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

DISPOSSESION: THE GREAT SOCIAL HOUSING SWINDLE

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged Benefits Street, Community, council housing, Dispossession, documentary, film, food banks, Glasgow, homelessness, housing estates, Jan McLachlan, Karen Cully, london, Maxine Peake, Nottingham, Paul Sng, poverty porn, public service cuts, Radical Routes, Samir Jeraj, screening, social housing, social isolation, Su Langdon, The Great Social Housing Swindle, The People's Picnic, The Rent Trap.

by Eli Lambe

Released shortly before the disaster at Grenfell, Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle is a timely and balanced exploration of the factors that led to the tragedy, and to the wider social cleansing of working class and low income communities throughout the UK. Introducing the film to a packed room in Norwich’s Cinema City, director Paul Sng emphasised the need to counter the “media culture of denigrating people who live in social housing”. The goal of the film, for Sng, was to show that people living in these estates and situations are valuable in themselves, and that the communities that exist there are important and should be preserved, as well as highlighting how this is overshadowed constantly by the prioritisation of profit and private sector gains.

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