The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground
www.theguardian.com
The long read: After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious
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    0•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    “And it’s you rich buggers,” Van Allen marvelled, genially enough, as he eyed the state of their trainers, “who can afford to look the scruffiest.” He wore durable boots, khaki trousers and a leather motorcycle jacket, and could have been mistaken for a bike courier, a builder, maybe a maintenance guy at the hospital next door, where he was known in the staff canteen as someone who would wander in at dawn to buy a discount coffee.

    Although we know there are between 55,000 and 60,000 statutory homeless (that is, those who apply to make use of state services) and although there are efforts towards an annual census of rough sleepers (carried out by head-counters who hit the roads every autumn to ask for a show of hands), there’s a vast population the statisticians cannot account for.

    He was decades-trained to be up and on the move before the city’s day shift began, before London became more closely observed by its security guards and park rangers and police officers, any one of whom might inadvertently happen on the latest of his impermanent shelters and blow it.

    On the books of a production company, Van Allen worked mostly on music concerts and outdoor TV broadcasts, a dependable “scaff monkey”, so-called because he would willingly cast aside his smoke and steeplejack up a teetering scaffold, to rig a speaker or aim a spotlight.

    Good-weather months he camped on the heath, becoming familiar with the park’s night-time rhythms – first the hour the rangers knocked off, then the last of the dog-walkers, and, after that, the twilight time when the homeless presided, gathering on benches to share a beer or a spliff before they bedded down and ceded the place to the magpies and moles.

    When it comes to the game of property and land rights, there’s an urge to sniff or roll eyes at what goes on – be irritated or even perversely impressed by those who would blow up a woman’s cottage or ask £9m for opening bids on bricks and mortar.

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