BIN-BAG BATTLES IN BREADLINE BRITAIN
Michael Dickinson


Having been barred from returning to my pad in Istanbul for 3 months because of visa restrictions, and paying for a bed at the over-expensive Backpackers’ Hostel in Piccadilly, London, I calculated that if I kept it up I’d be stony broke by mid November. Then what should I suddenly hear about but a place called the Hobo Hilton – a free squatted hotel catering for the homeless at 203 High Holborn in the heart of London. I went to investigate.

It wasn’t far. A grey marble building eight stories high, last inhabited by BT (British Telecom) in 2003, recently occupied by around 50 activists who planned a ‘free space open platform for education, creativity, revolutionary work groups and activities.’ I had ideas for some of those. The downstairs window door was covered by mirror tape inside so you couldn’t see in. I rang the bell and waited. The door suddenly swung open and a shaven-headed girl with green paint around her eyes thrust her visage from the dark gloom inside.

“Don’t know the face?” she challenged aggressively.

“From what?” I said as I staggered in towards the dimly-lit reception desk where a group of dishevelled youths lolled in different attitudes watching a computer screen. I told them about my plans for a possible theatrical production and a showing of my collages in the building. A big guy called Dan said it sounded what they were looking for, and it just so happened that a flash art exhibition was being planned for the following weekend. I was welcome to stay too if I wanted. I could find myself a place on the second floor. I went up and had a look. Each floor was vast empty spaces of carpeted floor. There were some rooms with lockable doors, but all had been occupied. I found myself a large open alcove next to the kitchen. After I’d moved in my stuff I hung the huge black and red anarchist flag I found in Istanbul up over the entrance and had my own private lair where I stayed until our dramatic eviction by police and baillifs a couple of weeks later.

Life at the Hobo Hotel had its pros and cons. The pros were free electricity, running water, flushing toilets and a shared kitchen with a cooking ring, and privacy or camraderie as you wished. The cons were the lack of organization (workshops billed on a noticeboard often didn’t take place, and meetings were turmoils of chatter and arguments), thefts, erratic behaviour by some guests or visitors (fights with fire extinguishers, a public maturbator escorted out, an inner wall smashed to resemble a bomb-hit Palestinian home,)some partied all night downstairs and their sleeping bodies littered the foyer and lounge in the morning, along with piles of rubbish – empty beer cans and bottles, discarded food and plastic and cardboard packaging and cigarette ends – trash was the main problem, and few people picked up after themselves. I made one of my main tasks of the morning a collection of the strewn rubbish on the first two floors and usually had more than two large full plastic bags to take outside for the bin men. I also bought some scouring cream and gave the disaster zone kitchen a daily once over to keep it bearable. Food – bread, sandwiches, sushi, baked potatoes, cakes, cheese, yoghurts - was usually displayed there in plenty in the evenings, collected by inmates who had been out on garbage raids. Much of it was provided by my own lucky hand.

I’ve become quite an expert garbage picker of late. I cover the same trail I learned on my visit to London last summer, when I was living in a tent in the ‘Peace Camp’ in Parliament Square. Starting at a Cooperative supermarket in Soho, I wend my way through certain streets, stopping at the dumping places that have rewarded in the past, ending up at a baked-potato shop in Covent Garden known for its thrownaway leftovers. I usually return quite laden.

Unfortunately I seem to have recently lost my chance at the supermarket, my usual first and most abundant port of call. I know the time in the late evening when the orange plastic bags are waiting outside to be collected by the rubbish trucks. Usually at least two of them are filled with all sorts of foods which have just passed their sell-by-date, or are about to. I usually pick up a bag and take it around the corner of the shop where I can open it unseen and make my selection. I’m always careful to unseal the bag carefully and tie it up again unless the knot and time are too tight, when I might rip it open.

Last week I was about my task with the first bag under the streetlight in a heavy drizzle. Suddenly, who should appear around the corner but the supermarket manager, a gentleman of Indian or Pakistani origin.

“Leave that alone! You are not allowed to touch that! It belongs to this store!” he shouted and snatched the bag away from me.

“What do you mean? You’ve thrown it away. There are things that I can use. I’m helping to feed homeless people,” I replied.

“No, no! You cannot have it!” He took the bag and went round with it into the front of the supermarket. Indignantly I followed him.

“Well, there’s another bag in the street,” I said. “I’m going to take that.” I went out and picked it up. He was out after me in an instant and grabbed the other side of the bag so that we were both having a tug of war.

“No, no, no! It belongs to us!” he yelled.

“What are you doing?” I exclaimed in amazement. “This is rubbish!”

The top of the bag broke and he staggered inside with it, ordering his bemused staff to call the police. 999!

“If you wish to continue this fascist pantomime I will be back tomorrow night,” I warned as I left.

A couple of days later I was back, but I didn’t see the manager. I retrieved a few edible items from the first bag, but left a bit of litter on the pavement as I went to get the next bag, intending to clear it up after I’d finished. When I got back a couple of seconds later I found my stuff and the first bag gone, dumped in his trolley by a black street sweeper.

“Look at the mess you made!” he said angrily.

“I was just going to clear it up,” I explained . “Where is my carrier bag? I had retrieved some food.”

“It’s rubbish! Not for people to take! Be on your way!”

I went. Some people can’t be argued with, and I suspected he was in cahoots with the manager.

When I revisited the supermarket a couple of days ago I saw the orange rubbish bags piled up just inside the entrance doors. In order to stop me or any other freegan scavenger from helping themselves to their castaway food, from now on the staff wait for the arrival of the garbage truck to throw it straight on unmolested. This guarding of the garbage is common at many a British supermarket. When you consider that each year, while food prices rise and households struggle to put food on the table, an estimated 3m tonnes of food, much of it fit for human consumption, is dumped in landfills to rot - it’s nothing short of a scandal.


Talking of food, last Friday morning as I was tidying up my own room the fire alarm started ringing in the Hobo Hostel. I ignored it, thinking it had been set off by someone for a lark again.

“The bacon’s here!” I thought I heard someone call out from the landing. I went to the kitchen to investigate, thinking someone had found a lucky haul of pork, but when I saw people scurrying around with belongings, I learned that the word I thought was ‘bacon’ had actually been ‘baillifs’, who had arrived along with a fleet of 7 police vans in order to evict the building of our presence. The ‘bacon’ had indeed arrived – but of the uncooked variety.

The fifty of us who had been living in the building were given a few minutes to pack our stuff and then escorted out to stand in front of the building in the pouring rain, homeless again. There were scuffles and chanted protests, one Brazilian was arrested for possession of a weapon (a key), and then the groups split up, heading for other squatted premises that they had contact with, hoping to be given a place to sleep. I went along with one and found space in another squatted office not too far away, and have been there for a week now so far. No toilet, no hot water, but at least a roof over my head and shelter from the cold. Lucky me compared to the thousands of people sleeping rough on the streets of London, the number due to increase drastically now that the squatting of residential property has become a crime which carries a penalty of a 5000 pound fine and a six month prison sentence.

What a dystopian nightmare is life in Breadline Britain! Cuts, closures, austerity, and multiplied misery for the poor, while the upper-class elite toffs who rule the country live in luxury and put on the squeeze on the ‘plebs’ as tightly as they can. How long will it be before the people, instead of Oliver Twist-like meekly pleading for seconds, rise up instead in anger and defiance and cry in unison -

“No more of this! We have had ENOUGH!”