For three days he hadn’t slept, at least not properly. The last time he remembered drifting off was before dawn on Tuesday. It was now 1:40pm on Friday, and Ginger was hunched in his sleeping bag on the freezing slab of north London pavement he called home. His resting place was outside a branch of HSBC, metres from Camden Town tube station. There might be more crowded locales in London but few are more frantic. Around him surged crowds of tourists and revellers starting the weekend early. A bunch of Italians took it in turns to take pictures of Ginger, red-eyed and weary, a very modern face of the capital. Others struggled to hide their pity; some looked plainly disgusted.
But it wasn’t the incessant tumult of Camden that had induced Ginger’s most recent bout of insomnia. “It’s the cold. You can’t sleep. You just lie there, freezing. Even when you turn numb, it’s still painful. And someone stole my gloves,” he shook his hands forcefully to mimic his shivers as the temperature fell to -3C last week.
Ginger said the best thing to kill the cold was heroin. “It’s the only thing that makes you feel warm, from the inside. But it’s been so cold, even that hasn’t worked.”
An articulate and incisive character, Ginger is one of Britain’s growing cohort of rough sleepers, among the 960 identified in London last year. Last week government figures showed that the number of rough sleepers in England had risen for the sixth year in a row, up 16% on the previous year, nearly double the number since 2010. Across the country 4,134 people were forced to sleep outside. Ginger describes it as a life of extremes, an existence that brings out the best and the worst of people. “Some people try to bully you, try to pick a fight, some spit at you or shout at you to get a job or get some benefits. Mostly they tend to stick their nose up at you.
“And then a lady will walk by and give you a helping of homemade stew that she’s made especially – that happened yesterday,” he smiles. Considering his profound fatigue, Ginger looks well, although he admits he feels “much older” than his 41 years. The average age of death for rough sleepers is 47. The lowest average life expectancy in the world is in west Africa’s Sierra Leone: 44.4 years.
Ginger, born in upper Clapton, east London, in March 1975, describes his life’s journey as a string of squandered opportunities, bad luck, bad decisions, substance abuse and ultimately the shocking murder of a loved one. His first setback occurred at the age of six and a half. Ginger’s mother walked out on him and his father. He has not spoken to her since. “She didn’t want anything to do with me.” His father, now 67, brought him up single handedly and, according to Ginger, remains supportive.
After leaving school aged 16, Ginger went to live with his uncle in the Irish city of Limerick. There, he fell in love with the outdoors. In the River Shannon he caught his first salmon. He went rabbit hunting in the fields below the Slieve Felim mountains. “I became a keen fisherman, I really took to the life.” But the lure of London drew him back and, aged 19, Ginger found work as a painter and decorator in Camden, making £50 a day cash in hand, a grand a month. “That was big money in those days,” he said. But his disposable income was invested disastrously. Ginger began drinking heavily in Camden pubs like the World’s End – opposite where he now sleeps – or the Camden Head. “The problem was that I was drinking with the wrong crowd.”
Cannabis use rapidly evolved into crack and heroin addiction. His job suffered, his income evaporated. In 2000 Ginger received his first custodial sentence for robbery. For the following eight years life became a blur of prison and heroin use. He served time in Pentonville, Wandsworth and Portland, among others. Amid the chaos, Ginger managed to maintain a seven-year-relationship. He and his partner had two daughters and a son between 2002 and 2006. The family lived in a two-bedroom flat in a yellow tower block behind Euston station. “I had everything I ever wanted. I thought I’d made it.”
But in 2008 the relationship broken down. Ginger went clean but he has not heard from his partner or children since. His loss prompted a period where he tried to build a new life, and Ginger is adamant he would have never ended up on Camden’s streets had it not been for the brutal murder of his Irish uncle in 2015. An intruder attacked and viciously beat the 74-year-old in his Limerick home. “I was asked to go to the funeral but had to say no. I couldn’t bear to see him in the open coffin. I wanted to remember him as he was,” said Ginger, still visibly grief-stricken. Heroin anaesthetised the pain. By the summer of 2016 Ginger had lost everything and was a rough sleeper. “Once you’re back on the heroin, it’s hard to get straight,” he said, describing his current heroin intake as “dabbling”.
Spice – synthetic cannabis – is the narcotic of choice among Camden’s rough sleepers now. “Everyone’s on it. It just knocks you out,” said Ginger. Last May the government made spice illegal, and the only people to benefit have been the dealers. Before then, Ginger could procure five grams for £25 from a local shop. Now dealers cut the substance and charge £10 for half a gram.
Camden could be a violent place for a rough sleeper, he said. He is wary of the surrounding streets, recounting a drunken night in 2003 when he got into a mindless squabble with a stranger in a nearby alley. They began fighting. Initially Ginger thought his assailant had punched him in the leg. “Then I realised I’d been stabbed. You live in fear that that can happen at any time.”
Ginger also admitted that he was a danger to himself. In 2008 he was taken to St Pancras hospital in handcuffs after a psychotic episode. Once there, he sliced himself open with a craft knife he had hidden in his pants. Yanking up his jacket, he reveals two parallel lines of knotted scar tissue 30cm long, running across his lower stomach. “It was the voices that told me to do it.” He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and currently receives a fortnightly injection to control his condition. Research by charity St Mungo’s shows that four in 10 people who sleep rough have a mental health problem.
But street life is not unswervingly bleak. Ginger’s survival relies on daily acts of unsolicited generosity. “Some people sit down for a chinwag and ask how I am. Others give me money, even 20p, for which I’m always grateful. People bring sandwiches or visit a local shop to buy me lunch, and local restaurants often bring leftover meals.”
Staff from the McDonald’s on Camden High Street bring over a quarterpounder with cheese, Ginger’s favourite. If not, there is the nearby soup kitchen which, in a sign of the times, can “become very crowded”.
Ginger talks fondly of his fellow rough sleepers, how they will defend each other if attacked or from new faces they don’t trust. In the past Ginger has befriended strangers and woken up without his shoelaces. Even so, rough sleeping is fundamentally wearying. Days begin around 5am, when the city starts waking up, and Ginger says he can only fully relax after 3am when Camden’s nightlife fades. His alternative “homes” – a doorway close to the American Apparel store across the high street and an alley behind the World’s End – are hardly more peaceful.
Ginger often thinks of the day he’ll be able to leave Camden’s streets. Like all rough sleepers his primary ambition is a permanent home. Without an address, securing a job and saving money is almost impossible.
But Ginger is also scared that he’ll never fully conquer the internal voices that he said prevented him from moving forward. “The medication is working in the sense that I can only hear mumbling. I can’t quite make out the voices but they are there, coming from behind my back. If they stop, I’ll be able to think more clearly.”
HOMELESSNESS FACTFILE
• Using a different methodology to the government figures, the Combined Homelessness and Information Network, found that 8,096 people slept rough at some point in London during 2015/16, an increase of 7% one the previous year.
• Of these, 5,276 people were new rough sleepers.
• 85% were male, with the proportion of women rising slightly over the last two years by 1%
• Many rough sleepers have pressing support needs: 43% have alcohol problems; 31% have drug addictions and 46% mental health issues. The proportion of rough sleepers with no support needs is around a quarter.
• A third of people seen rough sleeping in 2015/16 had served time in prison, while one in 10 had experience of the care system. Eight per cent had been in the armed forces.
• Where nationality was recorded, 3,271 people rough-sleeping were UK nationals – 41% of the total.
Ginger’s life on the street: a battle with people’s disgust, illness … and the cold
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