He thrusts his hand towards me as soon as I emerge from Old Street underground station, fingers curled in a half-grip, long dirty nails. ‘Please give me some change’. It’s good English with a familiar Eastern European inflection. He’s stumbling along beside me now and he’s already calculated that I won’t be giving him any money. ‘What about a kebab – a chicken kebab’. We stop to talk and I look at him more closely. He has the most terrible hair-cut – a real Gulag special - and is filthy, really filthy and looks half-starved. He tells me his name is Jan Dudek and he is Polish. We move on to the kebab house and he seems strangely embarrassed that he must resort to this – begging a stranger to buy him some food. ‘A small kebab will do – just a small one with garlic sauce’. Inside the kebab house the two young Turkish men nod sagely as they impassively slice pieces from the slab of chicken meat rotating on the spit. They know him well and sole...
From 1999-2018 I was CEO of homelessness charity Thames Reach. From 2018-20 I worked at MHCLG to deliver rough sleeping and homelessness programmes. This blog seeks to bring to life the complexities, dilemmas, set-backs and triumphs that are part of trying to help people escape homelessness. It aims to tell the stories of the inspirational people I have met in my work, many of whom have faced homelessness and from whom I have learnt a lot.