Homeless at the Holiday Inn

By Samira Shackle

When the door shut behind her, Ariel knew she ought to feel relieved. Her double room in a south London Holiday Inn offered a haven from the coronavirus outbreak roiling the capital, as well as previously unthinkable luxuries: her own bathroom, a TV, a door that locked, a proper bed. Yet, as she took in the empty wardrobe and the bland walls decorated with a single, abstract print, her stomach tightened. The winter shelter she’d come from had been basic in its provision but full of camaraderie. Now she was on her own.

Ariel (who didn’t want her real name used) lay in bed, unable to sleep. Screams came from next door. Afua, the woman occupying the neighbouring room, had arrived from the shelter at the same time as her. The upheaval had disrupted her routine and she’d stopped taking her psychiatric medication. Social-distancing rules meant that Ariel couldn’t go and comfort Afua (another pseudonym). She just had to lie there and listen.

Both Ariel and Afua had been placed in the Holiday Inn, along with another 150 or so homeless people, by St Mungo’s, a charity. Case workers hurried to Afua’s door, but she kept asking for Ariel, the only person there she trusted. Ariel eventually persuaded the staff to let her sit with Afua in the corridor. The two women camped out there on a mattress for three days. At first Afua would panic whenever Ariel got up to go to the loo or have a shower. Over time she started to feel more like herself and agreed to take her medicine. After the mattress was put away and they each returned to their own rooms, Ariel realised that she had been so focused on looking after Afua that her own anxiety had receded.

Community had always been important to Ariel. When she was little, her mother told her that everyone bled the same colour so you should always try to find common ground. That stayed with her. An affectionate, chatty, neatly turned-out person, Ariel immigrated to Britain from Nigeria in the 1990s to work as a nurse in the NHS. Her life was stable until, in 2012, her husband died. She wouldn’t say what happened, only that she blamed herself for not preventing it.

The experience triggered a long episode of suicidal depression. Ariel found it hard to concentrate at work; eventually, the hospital let her go. When she disputed the decision it led to problems with her immigration status, which exacerbated her despair. Her landlord evicted her for falling behind on the rent, and she ended up being admitted to a psychiatric ward. After she was released in January, aged 56, she had nowhere to go.

Ariel told me she often thinks about the homeless people she used to walk past when she was working as a nurse. The shock of becoming one of them herself was paralysing. She is one among many. Britain’s homeless population has ballooned to around 280,000 since 2010, when many people began to struggle with their rent after the coalition government decided to cut welfare spending. The number of rough sleepers – those without even a sofa to crash on – has more than doubled in that time: some 4,000-6,000 are on the streets of England on any single night.

“I don’t want to start having flashbacks, saying ‘Oh my God, I used to have a two-bedroom flat, now I am here’”

When the covid-19 pandemic arrived, experts warned that both this group and those in crowded hostels were highly vulnerable to the disease and likely to spread it. On March 27th, within days of the government announcing lockdown in Britain to contain the virus, local councils in England were given 48 hours and emergency funding to re-house the homeless. Hotels across the country had no guests; England’s most at-risk homeless people were moved into their empty rooms instead. The rough-sleeping problem was more or less solved within a matter of weeks, at least temporarily.

When Ariel became homeless a few months before these measures, a charity worker suggested that she get a place in the winter night-shelter run by her local council. This meant a camp bed and hot meal in a different church or community centre each night of the week. Though Ariel was apprehensive about what it might be like, the other people there turned out to be funny, generous, vulnerable and kind. Within weeks, she couldn’t imagine life without them. Going to sleep at night she could feel other people’s breath, sometimes smelling of alcohol. It was crowded but comforting. “We were like one big family,” she said.

That closeness took on a different dimension when coronavirus hit London. Ariel watched the evening news on TV in the church hall and discovered, with growing panic, that the disease seemed to be especially dangerous for anyone with diabetes or asthma. She had both. The winter-shelter programme was about to finish; other charities and shelters were shutting because of the pandemic. Ariel thought she was going to be left on the streets to die. Then a volunteer announced that they would all soon be housed in hotel rooms. Ariel’s case was accelerated because of her risk profile: a taxi came for her and Afua, a fellow diabetic, later that week. The night before, her last at the shelter, Ariel cooked a Nigerian feast of jollof rice and lamb chops for everyone. She cried when it was time to leave.

At first the Holiday Inn didn’t seem like a promising place to make friends. The people housed there were told to stay in their rooms as much as possible. The restaurant, lobby and bar were off-limits. But people did congregate in the car park to smoke. Ariel went out there several times a day and would introduce herself to whomever joined.

As the guests began to settle in, the car-park community splintered into different groups. Polish men talked among themselves; some long-term rough sleepers gravitated towards people they knew from shelters. But a big TV event would usually get everyone talking together. Whenever Boris Johnson made a significant announcement, people would dissect it over cigarettes afterwards. The same happened after the video of a Minneapolis policeman killing George Floyd first aired. Ariel remembers some of the smokers’ tears as they spoke about it.

Everyone at the Holiday Inn was given a cheap mobile with a short-term contract so that case workers could reach them easily. Ariel spent a lot of time in her room phoning friends she’d made at the hotel, as well as some from the winter shelter, making sure they were okay. They checked in on her too. She still had dark days. “I’m lucky,” she said when I asked her how she had so many friends, “I always find people.”

Ariel kept herself busy doing embroidery. She downloaded new patterns – a fox, a blue flower, lettering saying “Let’s Stay At Home” – and St Mungo’s staff supplied her with thread. “Cross stitch clears my head, I just forget where I am,” she said. “I don’t want to start having flashbacks, saying ‘Oh my God, I used to have a two-bedroom flat, now I am here.’ I take that out of my mind.”

David was sleeping on the stone steps outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square at the end of March. As a child he lived in more than 20 foster homes and attended 13 different schools. David, who is now 38, first became homeless a decade ago, when he slept rough for four years. “I think I’ve blocked out the memories,” he said. “Mostly I was sleeping out. I didn’t have the kind of friends that would let me stay.”

Even when David had the opportunity to settle somewhere – he briefly had a council flat in Bournemouth – it wouldn’t stick. He insisted that he’s never been depressed, although what he described sounded very close to it. Last year he took off hitch-hiking round Europe, doing unpaid work in exchange for board and lodging, and got to see things he’d always dreamed about, such as Van Gogh’s paintings. He came back to Britain to take up a temporary job as a manual labourer, which included accommodation. Then coronavirus broke out. The job and bed vanished. David spent the last of his money on a hostel. When that ran out, he made his way to central London, where he knew that services for homeless people were most abundant.

He described the atmosphere on the streets in the early days of the pandemic as apocalyptic. One night, at a soup kitchen in Soho Square, a van of police officers turned up, shouting at the people queuing for food that if they didn’t socially distance, they wouldn’t get fed. David didn’t need reminding: he was asthmatic, and knew he was vulnerable. He still had a phone, and whenever he could charge it he scoured the internet for organisations that might help him find somewhere safe to stay. Eventually, St Mungo’s sent a cab to take him to the Holiday Inn.

David was grateful for the reprieve. But where others saw a chance to set down roots, even temporarily, he saw a waiting room, somewhere he was stranded. He chatted a bit with other residents, but hated listening to all the stories of sadness and mistakes, of alcoholism and depression. He wanted to talk about his passions: art, architecture, books.

He found it grating to depend on hotel staff to look after the things he was used to doing for himself. Even the laundry. Twice, David’s load was returned with an item missing, including a much-loved hoodie that he’d acquired while travelling. He complained, and it turned into a bit of a scene, something that happened to him more often that he’d like. “From foster care my mouth isn’t great,” he admitted. He spoke loudly because of his poor hearing, a legacy of “being smashed on the table” by his mother when he was a baby. The missing laundry items never turned up.

David also found not being able to make his own food disempowering. An external company catered for the homeless residents of the Holiday Inn, and the fare was pretty basic – soup for lunch, a sausage roll for dinner. Shortly after arriving David received a modest welfare payment, so he bought himself noodles, porridge, fruit juice and bread. But he longed for a fridge, somewhere to keep milk and butter. “Small things altogether make up a happy life,” he said. “Small things like washing your own clothes, drinking a can of Coke out the fridge.”

He noticed some residents leaving for hours at a time, presumably meeting friends outside the hotel to drink with or buy drugs from. He worried about them bringing the virus back, and spent most of his time alone in his room.

The lack of distractions did at least give him space to work on his poetry. He’d never had the focus to finish something before; suddenly sonnets and haikus poured out of him. Some were melancholy and introspective, others defiant: “Tonight though this token tranquillity tastes tremendous.” He usually wrote on the Notes app on his phone and posted screenshots on Facebook, or made short videos of himself reading them out. He enjoyed the likes.

“Small things make up a happy life, washing your own clothes, drinking a can of Coke out the fridge”

David kept asking St Mungo’s staff for a clearer sense of how long he’d be at the Holiday Inn. In late June, the government said there would be “no going back to the streets” and announced a new support package for rough sleepers. The exact scope and duration of the support is not clear however. Paying guests are slowly returning to hotels, and David noticed more and more people from the St Mungo’s programme being moved to other forms of short-term accommodation. The uncertainty of the checkout date looms in the minds of those still there.

Rough sleepers are often trapped in a vicious cycle as the everyday struggle to survive makes it hard to tackle the underlying mental-health problems, addiction and other pressures that may have helped propel those individuals onto the streets in the first place. St Mungo’s said that many people in the Holiday Inn were starting to feel a bit stronger. But their situation doesn’t represent a long-term solution. It’s not just that hotel beds are no longer going spare; more fundamentally, a hotel room can never replace a home.

When I spoke to him, David was worried about what would happen if he slept out on the streets again with the virus still raging. Yet he found the hotel’s cocoon stifling. He wanted to travel again, and kept checking the news for updates on which borders had been reopened. He missed the freedom of life outside, with all its rewards and frustrations: deciding to buy a cup of coffee he couldn’t afford, bumping into commuters glued to their phones. “Life is about doing things that annoy you,” he explained. “I guess even for millionaires it’s difficult. This pandemic is something we all experience together, right?”■

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