In a way, 70-year-old Tony Sinclair was lucky to be in his tent on the day last year when the police arrived. The canvas that kept him from the elements ended up in the bin, but, unlike several of his neighbours, he was able to save his most important possessions from going the same way.
On 10 November, he was in Huntley Street in central London, in one of 10 tents pitched in a row next to University College hospital. Officers turned up “demanding my details, name, date of birth. But I stood my ground and refused, because I’d done nothing wrong.” They said they were enforcing a section 35 dispersal order, under powers introduced 10 years ago to target antisocial behaviour. Sinclair thought such an order couldn’t be used to move someone away from their home – “and this was my home”.
Whatever the rules said, the authorities ensured it wasn’t his home for much longer. The police handcuffed Sinclair and identified him by searching inside his tent – even though he denied permission – until they found his driving licence. The officers released him and talked in vague terms about rough sleepers begging and defecating in the street (offering nothing to challenge Sinclair’s avowal that he had never done either in his life), then ordered him to leave the area. Again, he refused. He was arrested – now cuffed so tightly that it hurt – taken to a police station and held for several hours.
Released that evening, he went home to find his tent wasn’t there. As with those of his neighbours, it had been chucked into a Veolia rubbish lorry and crushed on the spot, the destruction captured in widely shared footage. Hastily erected security barriers now filled the tiny patch of ground the campers had made their own.
One of Sinclair’s neighbours, who has had two heart attacks and two strokes, “came back from somewhere, didn’t know anything about it and said: ‘Hey, Tony, where’s my tent?’” All of his stuff had gone: “He’d no sleeping bag; just freezing. That guy was so cold.” So the pair spent the night together, huddling inconspicuously in the hospital.
Within a couple of days, most of the campers, Sinclair included, had secured new tents from a charity, moved the barriers a bit and repitched.
Sinclair’s mattress and toiletries had been destroyed, along with his tent. But the police had let him bag up some possessions and bring them to the station. Most of the other campers were absent, sometimes with terrible consequences: “One guy, I think he was bipolar. His tent and everything went in the bin. We couldn’t get hold of him for a long while.” When a worried Sinclair eventually established contact, the man was inconsolable. “He told me: ‘There was my dad’s watch in there, which he gave me just before he died. There was 23 years of my life in that tent.’”
Sinclair’s story is not unusual. Walk around any British city and you will notice people who used to sleep with roofs over their head bedding down under canvas. I recently spotted a tent right by the Ritz hotel in central London. Rough sleeping in England is up 60% in just two years, according to the latest official figures; in London, it is breaking records. Meanwhile, the tally of households stuck in (reliably terrible) temporary accommodation – the submerged iceberg of hidden homelessness – has more than doubled since 2010.
And yet on 4 November 2023 – six days before the UCH tents were cleared – the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, tweeted: “We cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people … living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.” Sinclair eventually heard those words and has no doubt they encouraged the authorities locally: “That’s why they felt bold enough to go for everyone at once.” Even after Braverman lost her job, the government attempted to increase fines for “nuisance” rough sleeping to £2,500, even threatening jail. The criminal justice bill, which fell victim to the dissolution of parliament in May, defined the damage caused by nuisance to include “smells”.
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Sinclair arrives one minute early for our appointment, just near the little camp where he lived until a couple of months ago, when he moved in with a relative. He is a positive and friendly if slightly frazzled presence, marching me to the “cheap and cheerful” hospital canteen. He still speaks with a strong Manchester accent, even after 40 years in the capital. He intersperses the story of how he became an “urban camper” with the airing of various enthusiasms, including the healing powers of meditation, for which, he explains, a pod-style tent is especially well suited.
Sinclair and his two brothers were adopted young by a dedicated Manchester fostering family: “It was their job – there were other kids around.” As a teen, he was inspired by action films that made him think: “I’ll ’ave a bit of that,” and he joined the army as soon as he could. He headed back to Civvy Street three years later, in 1973 or 1974, “and started on the buses in Manchester”. Now in his 20s, he rented his own place. He found life a blast, “drinking and womanising” on the weekends.
At 28, with a brother already in London, he headed for the capital and turned his hand to minicab driving. He was soon trusted by the owner to manage the station where 60 other freelancers worked. The proprietor “would just turn up every two weeks and collect the money. That was it. I was running it; he were happy. It was good.” By now, Sinclair was a single father with a lot on his plate, but home life was eased by the owner giving him a sweet deal on a rental property. Later, when the owner offered him the chance to buy the minicab station, he seriously considered it. In the end, one of his friends did the deal instead, although Sinclair continued to run the operation.
That was fine for a while, but it didn’t work out. So, in his late 40s, Sinclair went back to bus driving. “I loved it,” he says. “It was a good job.” He did it for 20 years, sometimes making £40,000 a year. Towards the end, a “really nice manager” explained that he was over pensionable age and could stop paying contributions; in fact, he was due a seven-month rebate. “I went on holiday to Cuba. I wanted to stay, but they’d have locked me up. They can’t take people like me over there!”
Suitably refreshed, he went back to the buses. But then came Covid. A former girlfriend was struck down by the virus and died: “That really messed me up.” Meanwhile, the shocking number of deaths among London bus drivers became a big story. Some ailing staff said they felt obliged to carry on working because they would get only statutory sick pay (£95.85 a week in spring 2020): “Drivers who’d got Covid were coming back.” At one nearby depot, Sinclair says, “five died in the space of a month”. The sick pay got sorted, but he still worried: “The precautions wasn’t there.”
Sinclair ruffled feathers with awkward questions about the risks. In every interaction, he says, the management were now giving him a hard time. He spent the next three years wrangling with them, including a spell off from stress, “putting in a grievance” over safety concerns, a sudden formal discussion he had no time to prepare for, a dismissal letter that he says he never got, then tribunal and court hearings, which eventually he lost.
All of this was expensive. Even after Sinclair moved to representing himself, he was at one point hit with a £1,000 fee to keep the case going. “Printing alone was costing me a fortune.” With a state pension income of £880 a month and rent of £1,000, his position was unsustainable. Something had to give – and it was the rent. “I had to make that choice,” he says.
He went to Manchester to stay with one of his brothers, but after a few months he headed back to London with no clue where he would land: “It was horrendous.” Then a homeless man on Tottenham Court Road told him about the camp. Someone lent him a tent, then had to take it back. Sinclair bought his own, “which wasn’t a problem, as I had some money”. That was “great” for a bit, until one day last June, when his pod was singled out and binned, along with his passport and his asthma pump.
But he soon had another tent and found day-to-day life tolerable. Meditation helped. For the toilet, Sinclair could generally slip into the hospital without a problem. He used some of the cash he was no longer paying in rent to pay for a gym membership, so he could have a shower every day, and he kept active with “weight training, rowing machine, cross trainer”. Above the gym was a library, where he would spend a couple of hours each day on his legal case.
Still, he says: “Life on the streets is hard. I’ve seen people being attacked.” He got a lot out of being the pillar of the embattled community. There were some addicts and one intolerably noisy drunk, but he learned to be understanding: “When I were a bus driver, I’d give to the homeless, but I was selective – I wouldn’t give to alcoholics and druggies. But that was not knowing about them. You know, they’re all suffering from trauma from an early age and that’s what put ’em on that road.”
Other campers weren’t addicts; they were just overwhelmed. “One guy next to me was a catering manager in a pub. But he was paying child maintenance and couldn’t afford rent.” He wasn’t penniless: “He could have paid a deposit, not a problem, but then he’d have to pay the rent,” which he couldn’t afford. Instead, he camped and bought a car, even though he couldn’t drive. He sat his test, but failed. So Sinclair took him out every day and gave him hours of lessons: “He passed – he was so made up.” He has since landed work in a different pub, where he can live.
Another neighbour was Pete, the chirpiest sort of London geezer. When we pop round the corner to see the four or five remaining tents, he dashes forward to say hello. He banters knowledgably about Huddersfield Town (my local team) and much else, then pops round the corner to get me a local paper with a story about a plan to clear the tents for good, by putting cycle racks and bollards in their place.
Pete ended up here after being booted out of his digs in Camden, run by a fake landlord who had claimed the property was his. “It turned out it wasn’t,” he says. “We’d all been paying rent, but got evicted.” Work should offer Pete a way out. He has done all sorts – “building sites, casual labour”, helping out a friend with a cleaning company – but he has hurt his arm. Its visibly restricted movement seriously limits his options.
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Despite Sinclair’s efforts to stay positive, he hid his life under canvas from his daughter. She discovered how he was living when the clearance popped up in the news: “Dad, why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. “I couldn’t put that on someone else,” he says now. “I needed to fight for myself.”
It’s all of a piece with Sinclair’s efforts to keep his freezing neighbour warm, to reconnect with his lost bipolar friend, to get his neighbour a driving licence, to ensure suitable Covid protocols at work. If one theme threads the stories he told me, it’s responsibility – a concern that is often lacking elsewhere.
After November’s tent clearance caused a backlash, the hospital’s trust acknowledged that it had wanted the sleepers to be dispersed, but let it be known that it had never meant for the tents to be destroyed. Labour-controlled Camden council, which contains Keir Starmer’s constituency, struck a regretful tone and said it had ordered an “urgent investigation into what happened”. Veolia, the operator of the rubbish lorry, said it had acted “on behalf of and under the strict supervision of Camden council, and the police when needed”. Eventually, the police admitted they had acted unlawfully. Sinclair is now in line for compensation for wrongful arrest.
No one, then, came out of the incident proud. The affair betrays a country disturbed by the penury in its midst, yet clueless about how to address it – beyond the age-old trick of turning “vagrants” into someone else’s problem by moving them along.
As for Sinclair, he has picked up warm words from the Lib Dems and Labour on affordable housing, which would “of course” make a difference – but he doesn’t believe it will happen. Election or not, he says, “our rights are going to get eroded anyway”.
Broke by Tom Clark (Biteback Publishing, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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