Ending rough sleeping is the goal, but taking bars off benches is a good start

Norwich City Council, in apparent solidarity with rough sleepers, are taking away armrests from public benches so that night sleepers can stretch out more. This is an endeavour to be more supportive of those reduced to turning public spaces into temporary dormitories.

For perhaps the last 20 years many local authorities and private property owners have been doing the exact opposite. Putting metal bolts on flat spaces so that they become impossible to sit on, let alone lie on. ‘Social dislodgement’ you might call it; architectural solutions to social problems. One of the canniest inventions was to turn bus shelter seats slightly tilted so that after a short time you began to slip off.

Not dissimilar from an earlier attempt at ridding public spaces of pigeons, by putting short, wire spikes on top of places that birds could rest on. Pigeons and people were, in the minds of some impresarios of public space, little different. But now with definite intention a council is beginning to remove discouragements to getting your head down in the public realm.

How socially progressive is that?

Being a long-term user of public spaces, stretching back to the middle of the last century, this argument could be seen as a friendly act of a local authority happy to bring relief to rough sleepers. It coincides with not being harsh
on beggars. 

But it could also be seen as a demented act of regularising rough sleeping by providing that outdoor dormitory necessary to the rough sleeper. 

In my early days no public sleeping or begging was accepted by the custodians of the public space – the police. I was in my youth a devotee of clumps of rhododendrons in public parks, after I had scaled fences. There you were guaranteed an uninterrupted night’s sleep, weather permitting.

Interestingly the ending of a public police presence, strolling community coppers, coincided with the advent of rough sleeping in public. A major central government decision to thin out policing and take the copper out of the community represented a major change to modern life. I would say an apocryphal change: a deserting of the streets by government. And a similar change of mind by local authorities.

If you ain’t got the coppers and you don’t want to spend money on the homeless then bring on the spikes and the studs; bring on the slippery seats and the dividing armrests. Learn from your earlier success with pigeons; make roosting in public places a thing of the past.

Read more:

• New prime minister Andy Burnham starts with vow to end rough sleeping. Here’s how he aims to do it
• Andy Burnham: ‘Housing is a human right’
• Rough sleeping a ‘source of national shame’, government told

The loss of public life, of public wellbeing, of a sense of responsibility for our public street life has been immense. Overflowing municipal bins have been a further indication of this devaluation of public space.

An assault on public life has coincided with a desire, now reversed by Norwich City Council, to get rid of so-called street abusers like rough sleepers. But is this progress or misplaced idealism? 

‘Let’s make the discomforts of homeless rough sleeping more comfortable’ might be the thinking of
Norwich’s street custodians.

Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s saw the introduction of a new level of neglect in our streets and public spaces. Reining in local authorities, centralising their behaviour. Emptying the mental hospitals of their patients into the prisons, the hospitals and the streets was probably one of the biggest acts of social vandalism of modern times. Without delivering on their promise to create ‘care in the community’, which in theory was a better system than the Victorian asylums.

Allowing street life, public life, to become a public spectacle of government thinking allowed and encouraged the hundreds and hundreds of initiatives launched by the homeless and poverty charities. Out of the quagmire of government thinking that devalued public life grew, among other institutions, Big Issue. An emergency response, like hundreds of others, to a pressing need. Opening the sluice gates of mental institutions and the monumental closing down of our industrial base made London in particular a cauldron of homelessness, the most obvious sign that society was ungluing. 

Thousands sleeping rough in London’s West End underlined what 10 years of abrasive politics can do to a country. An enormous rise in the use – and devaluation – of social security ensued. ‘Emergencyism’ made the UK a different place from what it had ever been.

And it enabled a vast increase in personal wealth for a larger amount of people than at any time in British history. That contradiction, mixed in with more public wretchedness, created what you might call a London version of San Francisco. An American city that seems to have captured the extremes of the public display of wretchedness and untold wealth in one municipality.

Good luck to the burghers of Norwich in their attempt at making homelessness less uncomfortable in their city. 

But let us hope the promises of the new political broom in central government will show an ability to learn from history, and realise that the eradication of homelessness is a central issue for the health and wellbeing of us all.

And we must live in hope that a centralised attack on poverty – the precursor of most homelessness, will also
be forthcoming.

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

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