- the condition of being squalid; filth and misery.
Origin of squalor
1615–25; <
Latin squālor dirtiness, equivalent to
squāl(ēre) to be dirty, encrusted +
-or -or1
The problem of Rent:
Rent has three characteristics differentiating it from other forms of expenditure:
(i) Rent varies markedly from one part of the country to another,
(ii) Rent varies markedly as between different families of the same size in the same part of the country,
(iii) Expenditure on rent cannot be reduced during a temporary interruption of earning as that on clothing, fuel or light can.
Sir William Beveridge,
Social Insurance
and Allied Services Report
Excerto
de The New Poverty, de Stephen Armstrong. Verso
Chapter
6: Squalor, pp. 127-132
"That
afternoon I visited the city’s wet centre: a day hostel that allows homeless
people to walk in drunk or on drugs. As I arrived, staff were struggling to
help a man suffering from the violent hallucinations and sweeping emotional
changes brought on by the synthetic cannabinoid Black Mamba. He was howling,
his body shaking and his eyes blank. ‘It’s cheap and it’s strong,’ Hiley
explains. ‘It’s sweeping through prisons and the homeless and the effects are
brutal. People are using it to find oblivion.’ Back in the main building – a
walk-in and advice centre in a spruced up old school – I met Jas Singh, one of
Inclusion’s regulars and a local lad. He’s fresh-faced and handsome – he looks
a little
like Stone Roses singer Ian Brown, right down to his jagged mop-top hair – but
he totters into the room on crutches with his foot strapped up in a large
webbing-and-plastic sandal. Singh studied art at St Martins and graduated in
2012, moving to Kingston upon Thames where a friend secured him a
protection-by-occupation residency in a large empty house. He was on the verge
of the next stage in his life – interning with an art dealer on Pimlico Road.
‘It was unpaid but I’d get fed and into all the art exhibitions for free, and
some champagne parties,’ he grins. ‘I started to meet a few people – like Terry
O’Neill, the photographer, and I was starting to put my own work together …
mainly sound installations.’ And then, running up the stairs at the art dealer’s
house in 2014, Jas slipped and whacked his leg on the corner of a stair and
damaged his peroneal nerve, which provides feeling to the front and side of the
legs and the top of the feet. A damaged peroneal nerve causes a condition known
as foot drop, where the muscles that hold the foot in place stop working and
the patient’s foot effectively dangles uselessly at the end of their leg. He
couldn’t walk without crutches and couldn’t keep working with the art dealer.
When the house he was legally squatting finally got sold, he was out
– just as his dad phoned to tell him his mum was ill, asking him to come back
to Leicester to help out. ‘So I came back for a while,’ he explains. ‘I was here
for about six months when, ironically, I was giving a homeless person a few
bits of change and got mugged, whacked on the back of my head – I was knocked
out, unconscious for a while. I’m still not clear on everything that happened
after that. Apparently I discharged myself and went back to my family with my
head still bleeding. We had a huge row – I can’t remember what about … I was
drinking at that time though I’m sober now. But the atmosphere was tense.’ Mood
swings, anger and tears are textbook behaviours after a head injury – although
Singh blames long-running family tension for the rows that simmered at home.
After two weeks, he slipped on the stairs again and fractured the same foot. An
ambulance took him to hospital and his last words to his dad were – ‘I’ll call
you as soon as I’m done.’ After his foot was treated, he stood outside Leicester
General Hospital waiting for his dad when he got a tap on his shoulder. ‘It’s
two police and it’s
like – are you Mr Singh?’ he recalls, shaking his head. ‘I’m thinking – why are
the police asking if I’m Mr Singh?’ He pauses for a moment and looks away, then
back. ‘And I get arrested by the police – they say they’ve a restraining order
because of my aggression at my dad’s house … and I’m kind of baffled because I
just had a conversation with my dad and I thought he was coming to pick me up …
but it turns out suddenly I’m homeless.’ After a night at Euston Police Station,
a squad car dropped him off at the Dawn Centre, Leicester’s last remaining
homeless hostel – the council has closed three other hostels in the past few
years, offering supported accommodation instead but effectively reducing the
number of beds available to rough sleepers. Still a little dazed – and with a
few belongings in a plastic bag – he was hoping to get to a bed early to rest
and recover a little. But the Dawn Centre was full and the hotels he could walk
to only had rooms for £70 a night, so he went to an off-licence, bought a few
cans of Kronenberg and slipped into a hotel car park where he lay down behind a
parked van – ‘and drank and drank and tried to sleep,’ he shivers. ‘It was
February and I was freezing so I thought
I’d knock myself out with alcohol. But when you try and sleep outside, you
think you’ve slept and then you look at your phone and it’s been three
minutes.’He was so exhausted and dirty he thought he couldn’t do another night
like that so he booked in to the hotel using his bank card to guarantee the
room. He had a shower and got his head down for a couple of hours. When he
woke, his phone battery was running low, he had no money and everything he
owned was at his parents’ house. He walked on his crutches over to Leicester
City Council housing office, where they said he wasn’t eligible for help as his
parents’ house, his last address, stands just outside the city limits in
Leicestershire. He managed to get an appointment with Oadby and Wigston Borough
Council on the same day, got to the bus stop and realised he just had a few
coppers and a little bit of change. He showed the bus driver all he had, and
told him where he was going. The driver just took a few of the coppers and let
him on, which still brings tears to his eyes when he tells the story. At Oadby
and Wigston, a housing officer called Heidi hunted out a bed at the Action
Homeless hostel, run by a local charity" in the
city centre. She lent him £3 to get the bus, he made it to Victoria Park and
was given a bed on the first floor of a brick townhouse. He made friends
sharing tobacco and Rizla – ‘it was like school or a prison’, he says. ‘I
hadn’t got my own cup so they wouldn’t give me tea. People were kicking off
over dinner and I almost wished I was outside again, instead of having to climb
the stairs to get to my room with the noise of someone kicking off every half
an hour.’They moved him around a couple of times. First into shared
accommodation and finally into a single room in a quieter house. The
bureaucracy of the homeless system proved endlessly baffling. One advisor told
him he wasn’t entitled to housing in Leicester because his family lived
outside, but if he filled out a form saying he was estranged from his family
that would see him clear. So he did that and got a letter back saying he wasn’t
eligible because he had no local connections. He’d have to wait in limbo for
two years before he became a resident of Leicester.‘It’s crazy,’ he explains.
‘There’s housing I can get for £385 per month, and the council is paying my
hostel over £780 for a single room with a shared kitchen. On top of that, I pay
the hostel £104
a month, so they’re clearing £900 per month. Every now and then, someone says
they may force me back to London, because I have connections there. But how am
I going to get on a waiting list in Kingston upon Thames of all places?’He was
sleeping badly, and hugely sensitive to noise and light, which eventually drove
him to Inclusion looking for something to help. There he met a Dr Maxwell, who
talked to him for half an hour and was shocked that he’d not been treated for
his head injury. She helped sort out some medication, got the in-house
physiotherapist to look at his leg and wrote a few letters to Action Homeless
explaining his illness and asking that he be moved to a less noisy building.
She also connected him with Headway, a charity dealing with people with head
injuries, who secured him an assessment for the Employment and Support
Allowance – the benefit paid to disabled people. Initially the interview was
scheduled in Nottingham. ‘I told them I had problems with my leg and I suffer
from anxiety,’ he shrugs. ‘Does it make sense to send me to Nottingham? And
because I’m band four – as in, I’m not drinking or doing drugs – I’m a long way
down the list for any better accommodation. So if I get myself an "addiction
I’d get housed. I’d be better off if I started taking drugs.’The days pass
slowly, he says – he’s got a scrapbook and tries doodling and sketching in it.
He’s got a few ideas but they don’t quite come out right. And he’s started to
help out at a homeless charity Open Hands.‘They’re all charities aren’t they?
It’s funny that. The thing is – it can happen to anyone. I see people buying
all these lottery tickets and it’s like – you’ve got more chance of being
homeless than winning the lottery you know? I was working towards an okay life
before – interning and organising exhibitions in Pimlico and Chelsea. Now
everything’s stripped away. Some people do help out – but most people think I
don’t look homeless enough.’
