SINGLE

PERSON
ACCOMMODATION
Hazel Doone
When people think of slum clearance, they usually visualise the
rehousing of families, particularly families with young children. And when
they talk about the homeless, they think of the families in the Rest Centres,
of mothers with two, three or four children who cant find a place just
because they have children. The planning man thinks of people composed
in orderly units of Father, Mother and 2.2 children or, if he is concerned
with overcrowding, of families with four, five or six children. But they
forget, or do not notice, the very large number of single people, who live
alone in the older tenement blocks or in furnished lodgings. They form a
large part of the population in the older areas of the City, and not only is
their number much larger than the housing plans allowed for, it is also,
as people live longer, increasing. And I think it is the need for single
person accommodation which, because it has been completely underestimated, is now one of the most pitiful problems in London.
In the areas that are now being cleared, there are many, many small
units, households of ones and twos and threes, besides the large family.
Very often, when the slum clearance takes place, the married people, the
people with children, are re-housed, but the single people are left to fend for
themselves. If they are living in furnished accommodation, as many of
them are, then, however meagre the furnishings, they have no rights at all,
and are told to find a room somewhere else. For instance I know of one
man, an epileptic, who had a room at 4s. 10d. a week. He had lived there
for nearly 20 years, but because there was a little furniture in the room,and
a few odd cups and plates, he was counted as living in furnished accommodation, and was expected to find his own place when the buildings were
knocked down.
Many people are in the 5050 situation; they may have the odd chair
or so of their own, and the rest belongs to the landlord, or is made up of
things left by previous tenants. They, too, can expect no place on the
re-housing lists. And they then come into a peculiar No Mans Land.
Theyre not eligible for new housing (even if they were they might find it
difficult to pay the higher rents) and theyre not likely to be able to find
accommodation they can easily afford elsewhere. Often they have been
living in places with unusually low rents, and then, quite suddenly they find

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themselves pushed out into the open housing market. If they are on low
and irregular wages, like this epileptic man, and depend, a good deal of the
time, on the NAB, it may be very hard for them to find anywhere else to go.
Many go into similar or worse accommodation in another run-down
neighbourhood, and for them slum clearance is an additional burden in an
already difficult life. And there are some who are pushed out of the bottom
of housing altogether. The epileptic man, for example, was given the
alternative of going into an epileptic colony, which hed fought against
doing all his life. Now hes simply disappeared. I dont know whether hes
found another room, or joined a group of tramps, or been taken, rather
unwillingly, into the colony.
The room he had been living in was very small indeed. It was about
7 ft. long, and 6 ft. wide and only just had space for one little iron bedstead,
one chair, and a sort of half table, propped up under the window ledge.
It had a tiny fireplace, which was his only way of boiling a kettle or
anything like that. He used to gather end-pieces from the timber yards so
that fuel didnt cost him anything, but when he couldnt go out and gather
wood he was cold. There were no facilities for washing in the room, and
when he wanted water he had to carry down an enamel basin and fetch it
from the communal tap three flights of steps below. The roof leaked, and
there was no plaster on the walls, and the place wasnt being repaired
because it was due to come down, but at least it was cheap, and all he
could easily afford.
There is a great deal of this kind of cheap, private accommodation in
the old streets of East London. It is found especially in the oldest tenement
blocks, but there is a lot too in ordinary two or three storeyed houses,
where one or more people live in each room, and they all share one tap or
kitchen. If you take a street like Banbury Street, on the Stepney-Bethnal
Green border its nearly all single people who drift there, people who have
never been married, or people who have been widowed or separated. There
is a mixture of people; some are a bit sick, some are people who have been
unemployed for many years, others do casual work from time to time, some
are elderly or middle-aged prostitutes, or people who have been mixed up
with gambling places in the area and have since been dropped by their
gangs. They make their living in any one of a dozen ways, but rarely by
any regular work. They are on the fringe, getting a few bob here, and a few
bob there. All of these people, plus mental patients who have nowhere else
to go, are in a great conglomeration along that street, which is due to
be demolished in the next year. There is very bad overcrowding, and the
conditions in some of the houses are indescribable. If the sanitary inspectors
knew how many people really lived in them, there would be many more
people without any kind of refuge. The landlords must be making a very
considerable amount of money, but at least they will never turn anyone
away, and they do not put people out on the streets.
For a very long time now, Banbury Street has been the sort of place that,
if you were married and had children, you moved heaven and earth to get
out of it as soon as you possibly could, and it has become a refuge for the
single, the mentally sick and other disturbed people who had nowhere else
to go. There are a few families there who have come in after the clearance
order. What happens is that some family that has been desperate for

Single Person Accommodation

accommodation will take a whole house from a landlord who is only too
glad to get the rent, because he knows he is going to lose the property soon,
anyway. And then they are completely stuck because the LCC wont
rehouse people who have moved in after the clearance order has been
made. And that is how some families get into the Rest Centres, and are
split up. But the single people are in an even stickier position. Take the
example of Mr. Smith, one of the people in Banbury Street who has been
told he must find his own accommodation, and has been engaged in prolonged negotiation with the LCC to try to get a flat when he is forced to
move. Here is a letter he sent me about it:
Dear Hazel,
I beg to inform you of the latest development respecting my circumstances
of accommodation, realising that you would be most interested to know
of possible accommodation for two persons on your list. They say I am
offered a Council flat provided I am with a person, so that I total two in
number, because the London County Council Housing Department
regiets to provide alternative re-housing for a single person, such as myself,
residing in the clearance area of Banbury Street, which is included in this
big site due to be cleared. It will be necessary for me to find my own
accommodation, as they have asked me to vacate my stated address by
31st January. So, if you cannot find somebody to partner me off with a flat
as a tenant of one of the LCC flats, I trust you would recommend me for a
bachelor flat as was promised by them according to the Rules and Regulations of Application which I have passed for. I have been registered on their
list since 13th July, 1960, and this is my Registration number . . . Their
reference is . . . , and November, 1961 theyve sent me the notice. I have
replied to their letter of the above date, assuring them that I should take
the matter further if I received no satisfaction. Failing this, I do hope that
you can influence the Club to provide some form of unrestricted private
lodgings that would suit people like me also.
Also, what entitles me to some priority is that I am of the age of past
40 years which qualifies application for the housing of single personsat
least it does in some boroughs. I guess that you would submit this fact also
in addition to the other facts and anything that is of advantage to my case.
Yours faithfully, HARRY.
I rang the LCC to try and sort out what they had offered him and they
said that it was the Councils policy to encourage all single people to find
their own accommodation. They added that Mr. Smith doesnt really
qualify for being considered because hes only been at his present address
since March 1961. They say they dont rehouse people who have come in
within the last few months, to prevent anyone wangling a house by
moving into one that is going to be knocked down. Mr. Smith has, in fact,
lived in that street for four or five years, sometimes at one house, sometimes at another, according to the state of the landlord, the rent, or whathave-you, but the LCC are treating him as though he had just come into
the street. The whole thing has got into a thorough tangle, because the
LCC deny telling him that he would be offered a flat if he found somebody
to live with. But I am sure that somebody must have said something to
have inspired his sudden search for a partner to make him two in number.
I have never known him to be living with anybody, and there is no evidence

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that he has ever shared his room with anyone. He talked about a lady in his
past, but he has not mentioned her for some time. Now he has been telling
the Welfare Officer that he has been co-habiting with a lady who he has
invented, so far as I can see, in an attempt to get a flat.
So far Ive been talking of people who are quite on their own. But there
are also people who, though living apparently by themselves, depend
very directly upon a complicated network of arrangements which the
clearance plans destroy. There are lodgers who have become, in some sort,
part of the family because they have been living in a house for so long.
It may be this kind of situation, for instance: a spinster of 58 who had
originally lodged with her mothers best school friend. Both her mother and
her landlady had long since died, but the landladys daughterthat is the
daughter of her mothers schoolfriendhad inherited her in a quasifamily way. The lodger was treated almost as kin because she was the
daughter of this old friend, and you respected your mothers immediate
friendships the same way as you would a sister or a cousin of your own.
There are customary arrangements like these which can find no place in a
new block of flats or in an out-county estate where lodgers are not allowed.
There are also many people who, though they are technically on their
own, and live by themselves, nevertheless depend very directly on relatives
who live nearby. With the old housing system of the East End there was a
very great variety of householdsbrother and sister households, or
unmarried relatives living together, unmarried children living with widowed
mothers, two single people living together. What used to happen, for
instance, was that the unmarried brother would stay with the married
daughter who had remained with her mother and would later inherit
the tenancy. But when this daughter had too many children for the brother
to go on living with her, he would move round the corner with some other
part of the family which had more room, and then, when her children got
married he might move back again.
There were households which were composite in character, and there
were relatives who, even though they did not live under the same roof,
were nevertheless part of the familys life and even its domestic economy.
This was especially true of families that were poor, and families who,
through illness, were often in difficulties. The stronger members would help
the weaker, and there was an often changing series of arrangements made
to cope with difficulties as they arose. I knew a mental patient, who had
lived with eight different sections of the family, according to which
household found it easiest to help out.
Another man I knew, also a mental patient, was living next door to his
sister. He lived in a room by himself, but he went for dinner to his sisters;
he took his laundry to his niece, and he went and had a bath at the house of
another sister. The family were all rather overcrowded, but in the past, in
spite of the overcrowding, they all had him in their home. But he was a
depressive patient and had suicidal tendencies, and on occasions he had
attempted suicide when the young children were in the house. Another
thing was that he had nightwork, and on his nights off he didnt sleep very
well, and used to walk up and down and make a lot of noise which, in an
overcrowded household, disturbed a lot of people. Eventually the family

Single Person Accommodation

decided they couldnt have him in the home any more. But they didnt
want him to spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital, and so they got
him this room by himself, and organised his life so that he could still be
with them, though not under the same roof. Now these relatives were dotted
all around the district, but when the slum clearance came he was offered
accommodation in another borough about three miles away, which he
refused. And once he had refused accommodation he was no longer on the
housing list. So then he went into a hostel, and eventually came out of the
hostel and found another room. It isnt very near his relatives, and he cant
walk easily now to the different people who sorted out his arrangements for
him. He struggles to make the long walk and gets on as best he can. But he
can never manage things comfortably any more. This wasnt the housing
peoples faultthere wasnt another room in that areabut its the kind of
thing that comes up. People may lead a composite life without actually
living together in the same house, and these patterns are seriously disturbed by the way rehousing takes place.
All this is especially important for mental patients. With mental sickness,
where someone has been regressing, the families in this area tend to keep
him at home for a long time before they let him go to the hospital for
treatment. In the end, its usually because of some hopeless crisis, where the
family can do nothing at all, that he goes into an institution. Now, in
addition to people protected in this way from going in, there are also many
more people coming out. People who go into a mental hospital are staying
for much shorter periodson an average for six weeksand some of the
long-term patients are now being discharged. It is partly policythere is a
swing towards community care, towards keeping the patient out of hospital
where it is at all possible. And it is partly drugs; since the war tranquillisers have been developed which make it possible to discharge mental
patients who would never have come out previously.
A very high percentage of these people are single. If you take something
like schizophrenia, more than 75 per cent of schizophrenics are unmarried.
I suppose there are very few mental patients who are dumped entirely on
their owntheres usually a relative somewhere around. But they may not
be living with them, and how they get on may depend on whether they can
find a place nearby. A long-term patient whos now come home has
usually forgotten how to cope outside. Hes probably had Home Leave
while he was still at the hospital, and perhaps some help about shopping
and going into town before hes discharged. But its very difficult if hes
living on his own. I know of one man who was in hospital for 18 years.
His brother, who is many years younger than himselfthe baby of the
familytried to do something to help him when he came out of hospital.
He makes him very welcome at his house, but he couldnt have him live
in his house, not until his daughters are a little older anyway. He takes a
room for him with a friendly landlady, if he can find one, and goes to a
great deal of trouble to find one. The landlady keeps an eye on things, and
she lets the younger brother know when she thinks hes not so well.
Sometimes he goes back to hospital for a week or two, when hes feeling a
bit pushed, and she keeps the room open for him at a nominal rent.
But if he is away for more than two or three weeks, she may not keep the

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room and in that way hes had to move on to two or three different rooms
in the area, which his brother has searched for. Its always a terrific
struggle to get him resettled. He works as a tailorhis trade before he went
into hospital 18 years agoand hes very slow; its only because he has got
a tolerant employer that hes able to keep going at all. It would be very
cruel to make him spend the rest of his life in a mental hospital solely
because hes slow and cant quite keep up. When he went into hospital,
his mother was alive, and his place in the family home was secure. But of
course, by the time he came out, the home didnt exist any more, and the
other members of the family had married and were living in Council flats.
There cant be any question of sending people like this to new towns, or to
areas they know nothing about; where are they going to go if they are to live
near their relatives?
One family I know were living in part of Columbia Buildings, one of the
big blocks of dwellings in Bethnal Green. Just before they were cleared,
the younger brother was taken into a mental hospital. And because he was
there when the family were rehoused he wasnt classed among the tenants,
and so they werent given a place with enough room to include him in the
family again when he came out. Three years later he got well enough to
come home. But when he came to live with his sister as he had always done
previouslythe family were said to be statutorily overcrowded, and told
they could not have him. They then had to go on the waiting list for a
larger flat, and there was a see-saw battle to see whether the Council would
turn a blind eye to the overcrowding until they found them a larger flat.
In the end it was so awkward, having him sleep in the living room, that it
upset both him and them, and he went back into hospital again. And then
this disturbed their application for a larger flat because they were no longer
overcrowded. So you can see how the thing begins to go round in circles.
The regulations in the new council flats, when a family is moved,
make it all much more difficult. In the County Council flats they have
to make a special application to have an extra relative as a lodgerbecause
no lodgers are normally allowed. Its almost invariably granted for
mothers or fathers, but not so usually for other relatives unless some very
good grounds can be produced. So that the old easy movement of relatives
from one part of the family to another, according to circumstances, is
made very difficult. The treatment varies from Council to Council, and it
tends to be harder in the County Council flats. To have a lodger they have
to make application on a special formits been altered again recently
on which it is specifically said Is it a relative? and What is your reason
for wishing to have this person? In some cases the rent is put up, which is
an added difficulty. In practice, the officers will turn a blind eye, if they
are sympathetic to what the family is doing, and this is a godsend for a
family trying to help out a sick person. Recentlythis yearthe County
Council have issued instructions that special consideration is to be given to
mental patients home on leave, or being taken in as lodgers by a member of
the family. But prior to this year it was very difficult indeed, and the family
could only do it by trying to dodge bringing the situation out into the open
with the rent collector. It all varies very much from place to place but, with
all the forms that have to be filled in, and the rules that have to be
negotiated, the movement of families can never be as free as in the past and

Single Person Accommodation

its often the family that is least able to manage who has most difficulties
to overcome.
Thus there is a range of single people who, because they do not belong
to the standard family unit, have little or no hope of being housed by the
Council or the County Council. Most of them are driven to overcrowded
areas like Banbury Street. When the street is cleared they will go on to
similar streets somewhere else, because they will be the only places they
can find. Or they may try to get a toe-hold in temporary lodgings, and
then get pushed out of there. And the people who are least capable of
managing their lives, will get pushed out into the streets and the bomb
sites and the railway termini.
What happens to single people who are pushed out of the bottom of
housing altogether?
Some of them go, for a time, into hostels or clubs. Among the best of
these are the Red Shield Clubs in Central London run by the Salvation
Army but they are rather expensive and are used mostly by a certain kind
of commercial traveller, by servicemen on leave, or by people like carpenters on contract work. At the other end of the scale the LCC has a Reception Centre in Gordon Road which they run on behalf of the NAB. That
holds up to 600, but it is usually only half full, partly because people
dont like going such a long wayit is over the other side of Camberwell
and also because they are not allowed out until after 11 oclock in the
morning, unless they have special permission. But the men whose need is
greatest are mostly working at odds and ends, and the money they earn
is picked up in the early hours of the morning. They go to Billingsgate or
Covent Garden or Spitalfields at five or six in the morning to earn their
eight or ten bob, and they hate Gordon Road because there are chores,
a legacy from workhouse days, they have to do first.
Altogether, in Stepney alone, there are 1,500 beds in the different hostels.
But that doesnt mean that a poor man without a home can easily find a
place. The Church Army hostel is very good, but its also rather dear. You
can get breakfast, supper and a bed, all for 9/6d., which is very reasonable
considering the standard of food and accommodation there. But that
comes to 3 5s. in a week, and anyone whos on the NAB would have
trouble finding that as well as covering midday meals and other expenses.
The Rowton too arent cheap any morethey have been turned into working mens hotels and cost up to 21/- a night. And Tower House now takes in
mostly people who have got a stamped insurance card and who are in
regular work; it costs 2 or 3 a week to stay there and they bar various
men as drinkers. The Salvation Army hostels also bar people, and there
is the problem of what to do with the small but growing number of
people who have been barred from everywhere for various reasons. With
places like the Salvation Army hostels they are mainly barred for meths
drinking, or for being drunk and disorderly. But a man may get barred for
sheer insolence, even though hes personally sober because the officer in
charge is afraid of how to handle a whole group of men when one rabblerouser is allowed to get away with it. They are not supposed to circulate
black-lists among themselves in the Salvation Army, but I have seen a
typed list of the names they sometimes circulate between the different

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hostels, and there are some men who were blacklisted five years ago for
being drunk or for bed-wetting and whose names have got stuck on the
list. Bed-wetting can be due to drunkeness but it can also be because of
enuresis, and many people end up sleeping on the bomb-sites because
of it. Once a man is enuretic he loses his place in private lodgings very
quickly and may find himself put out of hostels for the same reason.
Women are in a much more difficult position both because the hostels
are stricter and because there are far fewer beds available. The number of
beds available for working women in the whole of the London area is 600.
The number for students, clerks and professional women in the same area
is 6,000. Some working womens hostels have been closed this year. The
Church Army have amalgamated some of their rehabilitation and hostel
units. The Salvation Army has only 150 beds for women and the majority
of these are for young mothers with childrenthey only have 20 or 30
beds for working women who are on their own.
And then there are those who fall right out of housing and sleep out.
They are not typical of the people I have been talking about, but they
illustrate at one extremity the pressures that bear on single people living
alone in the metropolis. Their number is small, but it is increasing as so
many of the old breathing spaces are closed up.
All the main line termini are homing grounds for the homeless. They
usually live round them during the day and at night they either sleep
right in the stationwhen they are able toor nearby.
There are all kinds of side issues connected with whether you sleep in
the waiting rooms or outside. The railway police dont often find many
sleepers-out because they get the tip-off from people standing around
outside. Inside you can dry your socks on the radiators when nobody is
about and you can use the toilet and wash and brush-up places. Then just
outside the stations there are tea bars which stay open all night and there
are people to beg from and sandwiches that are thrown away. At Euston
theres nowhere really comfortable or convenient to sleep. There used to be
radiators with black marble tops which they could sleep on, but these have
been fenced in. The people who used to sleep there now sleep out in the
gardens or in odd nooks and crannies nearby. But sometimes they can sleep
right inside the stations. Liverpool Street in particular was one where until
recently they camped a good deal. The railway people were not only tolerant
but very interested in their welfare. But more and more people kept going
therepartly because there were more and more homeless people and
partly because word got around that the police were softer there than at
Waterloo, where at one time there was a policeman who was very rough and
turned them off the benches. In the end the pile up got so bad at Liverpool
Street that there were sudden orders for a blitz and now theyre much
more serious about clearing the place when they come round.
The other nooks and crannies are found especially around the markets.
And there are bombed sites and empty houses dotted around the railway
and market areas. There are also a number of isolated hidey-holes like
newspaper mens boxes turned round against the wall so that you cannot
see there is anybody inside them. And then some nightwatchmen put up
tramps. But there are fewer and fewer places now where people can sleep

Single Person Accommodation

out. The sites are being built up and the usual haunts are better patrolled
or fenced in. For some time now Whitechapel Churchyard, which used to
be a favourite sleeping out place, has been fenced in so that the men there
have had to move to a lorry drivers patch nearby. One group decided that
since they had been moved away from all the places on the ground the
only thing to do was to go up. Now some of them sleep at the top of
City flats, near the water tanks or above the lifts.
The people who sleep in these places are often permanently homeless,
and like the meths drinkers and the tramps, have made it into a way of
life. But there are some who have only recently been pushed down and
who find a room from time to time, and at other times sleep out.
One woman I talked to, sleeping out near Euston, was still looking for a
room. She doesnt always sleep out. Some time during the summer she
had a room in the Aldgate area, but she gave it up, and since then she has
been sleeping in the park just in front of Euston station, or, when she is
frightened of the meths drinkers, on a bench outside the Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson hospital. Occasionally she sleeps on a bench outside one of the
big garages.
Ada is 52. She says shes a widow, though in fact shes an unmarried
mother. The man she married was killed during the war, and later she
had a girl by another man. She was always in domestic work of one kind
or another and had nowhere to live and keep the baby, who was taken
into care. She visits the girl every couple of months (she is in a foster home
on the South Coast), and she would like to have her daughter living with
her, but she can never hope to earn enough: she cant even keep herself
in shelter. Like a lot of other people in her positionoffice cleaners,
washers-up in restaurants and hotels, earning 5 or 6 a week, she has
found it increasingly difficult to manage. To people like this quite small
changesa rise in fares, or in the price of a cup of tea in the cafescan
make a great difference, and some of them find they can no longer manage,
paying 1 or 30s. for a room.
She doesnt earn quite enough to afford even a cheap room. She does
three different jobs: from 7 oclock to 9 she goes scrubbing and cleaning
for a fur company near Kings Cross, then she does a couple of hours
washing-up in a hotel in the same area and after lunch she washes-up at
one of the railway hotels, and thats more or less the end of her working
day. She gets onto the Circle Line at Kings Cross and comes to Liverpool
Street and for two hours every evening for the last two or three months
she has looked for a room in the Aldgate area. I meet her there sometimes.
If she took a steady job from 9 to 6 she might find her money went
further. But she takes what she can get. This is her point as she put it to
me: if you dont stick with the people you know youre sunk. If you take
time off to look for another job and they know youre looking they will
put you out. And if you havent got a regular address people wont take
you on. And if you do get a residential job in a hotel, say, or a better paid
job somewhere else youve got no security. She thinks its better to work
for the people you know. The fur company is a good job, although she
only does a couple of hours there: they pay better than some other places
would because they have to have someone trustworthy. I asked whether

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they wouldnt give her a reference and she said no.

Someone with more energy and imagination would tell themselves that
it was daft to do this, but people like Ada are afraid to let go of what
theyve got. So they hang on and wriggle around trying to make the
situation as bearable as possible. She spends money on having a wash
4d. every morning at the station and 8d. once a week for a bath. And she
buys vaseline and Fullers earth to make a marvellous compound which
she rubs into her legs to prevent her getting chilblains. She showed it us
one night: you lay out the newspaper so that the draught doesnt get
through, put the vaseline on and then roll your legs up in the paper and
settle down for the night.
People like this are not brilliantly intelligent but nor are they mentally
defective. Imagine how tired you get if youre not living on a proper diet
and you never get a proper nights sleep and on top of that you do scrubbing
and washing-up every day, which is hard work even if it is only for six
hours. You are caught in a web of unfortunate circumstances and quite
ordinary human characteristics like an inability to plan ahead and a
generally easy-going disposition become major disabilities.
The people who have been sleeping out much longer than Ada are often
past making any effort to escape. One woman who sleeps near Euston has
been sleeping out for a very long time. She had been working as a maid in
a family. She was taken into the household when she was young middleaged and then when she was elderly middle-aged the family didnt need
her any more as the children had grown up and she was dismissed. She
wasnt on anyones housing lists and she had no housing rights. She had a
washing-up job for a while and a room in the Kings Cross area. She was
paying 1 for the room out of the 4 a week she earned and after a while
she gave it up and has been sleeping out for a very long time now. She has
a bad leg and has to go and have it bandaged up in the Casualty Department of a hospital but I dont think they realise she is sleeping out. She is
quite unable to work but she is not getting any NAB. We asked her why
and she said it was because she didnt have an address. Legally the NAB
are not allowed to refuse a person assistance because they have no address
but the clerks often have no way of checking whether or not the person is
claiming NAB at several other places and so they do refuse them. This
woman could have National Assistance if she went to the office and really
stuck out for it, but she would have to stick out very hard which she is
not at all likely to do. She cant work and she ought to be drawing sick
pay but I shouldnt think she has a cardand anyway she is beyond
organising things. People like this can never get their foot into the door.
We asked her how she managed and she said she begged for coppers
a bit. And then at the coffee stalls she gets odd cups of tea given her by
people who know she is on her own and sometimes the prostitutes there
give her a pie. Her regular routine is to walk to different parks and lie
down there to have a snooze. Very often when she wakes up she finds that
people working nearby have left her a packet of sandwiches, though when
it is wet or at the weekend she doesnt get anything at all.
There are different levels to which one can sink and most of them fall
short of such total destitution. But there are very many people, especially

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in the larger cities, who quite suddenly find themselves clinging to the
very edges of society. And it is especially easy to fall if you are single. You
have only to be ill, mentally or physically, for a short time and then if you
havent any backing from your family or any very good friends to help
you out you can slide. You get into the sort of state where you can only
get a lower kind of job. You get pushed. You are less able to buy decent
clothes. You look less respectable. You are less lively and eager. And so
you get a worse job every time you lose one. If you have had several patches
of illness you may slide into the easiest kind of job you can get because
you are no longer capable of competing.
There are people who appear to be quite secure, earning a decent wage
and with a room of their own, yet whose position in society is really quite
precarious. Take, for instance, a nightwatchman I talked to when I was
working among the sleepers out at Euston. When he came home from work
one day during the war he found that his parents and his brothers and
sisters had all been killed in an air-raid. He left the East End, when his
family was killed, and went over to Kings Cross, where he has lived ever
since. He is in his 50s. He is unmarried and always lived alone. He does
his own washing and his own shopping and always cooks for himself.
He occasionally goes to the pictures on his night off, and he has an odd
beer of an evening, but he isnt really interested in beer, and because he
is mostly night-watching at different places he doesnt have any friends
in the pubs. On his night off he could always go to the same pub, but he
is a very shy little man, and has not really built up more than a nodding
acquaintance with the people near where he lives, and he has long since
lost contact with the people his family knew.
I met him by chance one night when I was waiting for someone I was
supposed to see at midnight and asked if I could get warm by his fire.
Our conversation lasted about three-quarters of an hour and he was so
anxious to talk to someone that he spoke like a man who has just come
off a desert island. He said that whenever old lady tramps came along he
let them sleep by the fire for the night. He gives them breakfast and arranges
for them to be able to have a wash in the hut. He always feeds and looks
after them because he doesnt believe that women should sleep out. If a
man wants to sleep by his fire it depended on whether he thought he was a
nice type or rough and liable to pinch things. I asked him what he was
going to do over Christmas and he said he would be on duty for the whole
time because other people dont want to be. But when I asked him what
he was going to do about a Christmas dinner he replied in a very lively
tone that he always had a Christmas dinner. And when I inquired about
it he said Oh, I have it in the middle of Christmas Night. I always roast
a chicken on the bar over my fire and I always have it by myself. If he
is very lucky someone comes along and talks to him on Christmas night
and he was hoping to find someone who would speak to him this year.
But quite often he would have Christmas dinner by himself without anyone
even talking to him as they went by.
I thought he was very typical of a whole range of fringe people
nightwatchmen, wharf keepers and so onwho have no real contact with
other people and no roots at all. He likes his jobhe cant bear working
under a foreman, though it is a long, long time since he attempted anything

99

like that. He likes to have his own place and run it his own way. This again
is typical of the shy, awkward unmarried man. He has been working for a
long time with a firm of cable-layers and he is earning 12 a week which
is quite good money and he has a room with a reasonable rent. So from
that point of view he seems to be all right. But he is only clinging on to the
edge of society by his finger nails. If he lost his room or wasnt very well
for a week or two, he could quite easily fall into the sleeping out group.
He has worked for the same firm for 12 years, but I do not know how many
weeks they would let him be away sick before they sacked him. As he is
alone there would be no-one to look after him and keep him in the room
and the job. He could get National Assistance or other help, but it is very
difficult to go out and organise your sick money if you have been ill in a
room of your own with no-one to look after you. Just supposing, for
arguments sake, that he had a fortnights flu and stayed in a room by
himself: who would bring him any milk or food of any kind? Probably
nobody. He creeps in and out of his little room; because he is a nightwatchman he is going out when others are coming home: he is not even on
speaking terms with anybody in his own house; he has no-one that he
speaks regularly to every day that would miss him and wonder where he
was, and come round to see what had happened to him. If he wanted help
he would have to creep out of his room when he was still ill and speak to
somebody, which for this kind of person is quite a thing. He might well
just lie there until he got better and when they didnt hear from himhe
is not the kind of person who writes lettershis firm would probably just
think he had disappeared and would replace him while he was away sick.
This is the sort of situation such people get into. It is hard to explain how
it does happen, but its often when they are sick for a few weeks that they
come unstuck. This nightwatchman, for instance, might get too ill to do
nightwork and yet have no other job to go to; or he might lose his room
and not have the initiative to look for another. I thought it would be only
too easy for this man to fall into the right out in the street group if he
was ill one winter.
The one thing that is true of most of these people is that it is almost
impossible to survey them and only too easy not to notice the way they
live; some because they never stay in one place and others because they
do everything to avoid contact not only with the authorities but often with
any outside person at all. Their way of life does not make them available
to interviewers or callersif they are on night work, they are asleep during
the day or out wandering; they may have no fixed abode, or indeed no
abode at all.
In the City of London for instance, there are only 6,000 settled residents.
But something like 2,000 people live a semi-vagrant life on the edges of the
city. At one stage during the past year 100 new callers were arriving in a
month at the crypt of St. Botolphs church which is a refuge for tramps.
The complications of the housing needs of a large city become apparent
when one considers the range of casual employment it provides and the
range of uprooted people it attracts and, at the same time, the variety of
people it enfolds who are not part of a complete family household. For
the last ten years the large building and civil engineering contractors have

Single Person Accommodation

drawn thousands of labourers to the London area, and lodgings and

hostels of all types have been swamped. The newspaper sellers, the Sunday
paper sellers, relief nightwatchmen, market labourers and casual porters
who have for many years circulated throughout the London area now find
it hard to gain a regular nights shelter. Many have given up trying.
Merchant seamen waiting for a ship swell the numberssome join the
group of meth drinkers on bombed sites and never return to the sea. In
another sphere, but very often equally helpless are the unmarried mothers
and middle-aged spinsters who lose their homes on the death of their
mothers. Also living in single rooms which they are always in danger of
losing are many widows, or elderly cousins living together and brothers
and sisters who form tiny two-person or single-person households.
Because it is often extremely difficult for married couples with children
to find lodgings, it is frequently assumed that it is easy for single people, as
landladies and landlords could have no particular objection to them. But
in fact they are often condemned to live in the worst kind of lodgings and
the most miserable places, so that they move from one room to another
with no security. Like a man sleeping on the floor for the first time, they
keep changing position so that it will hurt in a different place and let the
other bit get a rest for five minutes.
The amount of loneliness in a large city is one of the most appalling
things in modern society. There are people, like the nightwatchman I spoke
about, who only meet somebody when they buy a bottle of milk or their
sausages and bread. Their work does not involve them in any kind of
personal contact. They are not on speaking terms with anyone in their
house or block either because they are shy and withdrawn or because they
do not go in and out at the same time as other people. From one weeks
end to the other, these people do not exchange 20 words with anybody.
Consider the number of unmarried mothers among the Italian or Irish
girls who come to domestic or hotel work in the City and imagine the
vulnerability and helplessness that often lies at the centre of their lives.
Or think of unmarried middle-aged men and women or people who are
widowed or separated, or those who lost all their family in an air raidall
those with no close relatives or friends in London, but who perhaps only
ten years ago were living at the centre of a full family life.
There are needs here which go far beyond the limits of housing policy
but we might begin by recognising that these needs exist and are made more
desperate by insecurity about housing. We should imagine the many different things that could be done to provide decent living accommodation
for single people and see what breathing spaces public authorities can
put in the place of those they are destroying.
Even if only one man is not offered alternative accommodation when
slums are cleared then part of his life is taken away and that man is pushed
closer to destruction. A slum house may be only a pile of insanitary bricks,
but a home is more than a roof over your head; it is a way of life.