‘This Whole Project Has Given Me Focus, Hope and Positivity’: The Co Presentation of Findings

I was explicitly clear with everyone who became involved in the Homeless Heritage project that the intention was to present our findings publically in a number of ways. We did this by co-publishing articles in popular magazines and peer-reviewed journals, speaking at public meetings and academic conferences, and through co-curating two interactive public exhibitions on the heritage of homelessness. It was important to spread the ways in which our findings were presented across a variety of platforms so that our results reached diverse audiences; for example, John Schofield, my homeless colleagues, and I published co-authored articles in The Big Issue, and in British Archaeology, in the hope that our work might reach people outside academia. That said, we were equally keen to demonstrate that the Homeless Heritage project was just as valid as archaeological investigations into any other marginalized culture or period so we also published co-authored peer-reviewed papers in Public Archaeology, Post-Medieval Archaeology, and created, in collaboration with artist Mats Brate, a comic based on fieldwork for the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. Further to this, various book chapters were co-produced for academic books,6 and I have since published a paper for the International Journal of Heritage Studies, which focused on how cultural heritage methodologies can function as tools for empowerment. I encouraged my homeless colleagues to co-present papers at a variety of conferences and public talks. Jane, Danny, Deano, and Whistler co-presented a paper entitled ‘Punks and Drunks: Counter Mapping Homeless Heritage’ at the conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) at the University of Bristol in 2010, while Andrew, Jane, Dan, and Mark co-presented a paper called ‘Stories from the Street: Contemporary Homelessness as Heritage’ at the Postgraduate Conference in Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester Centre for Historical Archaeology in 2011. To me, it was essential that those homeless colleagues who wanted to remain involved with the project once fieldwork had been completed were given real opportunities to do so.

Wandering Abroad: Ethnographic Journeys in the City

I agreed to meet Punk Paul on Stokes Croft at around 8 a.m. Paul was exactly where he said he would be—behind the bin next to The Big Issue office. In his early forties, Punk Paul was everything a punk should be—a devout follower of punk bands across the UK, he sported a blue Mohican (when bathroom facilities and soap rations permitted), army issue boots and a battered leather jacket covered in ‘anti-fa’ (anti-fascist) symbols. Paul fashioned the rest of his clothes from whatever he was given by church volunteers and picked up along the way. His distain of authority was firm but friendly. ‘Evening officer,’ he could often be heard saying, with a wink, to local police who regularly busted him for drinking in ‘no drinking zones’. ‘Could you spare a few shekels for an old sea dog? I’m trying to get together a pirate ship to sail off the end of the earth!’ ‘I have to pay Abdul £10.03,’ Paul said, as I approached. Abdul, Stokes Croft’s kindly but long-suffering newsagent, let some homeless people, including Paul, have beer on tick. We walked the short distance from the post office to Abdul’s shop and I waited outside with my dogs while Paul paid his debt. He was holding a can of Tennant’s lager when he reappeared. ‘It’s sort of a constant debt that I have with Abdul!’ He grinned before leading the way down City Road, Brighton Road, and onto Wilder Street. ‘You have to see this place! If you want to see what homelessness is really like in this country . . . this city could be any city, if you ask me. You have to see this place!’ We continued down Wilder Street until we reached a semi-derelict building. Through peeling paint it was possible to read ‘Bristol Transmissions’ above the long-ago boarded-up shop window. ‘It’s known as “The Black House”,’ Paul said, pushing the door. A padlock had been smashed off. Inside, there were two downstairs rooms, both hugely decayed with missing floorboards.

Introduction

As I write this book, statistics show that there is an increasing housing shortage that has been projected, by 2025, to leave a third of the global urban population living in substandard housing or going without essentials to pay for their housing. Homelessness is an increasing problem worldwide. In Britain, where the fieldwork drawn on throughout this book was conducted, the latest available statistics show that rough sleeping rose by 31 per cent between autumn 2014 and autumn 2015. In the United States, the number of people living in severely overcrowded households has risen by 67 per cent since the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis triggered the recession of 2007. If we add to this data the rising number of people who are being forcibly displaced from their homes by war and other violence, the need to study how homelessness materializes and shapes the world around us becomes more urgent. As a child growing up by the sea in Devon, a rural county in the south-west of England, I initially encountered homelessness in two ways: the first was while on a rare shopping trip to Plymouth to buy school uniform in 1986. I was 8 years old. It was raining and the post-war architecture loomed greyer than usual. A man sitting on the pavement huddled his dog close to him, their heads down. I asked my mum what he was doing. ‘He’s homeless. Poor man! Don’t stare,’ she said. Her words rang in my ears as I tried, but failed, to conceive of having no home. The second encounter was more cheerful. I grew up in a house by the River Avon.5 When the tide is out, the riverbed becomes a mudflat, and in July and August it is green with samphire. A tramp called Albert, his yellow oilskins and bushy white beard making him seem to me a real-life Captain Birdseye, could be seen collecting samphire from the riverbed every summer until he died. A bench has since been erected in his memory. Albert was homeless too, but in a different, older way than the man I remember from Plymouth.

Conclusion

An archaeological approach to contemporary homelessness contributes to existing literature on the subject by materializing this familiar yet alien social status in a number of ways. Globally, homelessness continues to suffer from being conceptually constructed according to essentially British nineteenth-century ideologies that are class-based and heavily gendered, whilst, increasingly commonly, manifesting physically as a diverse and phenomenological experience. Approaching homelessness using participatory cultural heritage methodologies enabled those involved in the Homeless Heritage project to collectively destabilize some of the pernicious myths that surround homelessness, present alternative perspectives, and identify practical ways in which homeless people might be better helped to survive and recover. Positive outcomes from the Homeless Heritage project include the ways in which people involved experienced increased social connectedness and enhanced well-being. Homeless colleagues actively chose to (re)engage with existing social and public services with more robust commitment than had previously been the case, while reconnecting with family also emerged as a strong and important outcome from the Homeless Heritage project. There were theoretical implications too. Where archaeology may be considered an ‘intervention’—a methodology for engaging with the material world— heritage is the human context by which such engagement is made possible. Heritage, a mode of cultural production, has an important role to play in facilitating redemptive and cathartic conversations about difficult or distressing human experiences and could powerfully affect the course of social policies in the future. Conversations facilitated through Applied Heritage can produce more nuanced understanding, which could feasibly be used to improve and enhance social justice on local levels and promote tolerance, understanding, and peace on the wider international stage. The initial aim of the project was to see whether an archaeological cultural heritage approach to contemporary homelessness might contribute to wider understanding of the social condition. A significant outcome was a more nuanced understanding of homelessness in the twenty-first century. This helped to powerfully counter definitions and rationalizations of homelessness in terms of nineteenth-century constructions of vagrancy. A more surprising outcome concerns evidence that Applied Heritage can function as a powerful therapeutic form of social intervention. In approaching homelessness archaeologically, from the perspective of a range of individual agents, the Homeless Heritage project clearly showed why a homeless person might ‘choose’ to appropriate, for example, space beneath a willow tree or a bin cupboard over conditions in temporary accommodation deemed ‘suitable’ for statutorily homeless people.

Homelessness in a Global Historical Context

One afternoon in late summer of 2010 I was walking home from the shops when I bumped into Punk Paul. ‘Hungry?’ He joked in his thick West Yorkshire accent, gesturing to my bags full of bread, salad, sausages, and wine. ‘I’m having a BBQ at my flat with some friends. Do you want to come?’ Paul eagerly took a few bags from me and we began to the short walk up the hill to where I lived in Bristol. By then I had known him for almost two and a half years. We trusted one another. As we entered the flat, we were first greeted by my dogs, Joey and Pea. Both dogs wagged cheerfully before diving nose first into the bags that we were carrying. ‘Get out of there!’ Paul said gently to the dogs. They knew him from fieldwork. As I started to unpack the shopping, Paul sat cross-legged on the floor, stroking the dogs so that they settled down beside him. ‘Are you any good at making burgers?’ I asked Paul, slapping beef mince and onions onto the kitchen worktop. ‘Can I put some music on? I can’t work wi’out music,’ he said. I tossed him my phone. ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do wi’ that?’ ‘It has music on it!’ I laughed, taking back the phone and flicking to the music library. I gave it to Paul so that he could choose what we listened to and we spent the next hour or so chopping vegetables, dressing leaves and making burgers to Nobody’s Heroes by Stiff Little Fingers. Friends arrived, we barbecued, and, as it got later, one friend put her little girl to sleep in my bed. Paul came to the door of the bedroom where I was reading the little girl a story. ‘Marmite!’ I heard him say my name in a loud whisper. ‘Thanks for your hospitality mate but I’ve got to get going now.’ I went to the door. ‘Everything OK, Paul?’

An Ethic of Care

The night that Tia gave birth to baby Tyrone, I went home to my flat, locked the door and sank into the bath. Thoughts raced around my head as I topped up the hot water several times, turning the tap on and off with my toes. I didn’t want to get out of the bath because I didn’t know what to do next. I’d seen a fair bit of contemporary homelessness by that point and found it to be unjust, understudied, characterized by gallows humour and ugly, in equal measure. Tyrone’s croaky voice rang in my ears. ‘She had to score, Marmite! She don’t want to go back.’ As I lay in the bath, I felt exhausted. I couldn’t decide whether to wimp out entirely, go to my old boss at the BBC and grovel for my job back, or stick with it, make contemporary homelessness the subject of a PhD and embark on serious fieldwork and doctoral study. I still couldn’t decide the next morning so, after walking the dogs at dawn, I went straight back to bed where I spent the entire day reading P. G. Wodehouse and eating toast. It was John Schofield, later my doctoral supervisor, who eventually persuaded me to make contemporary homelessness the subject of a PhD. When you write a postgraduate research proposal it is important that your research question is clearly articulated. The research context should be cogent and the theoretical novelty of the proposed research should be robust and convincing. A central element of the proposal should be a clear indication that you have thought carefully about any ethical implications that might arise from research and taken measures to address these. I duly wrote a research proposal in which I addressed these points and explained that I had fully considered the ethical implications of working with vulnerable homeless adults (and all homeless people are vulnerable by dint of the fact that they have nowhere safe to call home).

Applied Heritage

At the start of this book I offered examples of how archaeological knowledge and skills are being applied in ways that are socially useful and relevant to contemporary society. Building on what Holtorf and Fairclough (2013) term the ‘New Heritage’, I want to go further to suggest that some participatory cultural heritage work might explicitly set out to function as a therapeutic social intervention with marginalized communities. I will call this Applied Heritage. Before I outline what Applied Heritage could conceivably comprise I want to look more closely at the findings and results of the Homeless Heritage project. In the first part of this chapter I unpack how material culture relates to and stimulates memories which shape perceptions and may be useful in aiding the reconstruction of identities following experiences of marginalization or trauma. Following this, I will look at the negative impact that memories can have for populations who feel ‘out of place’ in the physical environments in which they are forced to exist. I examine several ways in which a cultural heritage lens can be shown to have been useful in addressing some of the challenges first experienced in engaging people on the Homeless Heritage project. The second part of this chapter looks at how an archaeological approach to contemporary homelessness was useful in identifying how historic attitudes to homelessness, which were enshrined in policies intended to deal with vagrancy, continue to haunt current homeless legislation. Archaeologist Michael Shanks has observed that ‘a key component of archaeological thinking is . . . personal standpoint, in a context of sometimes considerable state investment in heritage and stewardship of the remains of the past’. The Homeless Heritage project sought to document multiple ‘personal standpoints’ which often directly contravened those memories of the past preferred and pushed by the state. As we saw in the brief history of the development of homelessness as a social status offered in Chapter 4, states have increasingly conflated homelessness and associated social deprivation with criminality.

‘Are You Looking for a Body?’: Excavating Contemporary Homeless Places

About halfway up Stokes Croft, Bristol, there is an area known locally as Turbo Island. It remains an unassuming triangle of land that, about five metres at its widest point, houses an advertising billboard and an electricity substation. Turbo Island was once the site of three buildings—71 to 73 Stokes Croft—that received a direct hit from a 400 lb bomb during a Second World War air raid. The foundations of the buildings remain and form a wall upon which homeless people have been known to sit, chat, and drink for several decades. The name ‘Turbo Island’ is said to derive from the amount of ‘turbo’—that is, super-strength—cider that homeless people consume at the site, cultural linguistic evidence perhaps of Turbo Island being a homeless place, a place that belongs to homeless people. Turbo Island also happens to be directly opposite the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC) headquarters (32 Jamaica Street). It was one of the first places that PRSC attempted to promote the idea that we—the wider local community—could collectively and collaboratively improve Stokes Croft for the enjoyment of everyone if we took responsibility for simple things. For example, if we collected litter, kept the streets clean and tidy, and cared for the few green spaces we had to make the area a more attractive, healthy place to spend time. It was in this vein that PRSC installed a picnic table painted with a chessboard,1 so that people who used Turbo Island had somewhere to sit and something to do. Turbo Island was (and remains to this day) a nexus point for homeless people. It was often where I first met homeless people with whom I went on to develop close working relationships. It was the place to which people most commonly returned. One afternoon, after a particularly long day of ethnographic mapping, I dived into Abdul’s convenience store to buy myself and Little Tom a drink before we crossed the street to sit on Turbo Island.

Welcome to the Croft!

It was one of those days, typical of England, when you have to work very hard to remember that above the thick, white cloud the sky is always blue. I was cycling up Cheltenham Road, feeling increasingly angry, when I saw a giant advertising hoarding had been erected around a disused car showroom that had, until recently, been a residential squat. It read: ‘New Development, a mix of 1, 2 and 3 bedroom flats. Prices start at just £199,000’. The advert included pictures of smart-looking kitchens, shiny surfaces, and anonymous faces grinning inanely at their fictional bathtubs. I started to cycle harder with each raging thought. I had woken up feeling dismal and my mood had become progressively worse as the day went on. At that time, I worked as a junior programme maker at BBC Radio 4. I had been told in a meeting that I needed to establish a ‘celebrity angle’ on a story that I was working on. It maddened me. What relevance do celebrities have to ordinary people’s lives? This was 2007. The Global Financial Crash was just months away. Back then I resembled a slightly scruffy, more politically engaged Bridget Jones. Single and painfully middle class, I smoked roll-up cigarettes and spent most of my time feeling frustrated that both national and international politics appeared to be moving to the Right while I, and millions of others, protested but got nowhere. Massive peaceful anti-war protests had been ignored by Britain’s ruling elite, and direct action carried increased risk of criminalization. Some saw violence as a resort—albeit the last one—but it was never my style, so instead I just felt increasingly frustrated. I was sick of joining ‘movements’ to quickly become nothing more than a ‘clicktavist’, and was not prepared to turn my back and sink into a state of total apathy. I felt extremely powerless and that made me angry. ‘Rachael!’ I heard someone call my name. It was Jim Dixon, an old friend and fellow graduate of the University of Bristol’s MA in Historical Archaeology.

‘A Community of Sciences’

Homeless people are among the most marginalized in the UK, where homelessness—or vagrancy—has been ‘the classic crime of social status, the social crime par excellence’ since the 1349 Vagrancy Statute sought to deal specifically with the ‘wandering poor’. People who are homeless are those ‘swept into the vortex of political practices, socioeconomic assumptions, values and expectations bearing on the phenomenon of “home” as we understand it today and negatively put on “homelessness”’. But regardless of how they are legally and politically defined, homeless people have to exist somewhere. They have to find shelter, food, and other resources. They have the same physical, bodily and emotional needs as everyone else. It isn’t pretty or polite but homelessness has been documented in the UK for over eight hundred years, and it continues to shape and inform the world around us. Homelessness leaves material traces and a rich intangible heritage in the form of lexicon, folklore, and memories, making it an appropriate subject for archaeological study. The practice of applying archaeological approaches to the contemporary world—or, contemporary archaeology—is a comparatively recent development in the history of the discipline of archaeology. As Graves-Brown, Harrison, and Piccini note in the introduction to their edited volume, the contemporary archaeologist’s subject matter is ‘not just the buried remains of past societies, but as often as not the circumstances of living people’. An important question to bear in mind is this: For whom do archaeologists practise archaeology and what right do they have to make claims about the past or decisions about what should happen to data in the future? Archaeologists have a moral responsibility to ‘bear witness’ to other human lives regardless of whether the people concerned have been dead for thousands of years or they stand beside us, alive and kicking. To undertake an archaeological investigation of contemporary homelessness is to consider the ways in which homeless memory is constituted through objects (places and landscapes) as a form of bearing witness to the human experiences to which they testify.