Introduction

Abstract

Homeless, wandering, aimless people without roots are to be found in most British towns as the twenty-first century approaches. They huddle for refuge against the cold and rain in nooks and crannies near enough to the passing public to plead in the hope that some may momentarily pause to spare them a few pennies. When the office-workers and shoppers have returned to their homes, the street-dwellers sidle cautiously into their cardboard beds temporarily below the underpass or in the doorways of prestigious department stores. They hope waste heat will muffle them against the cold and that shop-front lights may protect them from roving predators and drunken better-off fun-makers. Their fragile economic resources are exhausted, they are the poorest of the poor, members of a so-called underclass clinging perilously to the fringe of society. When recommending their inclusion as the bottom tier of a proposed new eight-tier social pyramid for Britain, the Economic and Social Research Council explained that socially the position of the underclass ‘is obviously the worst of all’.² Usually submissive but sometimes truculent, they are mainly scorned and rejected by the more advantaged. Homelessness has increased sharply over the last twenty years with a disturbingly larger proportion of teenagers and young adults. The causes of this undesirable phenomenon are not clear.

Nobody knows, or has ever known, how many homeless people there are, and there is no agreement about what in fact homelessness is.¹