Things really began to turn for PJ when his mother died a couple of years ago. He’d been her carer, he explained to me when we spoke in early July, though she’d spent the last few months of her life in a nursing home. After her death, with no money and nowhere to go, the south Londoner rapidly found himself slipping into homelessness.
As he approached his 60th birthday, life was tough. Work was and remains hard to come by and it was difficult to see how or when circumstances might improve. After a month or so, he was rehoused in a north London studio flat. That was around the same time that he started visiting Margins, a drop-in centre based out of Union Chapel, a cultural venue and homelessness charity in Islington. With the help of their support workers, things gradually began to turn. He received help navigating the welfare system and has settled into something like a routine, however fragile.
