Tiny Tents

I took the train to Manchester first thing to get my hair cut. Arriving early I had a walk around and a coffee.

Along one side of St Peter’s Square is a row of twenty or so small tents. Homeless people had been camping in the arcade to stay dry in inclement weather, but the police have moved them out and the arcade is barriered off (rather bizarrely the hoarding is advertising go-working spaces). So the tents are now repositioned along the outside of the barrier. As I took this shot a chap was walking along leaving a plastic bag outside each tent. The bag presumably contains some essential provisions.

People are homeless for all sorts of reasons, and the presence of homeless people divides opinion. There is a view that homeless people should be moved out of sight, that their presence is an eyesore. Life for many is lived on the edge, it doesn’t take a lot to fall into the abyss. I tend to the view that there but for fortune go many of us.

This isn’t a macro shot, obviously. But these are certainly tiny homes. Homelessness is a complicated problem, the causes many and varied, and there seem to be no easy solutions.