The world’s first homeless museum opens in London

The stories told at London’s new Homelessness Museum make it frighteningly clear that homelessness can potentially happen to anyone.

One person whose experience is conveyed in the inaugural exhibition – titled “How to Survive the Apocalypse” – was once a wealthy financial worker in his early sixties who lived comfortably in Japan.

Although his full journey is not revealed, the man eventually recovered from cancer treatment while homeless on the streets of London. Wearing donated clothes, he kept himself warm one winter with a wool coat that – he reports without apparent bitterness – was emblazoned with the name of his former employer.

This is one of the compelling stories told at the new museum, which opens Friday, founded as a traveling project a decade ago but now settling into its first permanent location in an Edwardian lodge on the edge of Finsbury Park in north London.

The opening of the museum is, to say the least, timely. Across the UK, 290,000 families sought help for homelessness in 2022, the latest data shows, with the number of people placed in temporary accommodation doubling over the previous decade. Many people are still unable to access help and the number of people sleeping rough on Britain’s streets rose by 26% in the same year.

With rents rising faster than underlying inflation and an acute cost-of-living crisis that only shows signs of abating, things are only getting worse. In the last three months of 2023 alone, the number of people who became homeless increased by 16% across the country. The people whose experiences this museum explores are not only misunderstood and often ignored, but they are becoming more statistically significant every year.

Offering a mix of storytelling, education and advocacy focused on the experiences of homeless people, the museum’s unconventional setting goes beyond its theme. Instead of a collection of items in glass cases, it offers an interactive experience where volunteers share the stories behind the objects in their collection – all accumulated through donations from their homeless former owners – to small groups of visitors, using the exact words from his former guardians. The result is not only a powerful and humane look at the experiences of homeless people, but also – with its collection including objects as mundane as shopping carts and plastic bags – a challenge to established ideas about what museums should display. .

The objects included in the museum’s first exhibition have meanings that belie their modest appearance. Each object’s narrator reveals an impressive story: a rough wooden stick repaired with duct tape, for example, was actually grabbed as a makeshift replacement for crutches that a homeless man suffering from chronic back pain had left on the bus. . Barely able to walk on the sidewalk, the stick’s former owner found a piece of discarded cut wood in a front yard and discovered that the rounded log at its end fit perfectly in his hand.

Something grabbed in desperation turned out to be highly useful and even comforting equipment. Initially grabbed as a stopgap to get him off the curb, the stick became something his new owner began using constantly. Ultimately, he even adorned its vaguely head-shaped hilt with a glass eye, an ornament he felt showed the influence of his favorite strange novel, Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory. Explored more closely, this simple piece of wood’s transition from trash to tool and companion shows how even a simple object can become someone’s anchor and reveals sophisticated associations that don’t fit well with common perceptions of the homeless as lost. and abject.

These stories of homeless people as admirable survivors may cheer visitors, but the museum’s first exhibit is also disturbing. Working on the edge of a precipice where the safety of many Londoners is already teetering, museum staff see the people whose stories they share as models for a future where many people’s lives could become even more precarious. A future state of permanent crisis, a form of apocalypse in the museum’s words, could mean that the practices that keep the homeless relatively safe – resilience, mutual support and community – will become increasingly indispensable.

“We want to flip the script a little bit on what people say about homelessness,” says museum operations and production manager Adam Hemmings. “There’s a lot of sensationalism and pity, a lot of victim narratives about homelessness. What we’re doing with this program is saying that there’s actually a lot of wisdom, there’s a lot of creativity. Come on, it will be the people affected by these questions who will have many of the answers.”