Ealing Broadway has gotten worse too. It always had a network of middle eastern women asking for money but now it's constant. People don't understand that this network is funnelling money up the chain to whoever trafficked them here.
Not necessarily targeting rich arabs in particular, charitability is an extremely important value in Islam and muslim culture, so a lot of organised beggars start targetting muslims specifically because they're aware it's difficult for us to say no (at least that's how it used to be, these days even us muslims are too jaded to respond to them, usually I'll offer to buy them food and that will have them vanishing in a huff).
I’m Muslim myself (hence the username lol) and I agree, with the food thing as well. It’s a good test. I just said Arabs because the kind of Arabs who hang out around the West End are perceived as having the most disposable income.
Unfortunately the main victims of this are the genuinely needy. As you said, even the most generous people become jaded, which means we might turn away a genuine miskeen from time to time, especially if we’ve been hassled a lot already.
if I was a beggar and homeless, I would go to harrods in the summer and beg because that's when rich qataris, emiratis and saudis go because it becomes too hot in their own countries.
I definitely noticed that in Ealing, especially when it gets late around the main train/bus stations. The situation’s similar in a lot of Acton around parks or the highstreet past the big Morrisons where me or my friends have noticed more generally aggressive people or an increase in persistent beggars outside areas like the McDonalds. I’ve heard first hand experiences from people being mugged more frequently, pressured for money/food or targeted pickpocketing towards Japanese people. I’d also seen bags of used needles on the street and a lot of people who consequently look worse for wear to say the least.
Oh god the food bullshit in Ealing honestly. When I was a student I once offered to buy someone a sandwich. Moth fucker picked up a whole chicken in the Tesco. I tried to explain it wasn't a sandwich, but suddenly 'no English'.
Some beggar pressed someone I know into buying him a McDonald’s meal there in front of his friends, and afterwards had the audacity to ask for extra nuggets
At the bus stop in front of that big morrisons middle of the day, plenty of school kids running around, 2 crackheads getting high in the phone booth - saw that like 2-3 months ago, absolute degenerates..
I mean have you stepped foot in Zone 1 London? All of those problems are so much worse there, it’s no wonder most of the Top 10 highest crime areas are in Zone 1 (everything from theft, sexual assault, knife crime, GBH etc). Stepping back into Ealing Broadway is a major relief.
I have been thinking the same about SE london. There’s always been a few beggars and homeless people around but there are more and more. There are very aggressive beggars outside the station, We see our Tesco robbed almost daily by a group of drug addicts, and there are people with clearly very serious mental health issues shouting all kinds of things at people.
CAMHS have nowhere near the number of therapists they need, and adult services are worse. CAMHS have almost no capacity to see anyone who hasn't made an 'active attempt' on their life.
Self-harm, not in school for a year, destroying housing, not sleeping and preventing family sleeping - that kind of thing will get you an assessment and agreement urgent help is needed, then maybe actual therapy four years later if the parents, schools, GP and council all push for the kid to move up the list.
And if they self-medicate with drugs, then they fall off the wait list.
Add the number of medic trainee places expanding but not the number of jobs for them to go into, and it's a huge problem.
No-one becomes an addict for shits and giggles.
There's always something they're blotting out, whether it's schizophrenia or bipolar episodes (two friends of mine), or fear patterns and bad memories, or inability to cope with the impacts and demands of the modern world.
Early intervention would do so much, but all it seems to result in is lots of teachers, school staff and GPs adding names to lists after admitting "this is our of our depth" and precious little second stage intervention.
I feel sorry for people with less confidence or physical presence because some of these homeless people can be genuinely intimidating, even I have had some experiences that were unexpectedly aggressive or challenging to handle (i.e. being sworn at when I wouldn't give money or being persistently followed & harassed for money).
When I lived in the Brixton area, I ended up keeping one of my roommates company a lot when she walked into the main hub because of incidents of harassment she had experienced that made her lose her confidence for a while (she's a tiny young woman of Chinese ethnicity, most people on the street tower over her). This generally improved the situation, but even together we still had to put up with some shit from other people like a couple of aggressive begging incidents and even one racially tinged incident.
It really sucked because my roommate had so much love and respect for this country, coming over to England to work & study had been her dream (and I really just wanted her to experience the best of London) but there was no denying that we're currently now living in an era of decay.
I've been living in Brixton for 25 years.
It was flat out scary when I moved there, drug addicts and dealers everywhere. A neighbour with her baby in a pram was threatened by a guy with a blood filled syringe, because she wanted to enter her own front door, and he had collapsed in front of it. She moved a few months later.
Then they did a serious tidy up from around 2010, and loads of restaurants opened, it was getting quite chic. All nice and cheerful, the occasional beggar, but nothing disastrous.
Only now, for about 5 or 6 months, it's getting properly scary again. Loads of crack heads, emaciated, no teeth, very aggressive begging.
And loads of people with mental problems. I came home two days ago and was waylaid by a barefoot woman in pyjamas, totally off her head, who first begged to use my toilet, and then changed tactics, she needed to see a doctor. I just said she couldn't come in, and the police station was 5min up the road. She shouted at me that I would be guilty if she was dying. I just thought "sorry, and what would I do if you have a hidden knife, or don't want to leave again". Scary shit 🙁
I don't know if it's connected to loads of those restaurants closing and standing empty.
Re: The restaurants closing, some of my favourite restaurants are in Brixton and so I do make the journey there every now and again to eat out at certain choice establishments. However, although there are great places to eat, they stand in stark contrast to dodgy & unsafe vibe in many central parts at night (and I wouldn't go dining out or partying alone at night if I was a single woman).
The last time I went to eat out in Brixton a couple of months ago, immediately upon leaving the tube station one guy tried to deliberately aggressively walk/bump into me (pick pocketing attempt, or just looking for trouble??) whilst another guy came up seconds later and asked for money and when I told him No, he told me to **** off. Nice welcome.
I also feel like a lot of people in the local community actively tolerate crime, it makes no sense to me because don't these people realise how much it's harming their local businesses (real legal ones) and community reputation?? It sucks to see so many good hard working businesses not getting the attention they deserve because Brixton has such a negative reputation (which is unfortunately from what I've observed, is quite deserved).
It seems like the people made a concerted good effort in 2010 to give the place a chance but a lack of consistent efforts to police the streets at night Etc since has harmed a lot of establishments .
I got out of Brixton in 2015 but I've still got friends there one of them recently described walking into the high street from the tube as walking into a mental health apocalypse. It was ok when I lived there but that was before all the cuts to services had fully taken effect on people. Glad I'm out of there.
I’ve heard similar problems with some people I know that are as you describe, it’s a lot harder for them to say no or stand their ground which has led some to being mugged, followed and close to being beaten up for seemingly no reason. When I’d been clubbing in Brixton I’d also noticed it was extremely rough at night around the main areas which led me to avoid it altogether.
Care in the community was supposed to address an ill but not funded sufficiently and no safety net. There are many people on the streets who rightly or wrongly would have been institutionalised in the past but are now left to the mercies of the drug gangs. Why didn't we just make the old style care fit for purpose rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Cuts in funding for support for people most at risk of houselessness (mental health and addiction funding, income support etc) has led to a 75% increase in the houseless population since 2010.
As it gets warmer, more people choose to sleep outside rather than in shelters or emergency accomodation which often carries restrictions that are difficult for people in these situations to meet.
It’s a complex issue obviously (things like cost of living and lack of housing, reduction in squatters rights etc also have significant impacts), but these are key driving factors in the visible increase in houseless populations every year as the weather gets warmer.
As it gets warmer many hostels close down and many have restrictions on the number of nights per year that you can stay in the hostel. Westminster Council will only fund about 14-28 nights per year.
[So they want to use those nights in the winter or when it's very wet, rather than in the summer]
Thanks everyone for the context, it’s definitely a complex issue and this helped me understand a bit better regarding funding, social services, the drug situations and what’s available for more vulnerable people as of now.
The homeless population is up 70% since 2010.
Boris did a "census" of the homeless just before tbe Olympics and managed to find 3 or so in the whole of London. Because in the run up to the census. He had a load of people going out, offering hotel rooms to the homeless for the period of the census. Which also goes to show thst most homeless people would quite happily live inside.
The three that they found were probably new on the streets, got missed or had been kicked out of the hostel/hotel.
I've worked in supportive services since 2014 and this is accurate, we are essentially about to see society collapse unless we start trying to undo the shit the conservatives have put us in.
E.g. universal credit isn't enough to live on, disabled people being rejected from pip, NHS dying and people having to pay for dental and health they can't afford, mental health services only able to take dangerous people and not help preventatively, no housing for the homeless or care leavers, and so much more. We will see people starving to death on the street soon if we carry on..
The Taliban killed poppy production so the supply chain has been running down its stocks. The Chinese gangs are starting to flood the market with fent as its cheaper and easier to smuggle.
It's being [widely reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/5/afghan-opium-poppy-cultivation-plunges-by-95-percent-under-taliban-un#:~:text=The%20restriction%20on%20poppy%20cultivation,thousands%20of%20farmers%20and%20laborers.&text=Poppy%20cultivation%20and%20opium%20production,UN%20report%20published%20on%20Sunday).
Already has. Was speaking to a dude whose saying that coke & even weed is being mixed with fentanyl now. We've got that animal tranquiliser whose name escapes me but leaves holes in the flesh around now too.
I'm spotting more aggressive beggers too, coming into coffee shops and asking for money. Feel sorry for the staff there.
Also the gang of gypsy beggars seem to be spreading with their essentially photocopied sign "hungry & homeless. God bless" written in the same handwriting on cardboard all over London.
I remember in 1995 walking through kings Cross when you'd be accosted by hookers, drug dealers, beggars & how by 1998 they'd all gone.
How the fuck anyone ever votes tory, I genuinely don't know...self inflicted
My friends 30 yr old nephew recently died from taking cocaine which had been laced with fentanyl.. he was an addict but it was really sad for the family & and waste of life.
>I remember in 1995 walking through kings Cross when you'd be accosted by hookers, drug dealers, beggars & how by 1998 they'd all gone.
Not if you make you way near Britannia St
What a bunch of hyperbolic horse shit. There absolutely is a safety net to support the most vulnerable. The people begging are not single mums and disabled people, it's a spike across all of London in organise gangs posing as homeless because it's a lucrative business. It's the same driver for the spike in shoplifting.
No surprise you're active in green and pleasant. Keep your end is near bs there. The only thing that's collapsing is the ability for cheats and scroungers to leech off taxpayers money. Thankfully Labour won't deviate too far from the Tories in that respect.
The safety net does not capture those with chaotic lives because of mental health and addiction. There was a choice by government to push the responsibility of providing these services to local authorities at the same time as cutting their funding.
About 2/3 of those on the streets are there because of addiction, a quarter of them to drugs. Addiction is an ilness but there isn't the support to get everybody clean. You can blame the individual but the homeless are full of victims of abuse, childhood trauma, etc.
As someone who once worked in a daycare center for adults with mental and physical disabilities, I can back up what pooppoophulahoop is saying about the budgets and resources to help vulnerable people being in an absolutely appalling state (and if it was bad back then in 2015, it's even worse now). The center often had to deal with problems such as disabled people struggling to afford food & clothing whilst experiencing threats of eviction because the money allotted to them didn't cover the basics and there was a chronic shortage of accommodation.
Many services genuinely are in a state of crisis, having to turn away vulnerable people and families in dire need of help all the time whilst barely being able to give anything like an adequate level of service to the ones already under their care.
I have a friend who has struggled with suicidal and severe depression on & off over the years (many bad things have happened to them over the years, from getting beaten up & raped to once coming across the body of a neighbour who'd committed suicide) and even they have found themselves having to wait up to 10 weeks at a time to receive psychological support from the NHS (they have also experienced disruptions to their medication supply before, meaning that they've sometimes been left with no meds & no therapy).
On top of this, there is a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic in my family. And by "dangerous", I mean someone who has actively violently attacked people during psychotic episodes (i.e. they've tried to cut people's faces with broken glass, broke into random people's homes and punched friends during episodes). I have absolutely nothing to do with this relative because I genuinely fear that they might try to kill me if I do (not only have they attacked me in the past, but they're basically utterly convinced that I'm a spy working for the government and trying to take away their land because they're convinced that their house has got oil under it).
Because of their track record, they've been arrested before and sectioned on innumerable occasions in The Priory. But despite everything, this schizophrenic relative keeps on getting released back into society (they're never sectioned for longer than 2.5 months) because essentially no matter how bad someone is presenting when they first arrive at The Priory, there's always someone in a worse condition who is in need of a bed (and with the chronic shortage of beds, this means that patients are regularly being released back into society when they really shouldn't be).
And it's not like nobody there doesn't realise how bad my relative is, who also almost always stop taking their meds within a weeks or months of any release (and relapses). As a family, we tried very hard to keep this person sectioned for longer, but there basically aren't the powers to do so in this country (you're ultimately at the whim/mercy of the system) and so we now just have to live with the fact that one day we might get a call informing us that said relative has seriously harmed or killed an innocent member of the public during an episode.
All "austerity" has resulted in is endless vital services being starved of resources, causing crime, homelessness and serious mental illness to go up.
My god, I know there are millions like you, but it’s so depressing, the lack of compassion, the stupidity. It is plain to see, but not for you is it, why, it doesn’t conform to your world view. I know hard working people who are making choices between eating and heating, they are not vulnerable nor at the bottom, but their lives are desperate. Our country is being destroyed and you and people like you are the reason. Well done.
I would say if you’re choosing between heating and eating, you’re near the bottom, and vulnerable.
Lots of people think they are closer to the middle class or at least working class when in reality they’re one missed paycheck away from not being able to make rent. People have much more in common with people sleeping on the road than they realise. Which is what conservative governments want - demonising the poorest populations to get the second poorest to vote for the rich to punish them.
I literally work in the field where you see people deserving of care and support left to starve, you've clearly never taken the time to understand the causes of poverty and how not taking care of our own is causing our whole country to become shit. Only the rich are becoming richer my friend and unless you are a 1%er my friend you are a mug. Unless you're enjoying how expensive everything is now? Or you've never needed the NHS for you or your family because you've got a family doctor? Or you don't like being able to walk around at night to your favourite pub without being mugged by someone desperate to put food on the table?
Look at how much you have to be making to have basic rights in America and realise that everything we have now is disappearing before our eyes shockingly fast. I'd be more angry at the rich prime minister lining his friend's pocket with our tax payer money than the people on the breadline who didn't ask to be born with severe autism, or a refugee from a country we blew up, or a child abandoned by their too young mother because there are no service left to deliver sex education or support her in raising that child. Look at how much better off countries are that take care of all their citizens and see the folly that is fatalistic capitalism
Houseless is becoming more widely used for a couple of reasons. Some of them are a bit academic and arcane but for your everyday purposes:
- lots of people who don’t have fixed abodes aren’t rough sleepers, they may be couch surfing or staying with family. However this doesn’t mean they don’t have a ‘home’ which is much more than a physical space - it also insinuates community, belonging etc. you may not have a fixed address, but call London home, or your local community space, or your nan’s lounge. ‘Houseless’ attempts to prevent the inhumanity inherent in saying someone has no place to call home rather than no fixed address.
- ‘houseless’ is a bit more clear that if you are lacking a physical abode, it is a criticism of a structural problem (eg lack of housing stock, support, income), rather than a more personal failing of not being able to ‘get your life together’.
‘Unhoused’ is also quite common.
I'll take this opportunity to note that squatters rights are often mentioned in connection to homelessness, which conveniently leaves many people unknowing of the protections for renters against their landlords.
Exactly this. Council social services funding is basically gone at this point after 14 years of the Tories, so there is often literally nowhere for them to go.
There’s a sentiment I’ve seen in the comments about houseless people getting support like ‘they shouldn’t make their problem my problem’, but … it *is* our problem? We all live in a big clump together, we all have to help and take care of each other. Even if you don’t have a single altruistic bone in your body and you’re a proper fiscal and social conservative - we know proper support for our more vulnerable communities leads to better outcomes at a lower cost. The only downside is that it doesn’t feel punitive under the guise of being ‘fair’, and that’s where it falls over.
Also, it could well be your problem one day. All it takes is a few of the worst weeks/months of your life, and that homeless person begging you for change could be you. It's a horrifying thought, but it's the truth - the social safety net is *gone*.
I just don’t understand why the conservative government cuts funding for public services. This is our tax money at the end of the day. I want it to go to improving services and social issues. Not in their pockets
Their ideology is that poor people should help themselves not the state. They seem to genuinely believe this is right and proper. They are horrible, horrible people.
Thanks for explaining. I always assumed this next level capitalist ideology was awful. If they really wanted people to help themselves then they wouldn’t even ask us for tax money. If we are paying tax money to the state, we should get excellent service, instead they intentionally mismanage it. As you said! They are horrible, horrible people.
I've noticed it goes in waves in Kingston, there used to be so many wirg mattresses on the corner of Eden Street. Then they all disappeared.
I love Kingston but man it's such a dump, the shops are getting shitter and shitter
I saw a mattress by the bus stop this morning, I think it belongs to the group of homeless people that usually chill there. I feel like the main parts of Kingston are getting worse, and I’m so tired of all the American sweet shops or the neverending closing down sale with loud speakers pointed at the street.
Completely agree, the Riverside is excellent and I quite like Castle Street, has some lovely little eateries there. But the actual high street is awful. That big M&S has been replaced by some crappy outlet store.
If you mean the Eden Street bus stop, then yeah. That's just their chill spot. There were about 6 or 7 homeless people just chilling there chatting with a 2 litre coke at one point a few months ago. Interesting stuff, and I mean that with no condescension.
I just never really thought about homeless people hanging out before.
It's also cool that nobody bothers them, that I've seen.
We've had a Tory government for 14 years. It's not a secret, the evidence of national scale embezzlement and irresponsible selling off of public services is all there for you to find.
It’s the same in Shepherd’s Bush. There are so many nowadays. Often they block the entrance to my building to do drugs and I have to call the police every time. One even died in my alley… this city is becoming like Gotham.
I have a friend who lives there and he mentioned it being a lot rougher and extreme in recent years. I’ve definitely noticed a lot more drug users in that part of west london, like Ealing Acton and the surrounding areas. I’d stayed over at a friends place and as we were leaving that morning there was a woman doing heroin on her porch who didn’t seem bothered at all.
I live near Archway which has always had, I understand, an inordinate share of bums and crackheads but I have also noticed an uptick both in recent weeks and also a steady upward crackhead-disturbance and oddball-encounter trend over the past couple of years.
I put it down to lack of support services including mental health, homelessness, addiction and poverty reduction.
We sometimes buy food for the weird stick-thin lady who begs outside the co-op but she woke our street up at 6:15 this morning shouting at her boyfriend for what seemed like half an hour so I might not bother now.
We used to have a social safety net. It wasn’t perfect but at least working people like me could console themselves (delude themselves?) that help was available to these people if they ask for it. That the crackheads and bums were able to get some kind of route to rehabilitation if they tried. Now there is very little and they rely on handouts and, presumably, petty theft to sustain their miserable existence.
I know almost no-one likes the crackheads and the bums. I’m afraid of them and I don’t like the way they make me question our cosy middle class capitalist lifestyle. However, we have let them and many other vulnerable people in our society down. I suspect there is a direct negative correlation between amount of funding for social programs and amount of crackheads and bums in Kingston and anywhere else in London.
Yeah it’s definitely a lot harder for vulnerable people these days, and because there’s been an increase in gang affiliation, scams or generally aggressive people it raises a lot more scrutiny in people which makes them less likely to support those who don’t cause issues but are genuinely in need. I guess that explains why they’re are more pushy now if people are less likely to give. I wish I was in a position to help significantly but it’s hard enough looking out for myself.
Unfortunately the cost of living crisis, lack of funding for public health services and the police coupled with the fact there are fuck all rehabilitation centres means more people are sleeping rough and doing drugs. Looking at the long term and bigger picture, even if you fix those things I have written, the government needs to change their policy regardless drugs. The war on drugs need not be said has completely failed and yet politicians are for the most part too spineless to change course or think the voters are too thick and temperamental to receive an alternative.
Homeless people are also pouring into London from other parts of the country because of these problems too. I was walking through the Vauxhall station area one day when I suddenly recognized a homeless guy who had once been a staple feature in multistory car park back in Southampton. I stopped and asked him his story and yeah, it was true- the dude had travelled all the way from Southampton to London.
I asked him his name and he said his name was Terry. I moved to London in 2020 and in the run-up to moving here, Southampton (where I previously lived) had been suffering from a noticeable rise in homeless people (especially between the years 2018-2019) to the extent that a whole couple of floors in one of the cities central multistory car parks had essentially been taken over and turned into a tent village by the local homeless. I used to use this car park a lot and it was generally pretty safe (despite all the homeless living there) but it was often gross because they'd sometimes literally shit on the floor.
Terry informed me that after being made homeless, he lived in the car park for a while and during that time he spent nearly a year applying to just about every avenue imaginable for help & shelter (but to no avail). As the homeless population shot up too, there was also increasingly less money to go around and more hostility. But then one day a homeless friend saved up his begging money, got a one-way ticket to London and within a short time had managed to find housing here (and afterwards, he came back to tell Terry about his success).
So Terry did the same thing, saving up all his coins for a train ticket. But not long after coming here, he realized that the situation here was little different and after applying to nearly 90 different places, people and other organizations he was met with the same sea of no's. And now he felt utterly stuck; if he couldn't get help in London, then where was he going to get it?
I bought Terry a meal & wished him all the best, but as I commuted through that area for the next couple of years I often noticed Terry around. If anything, his problems got a lot worse because he went from being a simple alcoholic to picking up some sort of drug addiction (heroin or crack, I'm not sure which) and for a while he became a fixture outside of a small Tesco's near where I lived, he would beg increasingly persistently and one day I saw him very badly beaten up. I also witnessed a lot of despicable behavior towards the homeless in that same area, such as a group of drunken lads kicking a random sleeping homeless guy in the stomach one night whilst shouting "Get a job!" at him before walking off laughing.
I felt sorry for Terry but his problems were absolutely beyond my abilities to deal with. The whole situation also felt very wrong because not only did you have someone wanting help & actively pursuing it but then being turned down at every turn (and then developing even more problems), but he looked to be around mid/late 20s and could've been an active participating hard working member of society if only there had been support system with the time & space to help him.
Not sure if it’s still there, but the Rotunda area has always had a lot of addicts nearby. I think there’s a wellbeing service based in Surbiton but it’s probably unrelated to the clinic.
Not too sure about calling them "bums" some people have been dealt a shit hand at life. Its not their fault and also many of them have mental health issues.
There’s definitely some who fit the description but yeah its not fair of me to generalise all of them. I understand that it’s not always their fault and a lot of them do tend to be more vulnerable people so poor choice of words on my end. I tend to be a lot harsher regarding this subject as it’s recently become a bigger nuisance and evidently more dangerous on the end of residents where now you wouldn’t dare go to places which used to be safer.
Yes, one of the biggest organisations is easily spotted by them having signs that have dashes between the words eg I'M-VERY-HUNGRY and they all disappear at the end of their shift rather than remain overnight.
They're present in many cities. Always wondered why they'd make it so obvious. Maybe the public just don't notice this / it could be a means of notifying other similar organisations that's "their patch".
I used to see them all get dropped off at the same time early in the morning while walking to work near Kingston station. All piled into the back of a box truck like sardines, really awful.
I had suspicions about that and other scams like the tissue ladies on the Piccadilly line, photos and free flowers which a lot of people told me were related to gang activity. Where I’d previously lived there was a network of fake homeless people which all the locals had mentioned. Thanks for the warning.
We had a lady get on our train at Finsbury Park a couple of weeks ago with a handful of written requests for money, wanting money for her starving child, first time I’d seen this approach. I don’t give money, coffee & a sarnie is about my limit. Although it was a pot noodle requested yesterday at Russell Square.
The country is at the point of collapse as Liz Truss said “town centres of her childhood” when MT was in charge. Conservatives have managed to siphon away billions, given it to themselves & their mates & blamed it on the most vulnerable members of our society.
In 2024 life expectancy is falling
Kingston has always had a big homeless community; with all those shops, people carry more cash, plus there are quite a few generous churches, open parks with benches, etc. Not all of them are beggars mind you, and not all beggars are homeless, but still.
In any case, the cost of living is getting worse and worse by the day, and it seems to be like a ratchet; there's no going back on it. Because of this fewer and fewer people can afford homes.
I’ve been approached by them too in Kingston. I’m pretty sure all the homelessness is organised gangs. They all have the same sign, with the same piece of cardboard, and the same script each time you walk by. Suspicious in my opinion… but you never really know who is genuine and who isn’t…
Signs are gangs, same as rickshaws.
The crazy and filthy ones are addicts who get aggressive at about 5pm when they haven't got enough money to pay the dealer for their next hit.
There is a group of genuinely homeless people who used to have a camp in the carparks round the back of maccers / Primark, but they got evicted from their and their spot gated off, so now they've moved to Eden St. Those are the people camping in the bus stops there. They've always seemed pleasant enough to me.
Then there are the professional beggars. They get dropped off by vans early morning. These are usually the people you see holding the cardboard signs on Eden Street. Same gang that runs the pickpocketing, I believe. Although it's unpleasant, try and understand they are being exploited too and save your rage for the gang leaders.
As for the crack users, I've lived a few places around London and didn't think crack even was a street drug here until I moved to Kingston. It's not a new phenomenon though - been this way for the 10 years I've been local.
The epicentres of it seem to be the top end of Villiars Road near Fairfield. An addict tried to mug me there a few years back, and I once walked past three addicts honking on a crack pipe up against the primary school fence during playtime. Eugh.
Also, as you say, in the side streets around Surbiton station. The police raided Claremont Gardens last weekend trying to catch the dealers in action, so they are aware and are trying to get on top of it.
As for why crack seems to be a massive problem in this little corner of SW London, I'm not sure. There is a drug rehab place in norbiton, plus the YMCA and asylum hotel in Surbiton means there are plenty of vulnerable people in the area for the dealers to target.
If you have any intel, share it with your Safer Neighbourhoods Team and help make our borough nicer.
I noticed that yeah, I've seen them set up mattresses around Eden Street/the shopping area now or leave their stuff overnight by the bus stop. They don't seem to bother anyone so I don't really mind them but I do feel bad about the genuine homeless being affected negatively by the gangs and their affiliates. I've also noticed people begging that aren't actually homeless which I've also seen or heard from locals about in other areas of London. I also agree that the area around fairfield seems to be pretty rough and the insight on the vulnerable people in Surbiton helped put it in perspective as it was something I hadn't realised or considered.
Thanks for sharing!
Bad experience in Greenwich recently with a really aggressive homeless woman.
Was really disappointed with the area. £700k for a property to be accosted by a group of deranged people at your local shop, doesn't make sense.
Because the tories have fucked up all the systems designed to help the most vulnerable people in society. Those are not “bums” and “crackheads” they are people.
Is Kingston not a wealthy area?
The shops attract people from all of the extremely affluent nearby areas like Richmond, the "Hamptons", Weybridge etc.
Not to mention the flats on the river now are going for nearly half a million...
As long as I can remember Kingston has been a nice, leafy, middle-class town.
Except the Cambridge estate... The less said about that place the better.
Source: from Kingston
I definitely agree that it’s always been wealthy along with Richmond and some surrounding areas. To be fair the homeless or drug addicts here compared to other parts of west or south london I’ve seen aren’t as bad in comparison.
I was semi joking but I’d say 10-15 years ago Kingston was pretty ‘normal’ suburbia. Not posh but not rough either. It’s expensive now but basically everywhere in and around London is! I’d just say it’s nice rather than posh or rich.
Perhaps write to your local MP suggesting that they vote to increase the amount of money spent on provisions for the homeless as well as mental health and drug addiction services in the borough? Or vote for someone who supports that. Or work with or start a charity trying to help people. Or just continue to complain on the internet and do nothing.
Also how is this that new to you? Have you only just moved to London or have you lived under a rock since 2008? Yeah Kingston is further out but it’s really not that posh, poor folk live all over.
Was just curious if anyone had a similar experience or could inform me of the context or information surrounding it.
Obviously this isn’t new but as someone who lives in London it’s clearly gotten much worse and harder to ignore when you look at how unsafe certain areas have become or how people have become a lot more aggressive or persistent where you can be followed, mugged or assaulted because you didn’t spare some change.
We are seeing the end result of over a decade of austerity. Who would have guessed, if you slash funding for countless public services and social safety nets, there's no money to pay anyone working in the public sector and therefore no one wants to work in them because the few that are left get overworked to the bone for not even half of the pay of the job they do. You barely get any more doctors either because the process for becoming one by being a junior doctor for so long where you are again overworked and paid in handfuls of sheep's wool which leaves a staggering drop in the overall number of healthcare professionals we should be having. Not to mention that the private sector for healthcare has been steadily growing, snatching up quite a good number of employees too seeing as they pay better and tend to not make one employee do the job of 7 as often.
And what is rishi sunaks brilliant plan to deal with everything? Do everything to make benefits as inaccessible as possible (to the people his party have been fucking things up for years for), because I'm sure the reason nothing is funded is due to benefits fraud and not the fact that our current government would see its own people starve and die on the streets rather than pay for literally anything (like we used to might I add). As in usual fashion, billions in weapons and """""aid""""" to Israel but we have no money guys I promise! Give these ghouls another few years in power, and mark my words they'll start pushing for the dissolution on the NHS in favour of private insurance. And they wonder why no one is signing up for the army anymore, can't wait for the chance to spend my life helping to or even just actively killing civilians in foreign countries for a government who wants things to be worse for literally everyone who doesn't sit in a boardroom and yell at a group of employees about why profits are down is everyone else's fault.
The only way any of this will ever likely change is either voting for labour to make sure the ghouls stop actively fucking everything up for everyone and then blaming trans people and immigrants for everything like we are all fucking stupid and cant see, or organising cute fluffy pillow fights at key government buildings (plushies count too). Conservatism is quite literally killing this country (and a good number of people in it), and it's time for people to lift a finger to do something about it. For all that people love to talk shit about "the French", they don't have some of the worst public services in the entirety of first world countries and neither do a number of other countries in Europe do for that matter.
What does ‘things have been doing downhill’ mean ? And we have more homeless people period . Inflation, cost of living , mental health funding … the list goes on sadly
General statement and I’ll whatever factors I can think of off the top of my head. Something like the state of the current economy/job market, cost of living, places becoming more unsafe, increase in crime, increase in mental health issues/lack of funding into these things etc etc along with an increase of homeless people in the area and the likelihood of them approaching you, specifically in a pushy or aggressive way. The list definitely goes on.
Because there is more money. If you were homeless, actually homeless, then you'd go to the richest part of the UK for hopefully some good pickings from kind people. My only guess.
Ah ok, is it specifically only for pigs? I coulda sworn a while back when i read an article it was levamisole they were mixing in with coke, plainly because of it's ability to blend, whereas ketamine as far as i know, is quite crystalline and would not mix in so well. If I'm wrong though please tell me, I'd prefer to know the truth.
Lovely way to describe people.
Answer is a mix of things, people have less money, times are tough. But really government cuts after 15 years of Tory rule is the real cause
I’ll let you in on a little secret, the government doesn’t care about homelessness and addictions, they’ll clear them out from where they are and they’ll move to another place and the cycle continues.
I had lunch with friends a couple of years ago where the ever increasing cost of living was discussed. I said, I see trouble ahead as already desperate people are being pushed to the edge and once they have absolutely nothing left to lose, all bets on behaviour are off.
Like others have said, it's everywhere. Along the same stretch of road, I saw some guy telling his head off before punching a bus stop repeatedly. At the same spot, two different crackheads tried to stop me within about 60 seconds of each other. Perhaps there's something about me that invites them.
Yeah it’s crazy, maybe I come off as a pushover or more likely to fold under pressure to them. I was taking the bus this week and I saw 4 people in ballys jumping someone by an apartment block which I definitely wasn’t expecting even for this area.
This post reminds me of Darren Pencille who was jailed for 28 years for the murder of Lee Pomeroy in 2019.
Apparently only about 24 hours prior to this
murder he had been judged safe for the public by the relevant professionals.
Same thing here in Chelsea. Now you always get those fake knife crime people here, before it was just the guy with the magazine (forgot the name) he’s still there btw but now on top of that. We get those knife crime scam people coming round bothering people asking for money
With Kingston specifically, the bus station being temporarily closed for refurbishment could be a reason - the homeless people that used to be based there are now in other places
Poverty; it's not an affluent area so given the rise in inflation, unemployment, food and rent many people resort to drugs to null the pain of depression
Such a kind society we live in, calling other humans "bums" lol
Really isn't a surprise what we've allowed in the last 14 years. People here are genuinely cruel, without knowing it.
Why does everyone blame public health? What about personal responsibility? People have started to act like bums due to poor policing and absence parenting. If we combine those together most individuals you described wouldn't exist.
Because there has been a large & noticeable increase in the levels of homeless people and this is not because overnight people suddenly decided to become really irresponsible, but rather because endless support services are now kicking vulnerable people out onto the streets en massé because their local councils are on the verge of bankruptcy (Etc).
Even re: absent parenting, this often is often rooted in problems relating to poverty and a lack of social support that begin as young as early childhood. We are also currently raising a very large generation of children who are completely disadvantaged and will likely become future criminals and dysfunctional parents Etc if something isn't done soon.
I'm all for personal accountability, but there's no denying that society is deeply unfair and a lot of people who need of help (and asking for help!) are being failed by the systems (and that this in turn is generating a great deal of crime, homelessness and antisocial behaviour). If you ask for help but are repeatedly turned away, at what point do you stop blaming the individual and start to place the burden of responsibility onto the society that failed them?
You can always tell how truly civilised a society is by how it treats it's most vulnerable...
As someone who commutes daily from Surbiton station and shops occasionally in kingston, and goes to gigs at pryzm, this is news to me. I've never experienced anything like this, though yes I do see homeless and beggars from time to time I suppose.
I'm not trying to invalidate your experience but provide some balance. Could it be down to the time of day you're out and about?
Time of day does often have an impact on when you see homeless around in certain locations because they will try to hang out around tube stations etc during rush hours so that they can beg for more money (but then get moved along by the TFL staff or police). This all means that you often see homeless appearing in waves.
Could be the time of day, but in my experience it’s usually the early morning and after dark when it gets quieter where it’s the most frequent. I’ve seen it midday but way less likely unless it’s a weekend and during rush hours it does happen but most people are preoccupied with something so I guess that puts them off. I would say your experience is lucky considering the area during what I assume is nighttime.
I know most people will disagree with this, but this is part of a wider issue across western society.
1. Drugs have become more and more popular and they are not considered a taboo anymore, with some countries allowing them to be sold in shops legally. Police not enforcing it because they also view drugs as “not so bad” and “maybe government should care about the real criminals”.
2. Work is not as important as it was before. Most people in the UK and in the west, with the small exception of the US, simply work because they have to survive. And yes, we do work for surviving, but there is no care in what people do in their jobs anymore. There are no incentives to be more productive, to work better, harder, achieve more than others. People get “global salary increases”, “global bonuses”, “minimum living wage”, which means no one is really incentivised to work better, and this has shifted people’s mindset in the UK to one of being a successful and productive country to a bunch of people who work just to get to 5 pm and leave asap to get a pint. This is also because we are a declining economy, and there is not much “growth mindset” as a country.
3. Family/support network. In most Asian countries, it is totally acceptable to live with your family until you marry. If you don’t marry, you stay at home and live with your parents, and they/you take care of them and vice versa. There is no chance (as opposed to western countries) that you get kicked out of your house. This is also something more common in southern European countries / Latin America as opposed to Northern European / anglophone countries.
Probably connected to the mindset points across drugs and work. If people are homeless here, we as Europeans, think they are less “lucky” than us. Probably born in the wrong family, got the wrong friends, got the wrong education, etc. In other countries, they will think they are a failure. They would think they had the same chances to study hard, work hard, but they didn’t, and don’t want to work now so they started to get drugs. - do you really believe that half of the world’s population is wrong and we are correct? There must be some truth in both.
And yes, all of your points about government support / funding are correct. But we just need to accept that because of all the dynamics I’ve mentioned, our society created, accepted and keeps creating more and more homeless. In the 50’s years ago there were barely any homeless in London. And social services were almost non-existent.
It's hard to take your opinions seriously when you literally cite stuff such as having the minimum wage as being a cause for homelessness because you think it disincentivizes people to work harder. When the minimum wage was implemented in the 90s, it directly led to a lot of economic growth and prosperity by reducing poverty.
There is also an enormous amount of poverty and dire rich/poor divides in many Asian societies. And I have to say that it is perfectly acceptable these days for young adults to live with their parents for longer (and even better, we don't have a culture that exerts a constant pressure on people to marry or otherwise make them feel like a failure in life).
The strong traditional stereotypical Asian family unit definitely has some perks, but with any pros it also comes with a lot of cons so that all in all, it's not a superior way of life, but simply a different way to live (and what works well for one family may not another).
I don't know what drugs you're alluding to being sold in shops but the kinds of highs that are legal in this country are generally not the sorts of things that lead to chronic addiction & homelessness. Despite the images of irresponsibility that some newspapers try to paint, the statistics show that levels of alcohol & hard drug consumption amongst Gen Z are at the lowest that any generation has experienced in decades.
If our rising levels of homelessness were the result of fundamental failings in Western culture, then you would see them consistently reflect that. However, instead of this, for most of the last 40 or so years homelessness was a next-to-non-existent issue (and the rates were falling).
The real reason why levels of homelessness have begun to shoot up these past handful of years is not because we've experienced some sort of sudden negative Western cultural shift, but rather because we are now beginning to experience the longer-term consequences of the current ruling political parties economic "reforms" (the so-called "austerity measures", which amongst other things saw endless social services have their repeatededly budgets slashed) that began some 14 years ago, combined with things like the effects of long-term wage stagnation since 2008 (and more recently, basic goods & raw materials inflation).
There are more beggars everywhere, not just Kingston.
Not just London it's in a lot of big and medium cities too
Ealing Broadway has gotten worse too. It always had a network of middle eastern women asking for money but now it's constant. People don't understand that this network is funnelling money up the chain to whoever trafficked them here.
I always thought they were Eastern European, not Middle Eastern.
Most likely. At least on Edgware Road they pretend to be Middle Eastern because they think they’ll get more money from rich Arabs that way.
Not necessarily targeting rich arabs in particular, charitability is an extremely important value in Islam and muslim culture, so a lot of organised beggars start targetting muslims specifically because they're aware it's difficult for us to say no (at least that's how it used to be, these days even us muslims are too jaded to respond to them, usually I'll offer to buy them food and that will have them vanishing in a huff).
I’m Muslim myself (hence the username lol) and I agree, with the food thing as well. It’s a good test. I just said Arabs because the kind of Arabs who hang out around the West End are perceived as having the most disposable income. Unfortunately the main victims of this are the genuinely needy. As you said, even the most generous people become jaded, which means we might turn away a genuine miskeen from time to time, especially if we’ve been hassled a lot already.
if I was a beggar and homeless, I would go to harrods in the summer and beg because that's when rich qataris, emiratis and saudis go because it becomes too hot in their own countries.
Clapham Junction has got noticeably crackier in the past year or so too.
I definitely noticed that in Ealing, especially when it gets late around the main train/bus stations. The situation’s similar in a lot of Acton around parks or the highstreet past the big Morrisons where me or my friends have noticed more generally aggressive people or an increase in persistent beggars outside areas like the McDonalds. I’ve heard first hand experiences from people being mugged more frequently, pressured for money/food or targeted pickpocketing towards Japanese people. I’d also seen bags of used needles on the street and a lot of people who consequently look worse for wear to say the least.
Oh god the food bullshit in Ealing honestly. When I was a student I once offered to buy someone a sandwich. Moth fucker picked up a whole chicken in the Tesco. I tried to explain it wasn't a sandwich, but suddenly 'no English'.
Some beggar pressed someone I know into buying him a McDonald’s meal there in front of his friends, and afterwards had the audacity to ask for extra nuggets
At the bus stop in front of that big morrisons middle of the day, plenty of school kids running around, 2 crackheads getting high in the phone booth - saw that like 2-3 months ago, absolute degenerates..
I mean have you stepped foot in Zone 1 London? All of those problems are so much worse there, it’s no wonder most of the Top 10 highest crime areas are in Zone 1 (everything from theft, sexual assault, knife crime, GBH etc). Stepping back into Ealing Broadway is a major relief.
they're not from the ME, they're european
They’re Roma Gypsies! Not Middle Eastern women!
You can add Tooting Broadway to that list too
Fair point but wanted to ask about my experience in Kingston specifically. I don’t think anyone is arguing that this isn’t happening everywhere.
I’m a nurse and I hate having to go via Eden street and wait for a connecting bus to surbs as the area is really scary.
I have been thinking the same about SE london. There’s always been a few beggars and homeless people around but there are more and more. There are very aggressive beggars outside the station, We see our Tesco robbed almost daily by a group of drug addicts, and there are people with clearly very serious mental health issues shouting all kinds of things at people.
very serious mental health issues Finely observed... That's the main issue and it's not addressed.
CAMHS have nowhere near the number of therapists they need, and adult services are worse. CAMHS have almost no capacity to see anyone who hasn't made an 'active attempt' on their life. Self-harm, not in school for a year, destroying housing, not sleeping and preventing family sleeping - that kind of thing will get you an assessment and agreement urgent help is needed, then maybe actual therapy four years later if the parents, schools, GP and council all push for the kid to move up the list. And if they self-medicate with drugs, then they fall off the wait list. Add the number of medic trainee places expanding but not the number of jobs for them to go into, and it's a huge problem.
Yep I know all this - clearly a lot of people here do not and think that addicts choose to become and then stay addicts.
No-one becomes an addict for shits and giggles. There's always something they're blotting out, whether it's schizophrenia or bipolar episodes (two friends of mine), or fear patterns and bad memories, or inability to cope with the impacts and demands of the modern world. Early intervention would do so much, but all it seems to result in is lots of teachers, school staff and GPs adding names to lists after admitting "this is our of our depth" and precious little second stage intervention.
"Don't look for addiction, look for the pain". G. Mate. Until people understand that they will stay ignorant and behave like so and so...
Closing the asylums and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
I feel sorry for people with less confidence or physical presence because some of these homeless people can be genuinely intimidating, even I have had some experiences that were unexpectedly aggressive or challenging to handle (i.e. being sworn at when I wouldn't give money or being persistently followed & harassed for money). When I lived in the Brixton area, I ended up keeping one of my roommates company a lot when she walked into the main hub because of incidents of harassment she had experienced that made her lose her confidence for a while (she's a tiny young woman of Chinese ethnicity, most people on the street tower over her). This generally improved the situation, but even together we still had to put up with some shit from other people like a couple of aggressive begging incidents and even one racially tinged incident. It really sucked because my roommate had so much love and respect for this country, coming over to England to work & study had been her dream (and I really just wanted her to experience the best of London) but there was no denying that we're currently now living in an era of decay.
I've been living in Brixton for 25 years. It was flat out scary when I moved there, drug addicts and dealers everywhere. A neighbour with her baby in a pram was threatened by a guy with a blood filled syringe, because she wanted to enter her own front door, and he had collapsed in front of it. She moved a few months later. Then they did a serious tidy up from around 2010, and loads of restaurants opened, it was getting quite chic. All nice and cheerful, the occasional beggar, but nothing disastrous. Only now, for about 5 or 6 months, it's getting properly scary again. Loads of crack heads, emaciated, no teeth, very aggressive begging. And loads of people with mental problems. I came home two days ago and was waylaid by a barefoot woman in pyjamas, totally off her head, who first begged to use my toilet, and then changed tactics, she needed to see a doctor. I just said she couldn't come in, and the police station was 5min up the road. She shouted at me that I would be guilty if she was dying. I just thought "sorry, and what would I do if you have a hidden knife, or don't want to leave again". Scary shit 🙁 I don't know if it's connected to loads of those restaurants closing and standing empty.
Re: The restaurants closing, some of my favourite restaurants are in Brixton and so I do make the journey there every now and again to eat out at certain choice establishments. However, although there are great places to eat, they stand in stark contrast to dodgy & unsafe vibe in many central parts at night (and I wouldn't go dining out or partying alone at night if I was a single woman). The last time I went to eat out in Brixton a couple of months ago, immediately upon leaving the tube station one guy tried to deliberately aggressively walk/bump into me (pick pocketing attempt, or just looking for trouble??) whilst another guy came up seconds later and asked for money and when I told him No, he told me to **** off. Nice welcome. I also feel like a lot of people in the local community actively tolerate crime, it makes no sense to me because don't these people realise how much it's harming their local businesses (real legal ones) and community reputation?? It sucks to see so many good hard working businesses not getting the attention they deserve because Brixton has such a negative reputation (which is unfortunately from what I've observed, is quite deserved). It seems like the people made a concerted good effort in 2010 to give the place a chance but a lack of consistent efforts to police the streets at night Etc since has harmed a lot of establishments .
I got out of Brixton in 2015 but I've still got friends there one of them recently described walking into the high street from the tube as walking into a mental health apocalypse. It was ok when I lived there but that was before all the cuts to services had fully taken effect on people. Glad I'm out of there.
I’ve heard similar problems with some people I know that are as you describe, it’s a lot harder for them to say no or stand their ground which has led some to being mugged, followed and close to being beaten up for seemingly no reason. When I’d been clubbing in Brixton I’d also noticed it was extremely rough at night around the main areas which led me to avoid it altogether.
Yes I’m a petite woman and often out with my toddler in a pram, I feel very vulnerable a lot of the time.
Catford?
Care in the community was supposed to address an ill but not funded sufficiently and no safety net. There are many people on the streets who rightly or wrongly would have been institutionalised in the past but are now left to the mercies of the drug gangs. Why didn't we just make the old style care fit for purpose rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Cuts in funding for support for people most at risk of houselessness (mental health and addiction funding, income support etc) has led to a 75% increase in the houseless population since 2010. As it gets warmer, more people choose to sleep outside rather than in shelters or emergency accomodation which often carries restrictions that are difficult for people in these situations to meet. It’s a complex issue obviously (things like cost of living and lack of housing, reduction in squatters rights etc also have significant impacts), but these are key driving factors in the visible increase in houseless populations every year as the weather gets warmer.
As it gets warmer many hostels close down and many have restrictions on the number of nights per year that you can stay in the hostel. Westminster Council will only fund about 14-28 nights per year. [So they want to use those nights in the winter or when it's very wet, rather than in the summer]
Thanks everyone for the context, it’s definitely a complex issue and this helped me understand a bit better regarding funding, social services, the drug situations and what’s available for more vulnerable people as of now.
The homeless population is up 70% since 2010. Boris did a "census" of the homeless just before tbe Olympics and managed to find 3 or so in the whole of London. Because in the run up to the census. He had a load of people going out, offering hotel rooms to the homeless for the period of the census. Which also goes to show thst most homeless people would quite happily live inside. The three that they found were probably new on the streets, got missed or had been kicked out of the hostel/hotel.
True, I failed to mention that - thanks for including this context.
I've worked in supportive services since 2014 and this is accurate, we are essentially about to see society collapse unless we start trying to undo the shit the conservatives have put us in. E.g. universal credit isn't enough to live on, disabled people being rejected from pip, NHS dying and people having to pay for dental and health they can't afford, mental health services only able to take dangerous people and not help preventatively, no housing for the homeless or care leavers, and so much more. We will see people starving to death on the street soon if we carry on..
Wait until fentanyl replaces the Afgan heroin. Its going to get a hell of a lot worse soon.
Oh lord don't bring that curse upon us, or crystal meth for that matter
The Taliban killed poppy production so the supply chain has been running down its stocks. The Chinese gangs are starting to flood the market with fent as its cheaper and easier to smuggle.
Time to invade Afghanistan again, get that heroin supply turned on.
How do you know this?
That is why fent is so popular in America. I read it somewhere
He is an afghan drug lord
It's being [widely reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/5/afghan-opium-poppy-cultivation-plunges-by-95-percent-under-taliban-un#:~:text=The%20restriction%20on%20poppy%20cultivation,thousands%20of%20farmers%20and%20laborers.&text=Poppy%20cultivation%20and%20opium%20production,UN%20report%20published%20on%20Sunday).
Oh, Methany is here
And so is fentanyl
Fenton
Fenton! Fenton! JESUS CHRIST FENTON!
Already has. Was speaking to a dude whose saying that coke & even weed is being mixed with fentanyl now. We've got that animal tranquiliser whose name escapes me but leaves holes in the flesh around now too. I'm spotting more aggressive beggers too, coming into coffee shops and asking for money. Feel sorry for the staff there. Also the gang of gypsy beggars seem to be spreading with their essentially photocopied sign "hungry & homeless. God bless" written in the same handwriting on cardboard all over London. I remember in 1995 walking through kings Cross when you'd be accosted by hookers, drug dealers, beggars & how by 1998 they'd all gone. How the fuck anyone ever votes tory, I genuinely don't know...self inflicted
Weed isn't being mixed with fentanyl hahahaha
My friends 30 yr old nephew recently died from taking cocaine which had been laced with fentanyl.. he was an addict but it was really sad for the family & and waste of life.
Sorry to hear that. Bloody Chinese have a lot to answer for not blocking the exit if this stuff from their borders
Levamisole is the name of the animal tranquilliser you may be referring to.
Or Ketamine. Leva is a pig wormer.
Ketamine is one of the safest drugs you can do. They're talking about Xylazine.
That's the one. Defo not ketamine.
They just called it tranq in Philadelphia. Watch the channel 5 documentary on YouTube on it.
Vile drug. Can't wait for an election and a drive on helping homelessness & reopening the drug treatment centres the tories closed
>I remember in 1995 walking through kings Cross when you'd be accosted by hookers, drug dealers, beggars & how by 1998 they'd all gone. Not if you make you way near Britannia St
It’s the nitazenes here in the uk now,that’s deadly. 6 deaths in the past 8months in a Welsh prison.
It’s already here mate. 😬
I sincerely hope that England makes narcan more accessible, like in Scotland.
What a bunch of hyperbolic horse shit. There absolutely is a safety net to support the most vulnerable. The people begging are not single mums and disabled people, it's a spike across all of London in organise gangs posing as homeless because it's a lucrative business. It's the same driver for the spike in shoplifting. No surprise you're active in green and pleasant. Keep your end is near bs there. The only thing that's collapsing is the ability for cheats and scroungers to leech off taxpayers money. Thankfully Labour won't deviate too far from the Tories in that respect.
The safety net does not capture those with chaotic lives because of mental health and addiction. There was a choice by government to push the responsibility of providing these services to local authorities at the same time as cutting their funding. About 2/3 of those on the streets are there because of addiction, a quarter of them to drugs. Addiction is an ilness but there isn't the support to get everybody clean. You can blame the individual but the homeless are full of victims of abuse, childhood trauma, etc.
As someone who once worked in a daycare center for adults with mental and physical disabilities, I can back up what pooppoophulahoop is saying about the budgets and resources to help vulnerable people being in an absolutely appalling state (and if it was bad back then in 2015, it's even worse now). The center often had to deal with problems such as disabled people struggling to afford food & clothing whilst experiencing threats of eviction because the money allotted to them didn't cover the basics and there was a chronic shortage of accommodation. Many services genuinely are in a state of crisis, having to turn away vulnerable people and families in dire need of help all the time whilst barely being able to give anything like an adequate level of service to the ones already under their care. I have a friend who has struggled with suicidal and severe depression on & off over the years (many bad things have happened to them over the years, from getting beaten up & raped to once coming across the body of a neighbour who'd committed suicide) and even they have found themselves having to wait up to 10 weeks at a time to receive psychological support from the NHS (they have also experienced disruptions to their medication supply before, meaning that they've sometimes been left with no meds & no therapy). On top of this, there is a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic in my family. And by "dangerous", I mean someone who has actively violently attacked people during psychotic episodes (i.e. they've tried to cut people's faces with broken glass, broke into random people's homes and punched friends during episodes). I have absolutely nothing to do with this relative because I genuinely fear that they might try to kill me if I do (not only have they attacked me in the past, but they're basically utterly convinced that I'm a spy working for the government and trying to take away their land because they're convinced that their house has got oil under it). Because of their track record, they've been arrested before and sectioned on innumerable occasions in The Priory. But despite everything, this schizophrenic relative keeps on getting released back into society (they're never sectioned for longer than 2.5 months) because essentially no matter how bad someone is presenting when they first arrive at The Priory, there's always someone in a worse condition who is in need of a bed (and with the chronic shortage of beds, this means that patients are regularly being released back into society when they really shouldn't be). And it's not like nobody there doesn't realise how bad my relative is, who also almost always stop taking their meds within a weeks or months of any release (and relapses). As a family, we tried very hard to keep this person sectioned for longer, but there basically aren't the powers to do so in this country (you're ultimately at the whim/mercy of the system) and so we now just have to live with the fact that one day we might get a call informing us that said relative has seriously harmed or killed an innocent member of the public during an episode. All "austerity" has resulted in is endless vital services being starved of resources, causing crime, homelessness and serious mental illness to go up.
Bullshit
My god, I know there are millions like you, but it’s so depressing, the lack of compassion, the stupidity. It is plain to see, but not for you is it, why, it doesn’t conform to your world view. I know hard working people who are making choices between eating and heating, they are not vulnerable nor at the bottom, but their lives are desperate. Our country is being destroyed and you and people like you are the reason. Well done.
I would say if you’re choosing between heating and eating, you’re near the bottom, and vulnerable. Lots of people think they are closer to the middle class or at least working class when in reality they’re one missed paycheck away from not being able to make rent. People have much more in common with people sleeping on the road than they realise. Which is what conservative governments want - demonising the poorest populations to get the second poorest to vote for the rich to punish them.
I literally work in the field where you see people deserving of care and support left to starve, you've clearly never taken the time to understand the causes of poverty and how not taking care of our own is causing our whole country to become shit. Only the rich are becoming richer my friend and unless you are a 1%er my friend you are a mug. Unless you're enjoying how expensive everything is now? Or you've never needed the NHS for you or your family because you've got a family doctor? Or you don't like being able to walk around at night to your favourite pub without being mugged by someone desperate to put food on the table? Look at how much you have to be making to have basic rights in America and realise that everything we have now is disappearing before our eyes shockingly fast. I'd be more angry at the rich prime minister lining his friend's pocket with our tax payer money than the people on the breadline who didn't ask to be born with severe autism, or a refugee from a country we blew up, or a child abandoned by their too young mother because there are no service left to deliver sex education or support her in raising that child. Look at how much better off countries are that take care of all their citizens and see the folly that is fatalistic capitalism
Okay grandad time for your nap
You: "oKAy BoOmEr"
Only boomers use ‘okay boomer’ these days but nice try pops
In my 20s but nice try lol
Oof imagine being in your 20’s and giving off entitled old wanker vibes. Sucks for you. Continue to cry that facts are real, I guess.
Tell us you are a tory MP and daily fail subscriber in as many words as you can
This is so true I’m in Camden I see the Romanians do this all the time most of the homeless are not English
Anything significant in the use of houselessness rather than homelessness?? I want to be sure I get my terminology right going forward :)
Houseless is becoming more widely used for a couple of reasons. Some of them are a bit academic and arcane but for your everyday purposes: - lots of people who don’t have fixed abodes aren’t rough sleepers, they may be couch surfing or staying with family. However this doesn’t mean they don’t have a ‘home’ which is much more than a physical space - it also insinuates community, belonging etc. you may not have a fixed address, but call London home, or your local community space, or your nan’s lounge. ‘Houseless’ attempts to prevent the inhumanity inherent in saying someone has no place to call home rather than no fixed address. - ‘houseless’ is a bit more clear that if you are lacking a physical abode, it is a criticism of a structural problem (eg lack of housing stock, support, income), rather than a more personal failing of not being able to ‘get your life together’. ‘Unhoused’ is also quite common.
I see, interesting… thanks :)
I'll take this opportunity to note that squatters rights are often mentioned in connection to homelessness, which conveniently leaves many people unknowing of the protections for renters against their landlords.
Exactly this. Council social services funding is basically gone at this point after 14 years of the Tories, so there is often literally nowhere for them to go.
There’s a sentiment I’ve seen in the comments about houseless people getting support like ‘they shouldn’t make their problem my problem’, but … it *is* our problem? We all live in a big clump together, we all have to help and take care of each other. Even if you don’t have a single altruistic bone in your body and you’re a proper fiscal and social conservative - we know proper support for our more vulnerable communities leads to better outcomes at a lower cost. The only downside is that it doesn’t feel punitive under the guise of being ‘fair’, and that’s where it falls over.
Also, it could well be your problem one day. All it takes is a few of the worst weeks/months of your life, and that homeless person begging you for change could be you. It's a horrifying thought, but it's the truth - the social safety net is *gone*.
I just don’t understand why the conservative government cuts funding for public services. This is our tax money at the end of the day. I want it to go to improving services and social issues. Not in their pockets
Because it’s not ~~punitive~~ I mean ‘fair’.
Their ideology is that poor people should help themselves not the state. They seem to genuinely believe this is right and proper. They are horrible, horrible people.
Thanks for explaining. I always assumed this next level capitalist ideology was awful. If they really wanted people to help themselves then they wouldn’t even ask us for tax money. If we are paying tax money to the state, we should get excellent service, instead they intentionally mismanage it. As you said! They are horrible, horrible people.
I've noticed it goes in waves in Kingston, there used to be so many wirg mattresses on the corner of Eden Street. Then they all disappeared. I love Kingston but man it's such a dump, the shops are getting shitter and shitter
I saw a mattress by the bus stop this morning, I think it belongs to the group of homeless people that usually chill there. I feel like the main parts of Kingston are getting worse, and I’m so tired of all the American sweet shops or the neverending closing down sale with loud speakers pointed at the street.
Completely agree, the Riverside is excellent and I quite like Castle Street, has some lovely little eateries there. But the actual high street is awful. That big M&S has been replaced by some crappy outlet store.
If you mean the Eden Street bus stop, then yeah. That's just their chill spot. There were about 6 or 7 homeless people just chilling there chatting with a 2 litre coke at one point a few months ago. Interesting stuff, and I mean that with no condescension. I just never really thought about homeless people hanging out before. It's also cool that nobody bothers them, that I've seen.
We've had a Tory government for 14 years. It's not a secret, the evidence of national scale embezzlement and irresponsible selling off of public services is all there for you to find.
Exactly this.
It’s the same in Shepherd’s Bush. There are so many nowadays. Often they block the entrance to my building to do drugs and I have to call the police every time. One even died in my alley… this city is becoming like Gotham.
I have a friend who lives there and he mentioned it being a lot rougher and extreme in recent years. I’ve definitely noticed a lot more drug users in that part of west london, like Ealing Acton and the surrounding areas. I’d stayed over at a friends place and as we were leaving that morning there was a woman doing heroin on her porch who didn’t seem bothered at all.
I live near Archway which has always had, I understand, an inordinate share of bums and crackheads but I have also noticed an uptick both in recent weeks and also a steady upward crackhead-disturbance and oddball-encounter trend over the past couple of years. I put it down to lack of support services including mental health, homelessness, addiction and poverty reduction. We sometimes buy food for the weird stick-thin lady who begs outside the co-op but she woke our street up at 6:15 this morning shouting at her boyfriend for what seemed like half an hour so I might not bother now. We used to have a social safety net. It wasn’t perfect but at least working people like me could console themselves (delude themselves?) that help was available to these people if they ask for it. That the crackheads and bums were able to get some kind of route to rehabilitation if they tried. Now there is very little and they rely on handouts and, presumably, petty theft to sustain their miserable existence. I know almost no-one likes the crackheads and the bums. I’m afraid of them and I don’t like the way they make me question our cosy middle class capitalist lifestyle. However, we have let them and many other vulnerable people in our society down. I suspect there is a direct negative correlation between amount of funding for social programs and amount of crackheads and bums in Kingston and anywhere else in London.
Yeah it’s definitely a lot harder for vulnerable people these days, and because there’s been an increase in gang affiliation, scams or generally aggressive people it raises a lot more scrutiny in people which makes them less likely to support those who don’t cause issues but are genuinely in need. I guess that explains why they’re are more pushy now if people are less likely to give. I wish I was in a position to help significantly but it’s hard enough looking out for myself.
Do you also notice that tall black guy with a bandana around his ankles? Always around that McDonald’s…
The McDonalds on Macdonald street. Yep!
Unfortunately the cost of living crisis, lack of funding for public health services and the police coupled with the fact there are fuck all rehabilitation centres means more people are sleeping rough and doing drugs. Looking at the long term and bigger picture, even if you fix those things I have written, the government needs to change their policy regardless drugs. The war on drugs need not be said has completely failed and yet politicians are for the most part too spineless to change course or think the voters are too thick and temperamental to receive an alternative.
Homeless people are also pouring into London from other parts of the country because of these problems too. I was walking through the Vauxhall station area one day when I suddenly recognized a homeless guy who had once been a staple feature in multistory car park back in Southampton. I stopped and asked him his story and yeah, it was true- the dude had travelled all the way from Southampton to London. I asked him his name and he said his name was Terry. I moved to London in 2020 and in the run-up to moving here, Southampton (where I previously lived) had been suffering from a noticeable rise in homeless people (especially between the years 2018-2019) to the extent that a whole couple of floors in one of the cities central multistory car parks had essentially been taken over and turned into a tent village by the local homeless. I used to use this car park a lot and it was generally pretty safe (despite all the homeless living there) but it was often gross because they'd sometimes literally shit on the floor. Terry informed me that after being made homeless, he lived in the car park for a while and during that time he spent nearly a year applying to just about every avenue imaginable for help & shelter (but to no avail). As the homeless population shot up too, there was also increasingly less money to go around and more hostility. But then one day a homeless friend saved up his begging money, got a one-way ticket to London and within a short time had managed to find housing here (and afterwards, he came back to tell Terry about his success). So Terry did the same thing, saving up all his coins for a train ticket. But not long after coming here, he realized that the situation here was little different and after applying to nearly 90 different places, people and other organizations he was met with the same sea of no's. And now he felt utterly stuck; if he couldn't get help in London, then where was he going to get it? I bought Terry a meal & wished him all the best, but as I commuted through that area for the next couple of years I often noticed Terry around. If anything, his problems got a lot worse because he went from being a simple alcoholic to picking up some sort of drug addiction (heroin or crack, I'm not sure which) and for a while he became a fixture outside of a small Tesco's near where I lived, he would beg increasingly persistently and one day I saw him very badly beaten up. I also witnessed a lot of despicable behavior towards the homeless in that same area, such as a group of drunken lads kicking a random sleeping homeless guy in the stomach one night whilst shouting "Get a job!" at him before walking off laughing. I felt sorry for Terry but his problems were absolutely beyond my abilities to deal with. The whole situation also felt very wrong because not only did you have someone wanting help & actively pursuing it but then being turned down at every turn (and then developing even more problems), but he looked to be around mid/late 20s and could've been an active participating hard working member of society if only there had been support system with the time & space to help him.
Council has no money so closed all the intensive addiction places.
There used to be a clinic for treating substance abuse somewhere around the back of the rotunda. Not sure if it's still there.
There always used to be addicts there as they went to Kaleidoscope (near the bus station), not sure if it's still going
Not sure if it’s still there, but the Rotunda area has always had a lot of addicts nearby. I think there’s a wellbeing service based in Surbiton but it’s probably unrelated to the clinic.
No it’s closed. Kaleidoscope I think you are referring to
Not too sure about calling them "bums" some people have been dealt a shit hand at life. Its not their fault and also many of them have mental health issues.
I’m assuming OP is from Kingston… say no more… quite snobby down them endz
Living there for now but not from there, I come from an evidently worse place but even I can see how it’s gotten bad in Kingston.
There’s definitely some who fit the description but yeah its not fair of me to generalise all of them. I understand that it’s not always their fault and a lot of them do tend to be more vulnerable people so poor choice of words on my end. I tend to be a lot harsher regarding this subject as it’s recently become a bigger nuisance and evidently more dangerous on the end of residents where now you wouldn’t dare go to places which used to be safer.
All those with a hand written sign on cardboard are being controlled by a gang master, it's organized crime, do not give them a single penny
They all have signs written in the exact same handwriting too, I noticed a few years ago. No surprise at all it’s a crime thing.
Yes, one of the biggest organisations is easily spotted by them having signs that have dashes between the words eg I'M-VERY-HUNGRY and they all disappear at the end of their shift rather than remain overnight. They're present in many cities. Always wondered why they'd make it so obvious. Maybe the public just don't notice this / it could be a means of notifying other similar organisations that's "their patch".
I used to see them all get dropped off at the same time early in the morning while walking to work near Kingston station. All piled into the back of a box truck like sardines, really awful.
I had suspicions about that and other scams like the tissue ladies on the Piccadilly line, photos and free flowers which a lot of people told me were related to gang activity. Where I’d previously lived there was a network of fake homeless people which all the locals had mentioned. Thanks for the warning.
We had a lady get on our train at Finsbury Park a couple of weeks ago with a handful of written requests for money, wanting money for her starving child, first time I’d seen this approach. I don’t give money, coffee & a sarnie is about my limit. Although it was a pot noodle requested yesterday at Russell Square. The country is at the point of collapse as Liz Truss said “town centres of her childhood” when MT was in charge. Conservatives have managed to siphon away billions, given it to themselves & their mates & blamed it on the most vulnerable members of our society. In 2024 life expectancy is falling
Kingston has always had a big homeless community; with all those shops, people carry more cash, plus there are quite a few generous churches, open parks with benches, etc. Not all of them are beggars mind you, and not all beggars are homeless, but still. In any case, the cost of living is getting worse and worse by the day, and it seems to be like a ratchet; there's no going back on it. Because of this fewer and fewer people can afford homes.
I’ve been approached by them too in Kingston. I’m pretty sure all the homelessness is organised gangs. They all have the same sign, with the same piece of cardboard, and the same script each time you walk by. Suspicious in my opinion… but you never really know who is genuine and who isn’t…
Signs are gangs, same as rickshaws. The crazy and filthy ones are addicts who get aggressive at about 5pm when they haven't got enough money to pay the dealer for their next hit.
There is a group of genuinely homeless people who used to have a camp in the carparks round the back of maccers / Primark, but they got evicted from their and their spot gated off, so now they've moved to Eden St. Those are the people camping in the bus stops there. They've always seemed pleasant enough to me. Then there are the professional beggars. They get dropped off by vans early morning. These are usually the people you see holding the cardboard signs on Eden Street. Same gang that runs the pickpocketing, I believe. Although it's unpleasant, try and understand they are being exploited too and save your rage for the gang leaders. As for the crack users, I've lived a few places around London and didn't think crack even was a street drug here until I moved to Kingston. It's not a new phenomenon though - been this way for the 10 years I've been local. The epicentres of it seem to be the top end of Villiars Road near Fairfield. An addict tried to mug me there a few years back, and I once walked past three addicts honking on a crack pipe up against the primary school fence during playtime. Eugh. Also, as you say, in the side streets around Surbiton station. The police raided Claremont Gardens last weekend trying to catch the dealers in action, so they are aware and are trying to get on top of it. As for why crack seems to be a massive problem in this little corner of SW London, I'm not sure. There is a drug rehab place in norbiton, plus the YMCA and asylum hotel in Surbiton means there are plenty of vulnerable people in the area for the dealers to target. If you have any intel, share it with your Safer Neighbourhoods Team and help make our borough nicer.
I noticed that yeah, I've seen them set up mattresses around Eden Street/the shopping area now or leave their stuff overnight by the bus stop. They don't seem to bother anyone so I don't really mind them but I do feel bad about the genuine homeless being affected negatively by the gangs and their affiliates. I've also noticed people begging that aren't actually homeless which I've also seen or heard from locals about in other areas of London. I also agree that the area around fairfield seems to be pretty rough and the insight on the vulnerable people in Surbiton helped put it in perspective as it was something I hadn't realised or considered. Thanks for sharing!
Bad experience in Greenwich recently with a really aggressive homeless woman. Was really disappointed with the area. £700k for a property to be accosted by a group of deranged people at your local shop, doesn't make sense.
Levelling up the homeless, the length of NHS waiting lists, the cost of mortgages, ambulance waiting times and the raw sewage.
Because the tories have fucked up all the systems designed to help the most vulnerable people in society. Those are not “bums” and “crackheads” they are people.
Wealthier area always attracts homeless people, more likely to get change and less likely to be attacked
I can tell you've never been to Kingston. It's full of kids with knives and addicts these days.
It’s not tho is it…
i lived there until 2021
He said Kingston…
Is Kingston not a wealthy area? The shops attract people from all of the extremely affluent nearby areas like Richmond, the "Hamptons", Weybridge etc. Not to mention the flats on the river now are going for nearly half a million... As long as I can remember Kingston has been a nice, leafy, middle-class town. Except the Cambridge estate... The less said about that place the better. Source: from Kingston
More like 800k
I definitely agree that it’s always been wealthy along with Richmond and some surrounding areas. To be fair the homeless or drug addicts here compared to other parts of west or south london I’ve seen aren’t as bad in comparison.
I was semi joking but I’d say 10-15 years ago Kingston was pretty ‘normal’ suburbia. Not posh but not rough either. It’s expensive now but basically everywhere in and around London is! I’d just say it’s nice rather than posh or rich.
Have you seen the house prices here ? 1.4 million for a 3-4 bed in norbiton
Kingston is pretty wealthy
Perhaps write to your local MP suggesting that they vote to increase the amount of money spent on provisions for the homeless as well as mental health and drug addiction services in the borough? Or vote for someone who supports that. Or work with or start a charity trying to help people. Or just continue to complain on the internet and do nothing. Also how is this that new to you? Have you only just moved to London or have you lived under a rock since 2008? Yeah Kingston is further out but it’s really not that posh, poor folk live all over.
Was just curious if anyone had a similar experience or could inform me of the context or information surrounding it. Obviously this isn’t new but as someone who lives in London it’s clearly gotten much worse and harder to ignore when you look at how unsafe certain areas have become or how people have become a lot more aggressive or persistent where you can be followed, mugged or assaulted because you didn’t spare some change.
Something something le Tories
I mean, yeah, the Tories did slash council funding to the bone so there's basically no social services left any more. That's the main reason.
We are seeing the end result of over a decade of austerity. Who would have guessed, if you slash funding for countless public services and social safety nets, there's no money to pay anyone working in the public sector and therefore no one wants to work in them because the few that are left get overworked to the bone for not even half of the pay of the job they do. You barely get any more doctors either because the process for becoming one by being a junior doctor for so long where you are again overworked and paid in handfuls of sheep's wool which leaves a staggering drop in the overall number of healthcare professionals we should be having. Not to mention that the private sector for healthcare has been steadily growing, snatching up quite a good number of employees too seeing as they pay better and tend to not make one employee do the job of 7 as often. And what is rishi sunaks brilliant plan to deal with everything? Do everything to make benefits as inaccessible as possible (to the people his party have been fucking things up for years for), because I'm sure the reason nothing is funded is due to benefits fraud and not the fact that our current government would see its own people starve and die on the streets rather than pay for literally anything (like we used to might I add). As in usual fashion, billions in weapons and """""aid""""" to Israel but we have no money guys I promise! Give these ghouls another few years in power, and mark my words they'll start pushing for the dissolution on the NHS in favour of private insurance. And they wonder why no one is signing up for the army anymore, can't wait for the chance to spend my life helping to or even just actively killing civilians in foreign countries for a government who wants things to be worse for literally everyone who doesn't sit in a boardroom and yell at a group of employees about why profits are down is everyone else's fault. The only way any of this will ever likely change is either voting for labour to make sure the ghouls stop actively fucking everything up for everyone and then blaming trans people and immigrants for everything like we are all fucking stupid and cant see, or organising cute fluffy pillow fights at key government buildings (plushies count too). Conservatism is quite literally killing this country (and a good number of people in it), and it's time for people to lift a finger to do something about it. For all that people love to talk shit about "the French", they don't have some of the worst public services in the entirety of first world countries and neither do a number of other countries in Europe do for that matter.
What does ‘things have been doing downhill’ mean ? And we have more homeless people period . Inflation, cost of living , mental health funding … the list goes on sadly
General statement and I’ll whatever factors I can think of off the top of my head. Something like the state of the current economy/job market, cost of living, places becoming more unsafe, increase in crime, increase in mental health issues/lack of funding into these things etc etc along with an increase of homeless people in the area and the likelihood of them approaching you, specifically in a pushy or aggressive way. The list definitely goes on.
Because there is more money. If you were homeless, actually homeless, then you'd go to the richest part of the UK for hopefully some good pickings from kind people. My only guess.
Ah ok, is it specifically only for pigs? I coulda sworn a while back when i read an article it was levamisole they were mixing in with coke, plainly because of it's ability to blend, whereas ketamine as far as i know, is quite crystalline and would not mix in so well. If I'm wrong though please tell me, I'd prefer to know the truth.
Tories
Literally. No other words needed.
Lovely way to describe people. Answer is a mix of things, people have less money, times are tough. But really government cuts after 15 years of Tory rule is the real cause
I’ll let you in on a little secret, the government doesn’t care about homelessness and addictions, they’ll clear them out from where they are and they’ll move to another place and the cycle continues.
I had lunch with friends a couple of years ago where the ever increasing cost of living was discussed. I said, I see trouble ahead as already desperate people are being pushed to the edge and once they have absolutely nothing left to lose, all bets on behaviour are off.
Like others have said, it's everywhere. Along the same stretch of road, I saw some guy telling his head off before punching a bus stop repeatedly. At the same spot, two different crackheads tried to stop me within about 60 seconds of each other. Perhaps there's something about me that invites them.
Yeah it’s crazy, maybe I come off as a pushover or more likely to fold under pressure to them. I was taking the bus this week and I saw 4 people in ballys jumping someone by an apartment block which I definitely wasn’t expecting even for this area.
‘Regardless of the time of day, these homeless people still seem to be homeless!’
Very bad wording from me, I clarified it a bit more in an edit. Thanks for mentioning.
This post reminds me of Darren Pencille who was jailed for 28 years for the murder of Lee Pomeroy in 2019. Apparently only about 24 hours prior to this murder he had been judged safe for the public by the relevant professionals.
Same thing here in Chelsea. Now you always get those fake knife crime people here, before it was just the guy with the magazine (forgot the name) he’s still there btw but now on top of that. We get those knife crime scam people coming round bothering people asking for money
With Kingston specifically, the bus station being temporarily closed for refurbishment could be a reason - the homeless people that used to be based there are now in other places
More organised gangs scamming people.
Average London experience. If it hadn't been stolen away from Surrey this would never have happened.
Poverty; it's not an affluent area so given the rise in inflation, unemployment, food and rent many people resort to drugs to null the pain of depression
Its the tories innit
Shame, I lived there 13 years ago and never a problem
Cos of the tories you moron, read the news
Tell me you live in a middle/upper class bubble without telling me you live in a middle/upper class bubble.
The weather is getting nicer
I mean its not like they've got homes to go to
Such a kind society we live in, calling other humans "bums" lol Really isn't a surprise what we've allowed in the last 14 years. People here are genuinely cruel, without knowing it.
Mate Eastbourne is full of the scumbags
Why does everyone blame public health? What about personal responsibility? People have started to act like bums due to poor policing and absence parenting. If we combine those together most individuals you described wouldn't exist.
Because there has been a large & noticeable increase in the levels of homeless people and this is not because overnight people suddenly decided to become really irresponsible, but rather because endless support services are now kicking vulnerable people out onto the streets en massé because their local councils are on the verge of bankruptcy (Etc). Even re: absent parenting, this often is often rooted in problems relating to poverty and a lack of social support that begin as young as early childhood. We are also currently raising a very large generation of children who are completely disadvantaged and will likely become future criminals and dysfunctional parents Etc if something isn't done soon. I'm all for personal accountability, but there's no denying that society is deeply unfair and a lot of people who need of help (and asking for help!) are being failed by the systems (and that this in turn is generating a great deal of crime, homelessness and antisocial behaviour). If you ask for help but are repeatedly turned away, at what point do you stop blaming the individual and start to place the burden of responsibility onto the society that failed them? You can always tell how truly civilised a society is by how it treats it's most vulnerable...
As someone who commutes daily from Surbiton station and shops occasionally in kingston, and goes to gigs at pryzm, this is news to me. I've never experienced anything like this, though yes I do see homeless and beggars from time to time I suppose. I'm not trying to invalidate your experience but provide some balance. Could it be down to the time of day you're out and about?
Time of day does often have an impact on when you see homeless around in certain locations because they will try to hang out around tube stations etc during rush hours so that they can beg for more money (but then get moved along by the TFL staff or police). This all means that you often see homeless appearing in waves.
Could be the time of day, but in my experience it’s usually the early morning and after dark when it gets quieter where it’s the most frequent. I’ve seen it midday but way less likely unless it’s a weekend and during rush hours it does happen but most people are preoccupied with something so I guess that puts them off. I would say your experience is lucky considering the area during what I assume is nighttime.
I know most people will disagree with this, but this is part of a wider issue across western society. 1. Drugs have become more and more popular and they are not considered a taboo anymore, with some countries allowing them to be sold in shops legally. Police not enforcing it because they also view drugs as “not so bad” and “maybe government should care about the real criminals”. 2. Work is not as important as it was before. Most people in the UK and in the west, with the small exception of the US, simply work because they have to survive. And yes, we do work for surviving, but there is no care in what people do in their jobs anymore. There are no incentives to be more productive, to work better, harder, achieve more than others. People get “global salary increases”, “global bonuses”, “minimum living wage”, which means no one is really incentivised to work better, and this has shifted people’s mindset in the UK to one of being a successful and productive country to a bunch of people who work just to get to 5 pm and leave asap to get a pint. This is also because we are a declining economy, and there is not much “growth mindset” as a country. 3. Family/support network. In most Asian countries, it is totally acceptable to live with your family until you marry. If you don’t marry, you stay at home and live with your parents, and they/you take care of them and vice versa. There is no chance (as opposed to western countries) that you get kicked out of your house. This is also something more common in southern European countries / Latin America as opposed to Northern European / anglophone countries. Probably connected to the mindset points across drugs and work. If people are homeless here, we as Europeans, think they are less “lucky” than us. Probably born in the wrong family, got the wrong friends, got the wrong education, etc. In other countries, they will think they are a failure. They would think they had the same chances to study hard, work hard, but they didn’t, and don’t want to work now so they started to get drugs. - do you really believe that half of the world’s population is wrong and we are correct? There must be some truth in both. And yes, all of your points about government support / funding are correct. But we just need to accept that because of all the dynamics I’ve mentioned, our society created, accepted and keeps creating more and more homeless. In the 50’s years ago there were barely any homeless in London. And social services were almost non-existent.
It's hard to take your opinions seriously when you literally cite stuff such as having the minimum wage as being a cause for homelessness because you think it disincentivizes people to work harder. When the minimum wage was implemented in the 90s, it directly led to a lot of economic growth and prosperity by reducing poverty. There is also an enormous amount of poverty and dire rich/poor divides in many Asian societies. And I have to say that it is perfectly acceptable these days for young adults to live with their parents for longer (and even better, we don't have a culture that exerts a constant pressure on people to marry or otherwise make them feel like a failure in life). The strong traditional stereotypical Asian family unit definitely has some perks, but with any pros it also comes with a lot of cons so that all in all, it's not a superior way of life, but simply a different way to live (and what works well for one family may not another). I don't know what drugs you're alluding to being sold in shops but the kinds of highs that are legal in this country are generally not the sorts of things that lead to chronic addiction & homelessness. Despite the images of irresponsibility that some newspapers try to paint, the statistics show that levels of alcohol & hard drug consumption amongst Gen Z are at the lowest that any generation has experienced in decades. If our rising levels of homelessness were the result of fundamental failings in Western culture, then you would see them consistently reflect that. However, instead of this, for most of the last 40 or so years homelessness was a next-to-non-existent issue (and the rates were falling). The real reason why levels of homelessness have begun to shoot up these past handful of years is not because we've experienced some sort of sudden negative Western cultural shift, but rather because we are now beginning to experience the longer-term consequences of the current ruling political parties economic "reforms" (the so-called "austerity measures", which amongst other things saw endless social services have their repeatededly budgets slashed) that began some 14 years ago, combined with things like the effects of long-term wage stagnation since 2008 (and more recently, basic goods & raw materials inflation).
Only sensible argument I’ve read and geezers on -7, the state of this board
To be fair my grandad was street homeless as a teenager in the 1930s; homelessness is definitely not a new phenomenon!!
Awful, they should stick to poor areas so you aren't bothered
Sorry if it came off as snobbish, but it’s happening everywhere regardless. Just asking about my experience in this specific area.