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A history lesson

February 01 2025

What does Jimmy Carter’s death tells us about time and how can homelessness be consigned to the history books? These and other questions answered – or at least pondered – by
André Rostant

The death of Jimmy Carter just before Christmas reminds us that much of history is not as long ago as it may seem: some alive today personally knew people born into Confederate slavery, the last confirmed survivor of which died in 1972. My Irish grandmother, teller of the scariest ghost stories to us as children, was born at the end of the 19th century and grew up among survivors of the famine of the 1840s.

Of course, history is still happening: our grandchildren will learn about the Los Angeles fires, of floods and of wars that are displacing whole neighbourhoods, whole peoples, even as you read this article. Perhaps you are street homeless right now, fishing through the directory in this magazine for a clue about where to eat, where to wash, how to survive. Even if the circumstances that find you sleeping rough are not the stuff of news headlines, remember you are one of over 9,000 people in the same situation, and among over 300,000 homeless people in the UK today. Consider that when anybody has the cheek to suggest your situation is in some way your fault, some flaw in your personal nature. It is not.

In 1824, the Vagrancy Act criminalised veterans of the Napoleonic war and those displaced during a period of massive industrialisation and social upheaval. Nor is the Vagrancy Act history: to this day it is the bane of rough sleepers. The number of people involved and the persistence of homelessness make it plain that this is a systemic issue, rationalised by wilful denial in the form of blaming the dispossessed. Regardless, no matter who you are, what you have done or gone through, there is no justifiable reason for you to go without shelter.

It has been somewhat fresh this winter; even in London the temperature dropped to minus four. This is potentially lethal weather: during the winter of 2023/24 at least two homeless people are known to have frozen to death in England, one in Manchester, the other in Beeston. As always, many organisations and ad hoc helpers have been out on the streets doing what they can. One such group is the charity Under One Sky – founded on Christmas Day 2012, when Mikkel Juel Iversen and some friends spontaneously walked about central London “to let those affected by street homelessness know that they hadn’t been forgotten, and to distribute Christmas presents”.

Now, Under One Sky has thousands of volunteers and operates year-round. During the cold January nights, teams distributed sleeping bags, bivvy bags, hand and foot warmers, hats, gloves and hot drinks all around central London to people like Howard, whom they encountered in a doorway not far from 10 Downing Street. He “didn’t even have a jacket” and had not slept for two days, walking around to stay warm. When I texted Mikkel, a bit before midnight, seeking a quote for this article, he replied, “I will send you a quote tomorrow. I just got home from another round on the streets”.

But this is nothing new. One example: renowned chef Alexis Soyer fed over 22,000 souls in Soho during the winter of 1851. So many good people, so much good will, so little change. Even Prince William sallied forth like a latter day Wenceslas to sell the Big Issue. William has established the Homewards venture to “demonstrate that together it’s possible to end homelessness”. Homewards seeks to develop a number of socially balanced communities. I do not for one moment doubt his sincerity. Though not escaping the paradigm, Homewards, with its inclusive, holistic approach, represents a step up from his father’s famous housing scheme, Poundbury. In all earnestness, with no sense of irony, Prince Charles keenly endorsed the ornamentation of Dorchester with an exemplar of those model villages, idyllic communities established by landowners deeply concerned with the aesthetic. His own pet town, as it were.

Such ideas are not peculiar to the gentry. Bourneville was established in the 1890s as a modern company town for workers at Cadbury’s. Others such as Guinness and Peabody went even further, founding social housing empires and improving living conditions for tens of thousands. Jimmy Carter famously actually set to building houses with his own hands. If the law allowed, you or I could walk into the woods and build our own shelter. But it does not.

Ultimately, only large-scale government planning and home building can solve this problem, such that we might tell our astonished grandchildren we were alive in the days when street homelessness ceased to be a thing.

< We Are Here The gift of time >
February – March 2026 : Progress

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