THE HOLIDAY HOME PARADOX: WE LOVE CORNWALL BUT FEEL COMPELLED TO DESTROY IT

Posted on June 26, 2021 by Norwich Radical in Community, Perspectives and tagged Airbnb, coast, Community, conservatives, featured, foodbanks, holiday, home, homeless, house, housing, landlord, padstow, penzance, private housing, st mawes, Tories, uk, Zoopla.

by Sarah Edgcumbe

“Stop whining, you ungrateful inbred bastards, it’s our money that keeps you afloat” or some variant of that sentiment is regularly heard by Cornish people and permanent residents of Cornwall. Particularly in the summer. Particularly when we register our frustration at being priced out of communities we grew up in; at pristine green land being built upon, despite the presence of thousands of empty homes; and particularly when we dare to register our opinion that people are not entitled to as many houses as they like, no matter how wealthy they are. The severe levels of poverty experienced in parts of Cornwall are completely overlooked by wealthy holiday home-owners and the government (the two being far from mutually exclusive). It is hidden from view sufficiently that it will not dirty their holiday photos, it will not visibly encroach upon the sandy beaches or the pristine sea. They can pretend that everybody in Cornwall is as thick as portrayed in the TV show Doc Martin while maintaining a wilful ignorance about the devastating effects their Airbnb accommodation or holiday home is wreaking upon the county they proclaim to love.

AN OPEN LETTER TO STEVE DOWNES, EDP.

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Community and tagged accommodation, advice, anon street team, barriers, charities, City, Community, crisis, Eastern Daily Press, edp, exclusion, featured, foodcycle, grassroots, Haymarket, homeless, homelessness, hot meals, housing pressure, isolation, mental health, mental illness, norfolk, norwich, Norwich City Council, norwich foodcycle, Norwich Soup Movement, poverty, private landlords, rough sleepers, Shelter, social exclusion, soup kitchens, stereotypes, steve downes, stigma, The People's Picnic, unemployment, vulnerable, zero hour contracts.

by Eli Lambe

No, Soup Kitchens are not making Norwich’s “Homelessness problem” worse. It might seem that way to you, if you’re used to brushing the vulnerable off and not having to see the reality of more and more people’s lives. The easy solution – and the one that your newspaper and the local police like to peddle – is to force rough sleepers and vulnerable people out to the fringes of the city, where they’re cut off from their community and support and, most importantly it seems, you don’t have to see them.

What makes you think that your walking past the Haymarket every so often qualifies you to write about the lives of the people in the queue?Continue Reading

OLD JERUSALEM AND JERICHO

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged artivism, austerity, City, cold, creative writing, elites, featured, homeless, jericho, Jerusalem, original, poem, poetry, poverty.

by Chris Jarvis

They talk of dreaming spires
sleeping beneath them is routine
Crammed into a shop front
derailed carriage lost steam

Through the spiralled alleyways
off the beaten track
A dampen sodden mattress
a man laid on his backContinue Reading

PUNK 4 THE HOMELESS

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts, Community and tagged casa alianza, compass children's charity, Dandelion Florence, Dark Diversions, DIY, DIY Punk, False Advertsing, garage, gig, guatemala, homeless, Honduras, Hotwired, indie, leeway, magnificent seven, MARLA, Mexico, music, Nahaman Carmona Lopez, Nicaragua, noise, norwich, ommunity, P4TH, psychadelic, punk, punk 4 the homeless, punk bandc, Radioactive Rats, The Rezillos, Truth Equals Treason.

by Tim Forster

Punk 4 The Homeless has been busy raising money for homeless children in Central America since January 2010. They’ve been doing this through a variety of gigs throughout any given year and with a monthly Benefit Gig at the Sumac Centre in Nottingham. The monies raised are channelled through Compass Children’s Charity which started as Casa Alianza UK in February 1999 to raise funds for programmes in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Casa Alianza was founded in 1981 in response to the senseless death of one child – 13-year-old Nahamán Carmona López – a street child kicked to death in Guatemala City by four police officers who found him sniffing glue on the streets to combat his wracking hunger pains. This incident lies behind the P4TH slogan, ‘Stopping Cops Killing Kids Is Punk Rock’.Continue Reading

“HI, HOW ARE YOU?”

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged alcohol, anxiety, clubbing, companion, compassion, conflict, creative writing, death, depression, dog, family, guardian, guilt, homeless, homelessness, Kev Walker, kitbag, maybe, mental health, night out, pain, poem, poetry, pride, PTSD, rough sleepers, saturday night out, solider, special brew, substance misuse, support, tramp, veteran, war, words, writing.

by Kev Walker

Content warning: mentions substance misuse, mental health, homelessness, conflict

It’s all bling and totter, down the lights of the highstreet, drunk by the train journey there
Cackles and shouts, tales of shagging and swearing, cosmetics squeeze out the air
Bravado and vanity, beer and wine, heading for the first open club
Boys strut with their chests out, showing a leg, only thoughts are of getting a rub.

He’s crouched in the corner, a-top a damp box, wrapped in a half soaking doss-bag
A dog by his side, as companion and protector, a mucker to share a sparse nose-bag
He shakes with the cold, but also the comedown the cider has long since left him
A blot-out, a release, from the pain in his mind and the mess he now finds himself in.Continue Reading

GENERATION AIRBNB – SAN FRANCISCO

Posted on June 24, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts, Inter|national, Perspectives and tagged Airbnb, California, crisis, frisco, gentrification, Google, home, homeless, homelessness, housing, neoliberalism, prison, rent, san francisco, startups, Summer of Love, tech, The Mission, travel, Uber, US, USA, Valencia, work.

by Hannah Rose

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco. 1955

Aliyah has lived in San Francisco’s Mission district her entire life, which I estimate at being around twenty-eight years. Mission is the city’s working class and Latino area. She sleeps on the living room floor. The TV is on and throws intermittent light over her slumbering form, phone still in hand. I have to step over Aliyah on my way to her room—which I am renting through Airbnb for the week—and am careful not to wake her despite the blare of the TV. On the wall, beneath a tangle of half-deflated gold balloons left over from a party, is a giant poster of Whitney Houston—the queen of pop. Behind the water cooler is the silhouetted form of Michael Jackson—the king of pop—suspended on tippy-toes and ‘He Lives’ stencilled beneath.

Photographs of Aliyah and her husband smile back at me from heart-shaped frames that decorate the far wall and on a small, white canvas the words ‘Life is the Flower for which Love is the Honey’ are in poppy-red. One of a few splashes of colour in this windowless, dimly lit apartment.Continue Reading

SQUALOR, OVERCROWDING, EVICTIONS – THE TORIES HAVE NO ANSWERS ON THE HOUSING CRISIS

Posted on February 11, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Inter|national and tagged Britain, british politics, conservative, conservative party, conservatives, Dawn Foster, eviction, government, homeless, homelessness, Homelessness Reduction Bill, housing, Housing and Planning Act, housing crisis, inter|national, local government, Parliament, politics, Sajid Javid, social housing, theresa may, Tories, Tory, uk, uk politics.

by Olivia Hanks

“Walk down your local high street today and there’s one sight you’re almost certain to see. Young people, faces pressed against the estate agent’s window, trying and failing to find a home they can afford.” Sajid Javid’s words, in his speech launching the government’s latest white paper on housing, were rather unfortunate. The sight we’ve all been seeing on high streets this winter is the clusters of sleeping bags in doorways, the faces those of people failed so badly by society that they no longer have anywhere to live at all. This lack of understanding of what the housing crisis really is – not just thwarted aspirations of ownership, but squalor, overcrowding, evictions – sets the tone for this misfiring, misleading, self-contradicting paper.Continue Reading

NORWICH HOMELESSNESS: NOT JUST A PROBLEM FOR CHRISTMAS

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Community and tagged awareness raising, charity, christmas, cuts, EAT Norwich, homeless, homelessness, housing crisis, local politics, norfolk, Norfolk County Council, norwich, Norwich City Council, Norwich Open Christmas, Supporting People budget.

By James Anthony

As another Christmas passes us by, society suddenly remembers about the people living their lives on the streets. The cold weather and family focus of this time of year always seems to bring about fresh discussion, reports, and news concerning the issues around homelessness. Thankfully, much of the talk on the subject – especially on social media – is rather positive. This year I’ve seen a considerable number of friends and colleagues on Twitter and Facebook talking about admirable projects that provide food, care and company to those without a home during the Christmas period.

VAGABONDS, RASCALS, AND RUNAWAYS – A REVIEW OF CRUDE APACHE’S RICHARD III

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts, Community and tagged Andy Bennet, Apache, arts, charity, conscience, Donald Trump, dreams, Emmaus, homeless, immersive, interactive, Jenny Belsey, Joanna Swan, Nigel Farage, norfolk, norwich, play, preview, review, Richard III, Russell Turner, Shakespeare, Shelter, Shoe Factory Social Club, show, sinister, society, stage, theatre, tickets, Tim Lane, urban, violent.

by Hannah Rose

Director Tim Lane’s adaptation of Richard III is bone-chilling—and that’s not only down to the lack of heating in the Shoe Factory Social Club in Norwich. Shakespeare’s story of the wicked and rapacious King Richard is superbly located by Crude Apache in the disused factory space, which has been turned into a frightening vision of the future, an urban hinterland where people live in makeshift communities of cardboard boxes and behind wire fences. Exposed lights, metal girders and old sofas furbish the old factory; I could have been inside a modish bar in Hackney, or a punk squat in Berlin. The thumping techno beats made it all the more ethereal, and for a moment I was back at an illegal rave I once went to when I was twenty, except this one sold gin and tonics and cups of tea.Continue Reading

NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT – PREVIEW

Posted on November 23, 2016 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged Apache, arts, charity, Emmaus, homeless, norfolk, norwich, play, preview, Richard III, Shakespeare, Shelter, show, theatre, tickets, urban, violent.

by Hannah Rose

Now is the winter of our discontent
Richard III reimagined by The Crude Apache Theatre Company
23rd Nov – 3 December

The Crude Apache Theatre Company will be performing a striking adaptation of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty Richard III at the Shoe Factory Social Club in Norwich. A post-industrial dystopian world awaits audiences, as the Company prepares to throw them into this sinister tale of the power-mad and murderous.Continue Reading

homeless

THE HOLIDAY HOME PARADOX: WE LOVE CORNWALL BUT FEEL COMPELLED TO DESTROY IT

by Sarah Edgcumbe

OLD JERUSALEM AND JERICHO

PUNK 4 THE HOMELESS

“HI, HOW ARE YOU?”

GENERATION AIRBNB – SAN FRANCISCO

NORWICH HOMELESSNESS: NOT JUST A PROBLEM FOR CHRISTMAS

NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT – PREVIEW

Support the Radical

Subscribe

by Sarah Edgcumbe

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Support the Radical

Subscribe