In the news

I don't go to the West End very often but have done recently and the number of rough sleepers down the Charing Cross Road reminded me of what it was like in the 1980's.
Whats happened ?

I don't know about SE1 specifically, but the trend in London and nationally is, not surprisingly, upwards. It fluctuates throughout the year and people move around for a variety of reasons. There are official counts that are pretty reliable and they tend to coincide with what people see.

There is also a worrying trend of families taking up services aimed at rough sleepers because they are skint and living in food poverty. There is also a noticeable trend in casual labourers sleeping rough or in hostels - we see young men (Lithuanians seem to be prominent where we are) turning up in high-vis vests.

I'll drop you a line.

Possibly anecdotal but I feel like I've noticed a real increase in rough sleepers in SE1 the last year or so.

Definitely. Every part of London.

There is also a noticeable trend in casual labourers sleeping rough or in hostels

Hasn't this been a thing for quite a while (~ ten years) and mostly by choice? Young men who come to work and minimise living costs while they are here. Remember reading that some of the EU rough sleepers who were wrongly deported were here active and working.

This is purely anecdotal but I believe evidence of a wider problem.

I live in Blackheath, by the heath itself. When I take our dog for a walk in Greenwich Park I walk past a row of parking spaces in a particularly secluded part of the heath.

Every morning there are maybe three or four people getting dressed into suits or work uniforms after spending the night sleeping in their cars. I've also seen somebody emerge from a tent wearing a suit. Over the last two years, i've noticed more and more people doing it. Sometimes it is familiar faces, sometimes not.

Makes me wonder if there are a fair few employed and professionals who are finding themselves homeless.

Yeah, quite possibly, although in our experience it's more common now and I don't think it's necessarily by choice.

The last year or so has seen an increase in rough sleeping in outer-London boroughs that are traditionally less well equipped to cope with it, but I've no idea about professionals sleeping in cars, etc. It wouldn't surprise me.

Aka https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy

@Markyboy if you ever need more volunteers please PM me. I’ve got a lot of experience volunteering with Hackney Winter Night Shelter, I’ve basically done every volunteer role there, and last few years I’ve been basically doing the food coordinating (planning meals and buying the ingredients) for 1/7 of the venues, as wel as a lot of the cooking.

I commit a lot of hours for about 2 months of the year but recently I’ve been thinking it’s not enough because as you say, the need is increasing, and I’d like to increase my volunteering commitment to match.

Back when I volunteered at Samaritans, the rise in those with mental health issues turning to Sams for support was really difficult for me to deal with. From about 22:00, a lot of people who previously had 24hr support had nobody to talk or turn to. Volunteers found it hard because we didn’t have specific mental health issue training, so we’d either end up listening for literally hours about either delusions or intensely detailed accounts of how fucked their lives are, or some volunteers sadly took to hanging up on them or being rude.

The cuts to services for those who really need help are something I just can’t understand or mentally cope with.

@Markyboy - We run a similar outreach service in Battersea but for isolated / vulnerable people at risk of homelessness or primary care admission and avoiding winter deaths. There's a few funders about - let me know if I can help?

@Fatberg if Mark doesn't grab that - can we chat too?

Some businesses around here no longer accept cash, only cards or other types of i-payment. When cash and coins disappear how will we give direct charity to street people?

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Charing Cross Road reminded me of what it was like in the 1980's.
Whats happened ?

Enforced austerity as government policy is what's happened - again.
Somebody has already linked to this long read which explains some of it. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n13/john-lanchester/after-the-fall

And outside London. There are a lot more homeless people in East Sussex than I remember growing up here, from shop-doorway sleeping bags to tents in the parks to caravans on unadopted roads.

FYI I did just start an embryonic thread about homelessness.

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/321903/

Italy bridge: State of emergency follows Genoa disaster

The Genoa motorway bridge collapse is turning into Italy's Grenfell experience.

In the past I have driven over this bridge dozens of times, in 38 ton lorries. It is not a comfortable memory.

As a recently-not-renewed LGV1 licence holder, are you able to expand?

The Grenfell reference was my partner's comment. A piece of privately managed public infrastructure has failed, killing dozens of people. This bridge was the main link between western Liguria and the rest of Italy. It was part of the main route for the two most used road freight links across the alps between Italy and France (& Spain, UK etc).
There are questions about quality and funding of maintenance. There are questions about expert knowledge identifying problems with the structure and the level of maintenance of this 50 year old structure. There are 100's of similar aged bridge structures throughout the Italian motorway network, who will be content living nearby or driving over them.

The reference to driving over this route dozens of times is the thought that it could have been me, squashed under hundreds of tons of concrete.

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A sobering thought!

I posted about the ageing infrastructure issue here:

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/14369648/

Oof, someone's already edited OSM to remove the middle section of the bridge.

(I guess it's done to stop things that use OSM from being routed that way, but still...)

Working homeless is increasingly an issue, I've been volunteering locally to you this year, and wouldn't want to put a figure on it but a large number of the night shelter service users have jobs, which was a total shock to me and shows the scale of the problem.

If you fancy helping locally they are desperate for volunteers at the moment.

This article says the Westminster driver crashed into 'as many as 15 cyclists'.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/aug/15/police-question-man-on-suspicion-of-terrorism-over-westminster-crash

Two men and one woman were injured, but it doesn't say if they were on a bike or on foot.

I also thought this was significant news:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-trial-cancer-dewayne-johnson-ruling

PM'd