UK Housing Crisis

Shelter is a UK housing charity that provides help to rough sleepers and offers advice, support and legal services to people who are struggling with unsuitable accommodation and bad housing, as well as campaigning to end homelessness altogether.

Many people think of homelessness simply as people sleeping rough on the streets. Attitudes are often accompanied by assumptions about begging, mental illness, substance abuse, or even that people deliberately choose to live on the streets.

What people don’t generally associate with homelessness are the less obviously noticeable issues caused by bad and inadequate housing, especially in major urban areas like London, where the housing crisis is at its worst. Barely affordable rental prices, coupled with cuts in welfare and a refusal by many private landlords to accept tenants claiming housing benefit have forced many working people, including families with young children in to temporary accommodation. Temporary accommodation which is often unsuitable and ends up being long term.

The fact is, anyone can become homeless and it’s not just an issue that affects the most marginalised in society.

Shelter commissioned me to photograph various people all around the UK who had been affected in one way or another by issues surrounding housing and homelessness. The people I met all had their own stories to tell and were affected by circumstances which could affect anyone at any time.

The portraits could be of anyone in your daily life, your neighbours, friends, colleagues, your family. The faces are those of normal, everyday people, like you and me. They’re not incoherent, drunken beggars, they’re people with ordinary lives, with jobs, with families, with dignity.