It’s 10am on a Saturday morning and there’s a flurry of activity under the clock at Waterloo station. There are awkward hellos and handshakes, compliments on a new hat, conversations in Spanish and Arabic and English. A young man called Enrique unfurls a bright blue Salvadorian flag from his backpack. As we set off for our ramble in Bushy Park, we could be any group of tourists or weekend hikers. But today I’m joining ‘Never Walk Alone’, a series of monthly walks organised in and around London for refugees and asylum-seekers.
We step off the train in Hampton Wick and I get chatting to Marjan Haghdoost, a 45-year-old teacher from Iran. She began coming on these walks in 2019, after seeing a poster on the wall of the Dulwich hostel she was living in while she was claiming asylum. ‘I had nothing, no money, no English and I knew no one,’ she says, her warm, open face suddenly turning dark. ‘The Home Office gave me a roof and food but that was it. I felt like I was in jail but without the bars. It was a very bad time. For 15 months, I was just waiting because that’s all I could do. But when I came on Never Walk Alone, I felt joy. They gave me my first Oyster card, I was treated like a person, a friend.’
