Words on the street

A white van pulls up outside St Giles in the Fields, an imposing 18th century church in central London, around the corner from Tottenham Court Road station, for a couple of hours every Saturday afternoon. St Giles is known as ‘The Poets’ Church’ because it has memorials to Andrew Marvell and George Chapman, but this humble van makes the nickname more fitting. It’s a library.

To be homeless is to have no fixed address, which means you can’t borrow books from a public library — but it doesn’t mean you’ve no desire to read. Quaker Homeless Action set up this mobile library in 1999, making runs into London twice a week and lending books to more than a thousand homeless people a year. Borrowers only have to give a first name, which isn’t always their real name, and may take out two books for up to two weeks, although only around a third are actually returned.

The van hasn’t long been parked when a young man called Noah takes out Split Second, a crime novel by David Baldacci. I ask him why he chose it. He stares at me, startled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, in speech so halting there are almost as many pauses as words. ‘I’ve never been asked that before… I have a lot of prepared responses… People generally say the same things… Nowadays I try not to think about why I do things… You rather live down here than up here.’ He points first to his boots, then to his head.

There are around 40 people gathered in the churchyard — mostly men, in their thirties or early forties, which aligns with what we know about homelessness in London. According to Chain (the Combined Homelessness and Information Network database), six in every seven of the just over 8,000 people who slept rough at some point in London last year were male, and more than half were aged between 26 and 45.