No Fixed Abode: Life and Death Among the UK’s Forgotten Homeless
MAEVE McCLENAGHAN
(PICADOR, 384 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The strangest thing about reading No Fixed Abode, a challenging and compassionate investigation into British homelessness, was meeting someone I know within the first few pages. I recognised Andy immediately from Maeve McClenaghan’s description: ebullient, canny and never without his dog, Bailey, he is a familiar face at the London Catholic Worker kitchen where I ­volunteer. He is among the first rough sleepers that McClenaghan meets, at the very beginning of her deep dive into the lives and stories of Britain’s homeless population, and the ­coincidence gave me goosebumps.

McClenaghan writes with the pace and clarity you’d expect of an award-winning ­investigative reporter chasing a lead. At the beginning of 2018, she set out to find how many homeless people die on the streets every year, collecting their stories as she scrambled into squats and peered into the corners and dustbins that many call home. Lonely deaths and the families they tear apart sit alongside fond portraits of funny, ­personable and brave homeless people, rough sleepers and the volunteers and organisations that try to support them. 

The most breathtaking moment creeps up on you, gently and unexpectedly. Part-way through her investigation, McClenaghan visits University College London to speak to a lecturer in experimental psychology about “dehumanised perception”. In one recent experiment into the phenomenon, subjects’ brains were photographed by an MRI while they looked at archetypal images of a businessman in a suit, an elderly person in a cardigan, a homeless person in a sleeping bag. Their brains responded to pictures of homeless people as if they were looking at an object, not a person.