I put up a piece earlier this week on Rachael Kiddey’s presentation on the archaeology of homelessness in Bristol, along with links and videos on the archaeology of homelessness in Indianapolis, under Dr Larry Zimmerman and Dr Welch, and York back here in the UK, also led by Kiddey. Since I put it up, there was a report on the local BBC news evening news programme, Points West about homelessness in the city. It’s doubled over the last year.
Well, as the American comedian Bill Hicks used to say, ‘Well, pull me up a chair!’
Some of this will be due to the Coalition’s cuts and destruction of the welfare state. Some of it is also no doubt due to budget cuts by Bristol council itself. The city is now governed by George Ferguson, its elected mayor. Nominally independent, he was previously a Lib Dem and seems to have ditched his formal party membership in order to get elected. As part of his image, he strides across Bristol and the world clad in red trousers, though for funerals these are claret, rather than the shade he usually adopts. Under him, this situation will get worse. Just before Christmas he announced his plans for another £90 million worth of cuts, though told the press that ‘people shouldn’t be afraid of it’. As more services are cut, so more people will find it difficult to cope, with some eventually ending up on the streets.
I’ve found a couple of videos on Youtube on homelessness in Bristol.
In this video below by Jake Dix, the producer and director talks to the manager of one of the homeless shelters, a spokesman for the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, and a group of squatters. The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft is a co-operative, that has a number of subsidiary firms. One of these produces pottery from the fragments of old crockery. It has a policy of employing recovering drug addicts. As for the squatters, these have been occupying a building that was derelict for forty years.
This video on Bristol City Homelessness Advice Centre in Phoenix Court by ‘PublicEnquiry’ in itself isn’t really very interesting. It’s just footage of people coming and going in the office, set to a modern jazz soundtrack. I am, however, reblogging it on here because of its producer’s comments about the very commercial attitude of the Council and their attempts to remove it.
Here’s the video:
‘Despite their statutory duty to house the homeless Bristol’s local authority do virtually nothing nowadays to house the majority of homeless people. The council is being run as if it was a business and they can’t make any money out of the poor and mentally ill. They have even tried to get this video removed despite the fact that it is a public place and does not infringe anyone’s privacy.’
A few years ago I went to a talk at Bristol University on the archaeology of homelessness in the city, presented by Rachael Kiddey, John Schofield and some of the homeless people, who had helped them and whose lives they had investigated. Kiddey was a former archaeology student at Bristol University, who was now living in Stokes Croft, the part of Bristol which was at the centre of the project. John Schofield is a very senior archaeologist and a member of the Council for British Archaeology. Among his other works is the book with John Vince, The Archaeology of British Towns in their European Settings, published by Equinox.
The project was Kiddey’s idea. She had been angered by plans to demolish the grain store in Stokes Croft. This was a listed building, and one of the few remaining warehouses from the 19th century left in Bristol. Stokes Croft is one of Bristol’s inner city suburbs. It’s been described as ‘bohemian’. It has an ethnically mixed population, including many students and artists. Although it dates from the 19th century, it has suffered considerable economic decline. It was one of the areas in Bristol hit by the anti-Thatcher riots in 1981. As she has pointed out in other presentations on the project, as a historic part of Bristol Stokes Croft enjoys the same level of official protection as the far wealthier and more respectable Clifton. In practice, however, the situation is very different, and despite their legal status Stokes Croft and its buildings were given very little protection from neglect, decay and demolition by the city’s authorities. From what I can remember, the Grain Store was destroyed as part of a project to build luxury flats on the site. Kiddey was angered by this attack on the city’s working class heritage, and the destruction of this building had been so important to the city’s working people, in order to benefit the wealthy middle class. Her study of the city’s homeless grew out of her campaign against the destruction of this old, industrial building.
The project was deliberately set up to be socially inclusive. She quoted EU legislation, which states that every section of society should have the right to participate in the production of culture. This, she made very clear, also included the homeless, a marginal and excluded group. As she started to develop her ideas, she befriended a number of homeless people. They were initially suspicious, but after she had managed to assure them she was genuine, and not a police spy, they gave her considerable support. They took her with them on their journeys across the city, showing her where they lived, visited, and some of the places where they could get a meal, a bed for the night or simply a sympathetic ear.
One of the first things, she found out being taken around the city by them was that they were certainly not lazy. In their journeys about Bristol they walked about six miles a day. When one her homeless friends showed her the makeshift camp he had made underneath a wall or fence, she remarked on the strong similarity between it, and the remains left by ancient hunter-gatherer peoples around their rock shelters. These were camps set up underneath a rock overhang, which gave them some protection from the elements. The homeless people she spoke ate a particular Caribbean café in Stokes Croft. This was one of the few places that would serve them. They also respected it as the owners would not tolerate any trouble from their customers. If someone ‘kicked off’ in there, the staff would throw everyone out, leaving the troublemaker to face the ire of the other diners. They also had a lot of respect for a community of nuns in the area. Although the Sisters would not give them money, they would listen to them, something which the city’s destitute appreciated. They also gave her information about the area’s homeless shelters and their experiences with them. Conditions in one of them were actually so bad that one homeless man went back on the streets as this was a better alternative to the squalor he found in the shelter.
Kiddey managed to get support for the project from Schofield, who was very pleased to give it. He appreciated its novelty and the way it expanded and challenged ideas about archaeology and what it can do. Archaeology is not just about the distant past. It can also cover the very recent and contemporary. One of the other female students at Bristol University, for example, was researching a Ph.D. on mobile phone masts.
Kiddey’s study of homelessness in Bristol is part of a wider study of homelessness by archaeologists around the world. In America this is led by Dr Larry Zimmerman, an archaeologist and professor of Museum Studies at Indiana University – Perdue University Indiana. In an interview with one of the staff at Indianapolis public library, Zimmerman states that archaeology is not just about what happened a century ago, but also what occurred only ten minutes previously. He has stated that the study of homelessness benefits archaeology, as it prevents it from becoming socially irrelevant. Few people are directly touched or affected by academic’s study of the people’s of the distant past. Zimmerman developed his interest in the archaeology of the homeless when excavating the mansion of one of Indianapolis’ wealthiest citizens. He found evidence of homeless people squatting and occupying the site going back over a century to the 1840s. Since then, other archaeologists around the world have followed Zimmerman in studying homelessness, both in the present and in the ancient past. Zimmerman’s fellow researcher, Jessica Welch has personally experienced the problem. She was homeless drug addict for many years, until she managed to turn her life around, get of the street and into university.
The archaeologists studying the homeless used a number of professional techniques to record their lives. This included mapping their movements around the city, recording their rubbish and other material culture left at the places they visited and occupied. In the winter of 2009-10 the university excavated ‘Turbo Island’, a traffic island in Stokes Croft used by the homeless. This got its nickname from a brand of strong lager they drank there. Other sites visited and recorded included phone boxes and the ‘Bear Pit’. This is a circular public ‘square’, sunk below the level of the main roads surrounding it and reached by underpass in Bristol’s Horsefair. It lies at the entrance to Stoke’s Croft in Broadmead.
What came out most strongly from the talk is how immensely hard these people’s lives are. Many of the individuals studied and who spoke at the talk had severe mental health problems, or problems with alcohol and/or drugs. Much of the material remains recovered from the sites were drug equipment, including ‘pins’ – hypodermic syringes – and ‘spoons’. These were the bottoms of drink cans, which had been cut off and shaped so that they could be used for cooking heroin. At least one of them had fled onto the streets to escape a brutally abusive home. From what I can remember, their lives could be extremely short. Homeless people are often the victims of unprovoked attacks and violence. There’s a report on Youtube from America about ‘Bum-bashing’. This does not, unfortunately, refer to some kind of harmless horseplay involving striking the buttocks, but attacks on the homeless by young men, simply for some kind of sick fun. Kiddey also spoke about one of the other derelict buildings in Stokes Croft occupied by the homeless. She stated that its former lift shaft was full of discarded mattresses. Furthermore, if someone died there, then their body would also be thrown down it. Their death would not be reported to the police, as the cops response would be to come and clear the building. One of the homeless speakers described how she had managed to turn her life around and get into social housing. She described how she had lived in this building with her other homeless friends. She described with a kind of amazed horror one evening she had shared with another three, when they were nearly all out of their minds on drugs and alcohol. One of them had became paranoid and was suffering a panic attack, as he had heard a police siren and now thought they were coming for him. What this girl found particularly amazing now is that at the time she thought it was normal.
It was a truly excellent presentation that really did challenge my own perceptions of the city’s homeless, and opened my eyes to their problems. I have to say I went to the talk with some scepticism about such deliberately socially inclusive projects. It’s all too easy to take up the views of some of the more Conservative journalists and pundits that projects like this were a superficial product of the Blair administration’s insistence on ‘inclusivity’. It can be all too easy to accept the attitude of the Daily Fail and other Right-wing rags that the homeless are just feckless scroungers, a social nuisance, who should be moved on and who deserve little pity or sympathy. This project showed the complete opposite. Their lives are bitterly hard. They are not on the street through idleness, but often through simple misfortune, or from mental health problems that have left them unable to hold down a normal life. As I mentioned earlier, at least one of them was on the streets because of horrific abuse in the parental home. These people do not the deserve the scorn and hatred as some kind of the threat to decent society. Rather, they should be given sympathy as people, who are more often than not severely unfortunate. Rather than tabloid attacks, they should be given proper help from the governments and charities so they can pick themselves up and live some kind of safe, normal, reasonable life. Unfortunately, thanks to the Coalition’s austerity policies and their attitude that if you’re unemployed or poor, it’s your fault, the chances of this are becoming increasingly small.
In this clip from Youtube below, Rachael Kiddey talks about her project with the homeless in Bristol. Warning to Bristol Evening Post readers: she makes no secret of her contempt for the newspaper, describing it as the Evening Fascist. As it is partly owned by the Daily Mail, some people would argue that’s the correct description.
Since then, Rachael Kiddey has moved on to do a Ph.D. in the archaeology of homelessness at York University. Here are another few videos from Youtube about the archaeology of homelessness in that ancient city.
This is part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
This is a video, also from Youtube, of Jon Barnes’ interview with Larry Zimmerman at Indianapolis Public Library.
This an ABC news report on ‘Bum Bashing’ assaults on the homeless.
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This is the address for a webpage on the Archaeology of Homelessness
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