When I moved to London for the second time in my life, in the early 2000s, I was struck by a highly visible change: The street-level misery that had defined the great metropolis in the 1980s had all but vanished. Gone were the bodies huddled under blankets around the edges of Trafalgar Square, the rows of beggars along Oxford Street and the Strand, the encampments beneath the arches of Waterloo Bridge.
It was the first and only time I have seen a serious urban “rough sleeping” problem (as street homelessness is more accurately known in Britain) more or less fully solved, humanely and comprehensively.
Numbers seem to be in dispute …
This article quotes numbers from a homeless advocacy group so bias is possible, even likely – The London-only Combined Homelessness and Information Network (Chain) figures are considered to be more accurate than the official one-night count. The most recent annual count showed 10,053 rough sleepers were spotted on London’s streets between April 2022 and March 2023. That was down by a fifth on the 8,329 recorded in the previous year.
This is from the BBC – London has had the biggest rise of rough sleepers in England according to government figures, with an increase of 34% across a 12-month period.
There were an estimated 858 people sleeping rough in the capital on a single night in autumn 2022, compared to 640 the year before.
The BBC numbers seem light.
