Home truths | 29 November 2018

King’s Cross station at 10.30 p.m. is not a happy place. Most commuters have long returned to their centrally heated homes, leaving the concourse free for the homeless to roam randomly in search of a few coins from stragglers.

I was there to catch a late train to Potters Bar last week and almost missed my Cambridge–bound service due to the numerous men and women who approached and asked for money. Some looked dishevelled, disturbed, miserable; others were polite and seemed resigned to rejection. I keep thinking about one man in particular. He said he was an ex-soldier — a ‘veteran of conflict’, as he put it — and that he had not eaten all day. It was chilly but he was wearing shorts and had a soiled blanket over his shoulders.

I said, piously, that I gave to charity in a number of ways and that in any event I did not have any spare change. I am not certain that the bit about spare change was true. ‘Hear me out,’ the man kept saying as I headed for the barriers by platform 9. But I chose not to do so.

What’s going on at King’s Cross reminds me of arriving in New York in the early 1980s to work as an intern on a newspaper. I was shocked that so many doorways and entrances to shops, especially around Times Square, had become dormitories for the homeless.

The situation in the rest of London and in every major city in the country is now no different. But it seems especially poignant in King’s Cross because that part of town is held up as a paradigm of successful regeneration after developers moved in and the prostitutes and sex shops moved out.