Immersed in the fun of Streets Fest, you could have been excused for forgetting, just for a day, how vast a crisis homelessness in Britain has become.
Unless, of course, your first sight after walking out of Finsbury Park tube station – towards the health and wellbeing festival for homeless and vulnerably housed people – was a rough sleeper, apparently lifeless and surrounded by paramedics, as mine was this Monday morning.
It was a brutal sign of the times and a stark reminder of why charities are tasked with picking up where those with the power to change the fate of thousands have fallen down. And it is happening in a country where more than 8,000 people are forced to sleep rough on any one night, and at least 300,000 face homelessness. This is an era in which grassroots organisations, such as Streets Kitchen, find themselves having to host a special event – by some cruel irony, in one of the nation’s homelessness hotspots – to offer basic services to vulnerable people. It seems we have reached peak austerity Britain.
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