believe a true recording of homeless life can be made any other way. If I had money in my pocket I would have eaten in Pret A Manger, instead of from their garbage bags with regular homeless people. When the fear got really bad I would have hidden in a cinema. The truth is, I couldn’t do it with money in my pocket, I am too weak.


One defining area, during my short experience on the streets, where London differs from New York, is the level of aggression. London is plainly more aggressive. I am not talking about the homeless but the average man on the street. The Englishman, when you have the time to sit and look, is a bit of a Neanderthal. He walks around in a permanent state of alert. Part of a ‘who you looking at’ culture that doesn’t really exist anywhere else. I remember watching one man leave a McDonalds with his wife and two children. He walked stiff limbed and tight faced, swinging his arms and legs while surveying the area for potential enemies. A Chas ‘nd Dave song sprang to mind: Gertcha! The aggression in New York has become part of the cities personality. It never really goes beyond the verbal, beyond the ‘hey asshole!’. But the Gertcha Englishman will punch you in the face for little more than smirking at his gold.


I bid Michael farewell and go to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street where my brother is coming to collect me, to take me back to my normal life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back on the streets again. I hope not.