If I ruled London, by John Smallshaw

John Smallshaw leads walking tours for the social enterprise Unseen Tours, but he is no ordinary tour guide. After leaving his home in Lancashire at the age of 15, he soon found himself homeless in London, a situation he was in for several decades. Now off the streets and having overcome problems with drugs, he uses his knowledge of the London Bridge area to take people on unique walks. He also writes poetry and has read his work on BBC Radio 4 and at the BBC’s Poetry Slam at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Here he tells us how he would make London a better city.

If I was given a few million pounds to do something of benefit to Londoners, I’d do a survey of all the empty properties, and the ones that have been empty for five years or longer I would purchase at the minimum price and turn into places where people could live to get them off the streets. Boris Johnson promised to do it before the Olympics, and it never happened.

Gentrification is a move in the right direction. I don’t know if they’ve gone too far and lost the feeling of the East End, but 20 to 25 years ago you couldn’t walk down the street without being offered heroin or crack cocaine. That’s all gone very deep underground, it’s certainly not on the streets anymore. There are a lot of nice shops but they have kept the old Ridley Road market going which is really nice. There may be posh houses in Hackney and people talking with plums in their mouths, but there are real people still there.

I lived in and around Hackney for 15 years when I was married. I’m going back 20 to 30 years, before all the tower blocks were blown up of course. It’s vastly changed, it used to be full of factories once, and a hub of activity and industry. I live on the 21st floor and I’m just looking at the Olympic stadium now. [The Olympics] were absolutely fantastic and a great get together of people in the area watching the screens in the park, there was a really good atmosphere. As soon as it was over of course all the police disappeared, they stopped cleaning the pavements and it became a ghost town. What I’d say about the legacy of the Olympics is that there are more and more homeless people sleeping in the old shopping mall. People flock to Stratford for whatever reason, whether it’s to try and get a job or just to be around a lot of people and beg, but when I finish work and come through sometimes at 1 or 2 in the morning, there are maybe 40 or 50 people sleeping on cardboard inside the shopping mall.

I’m looking out at all these new blocks being put up, and between these new blocks I can see the old tower blocks that have been almost empty for years and years, the ones you never saw on the Olympic coverage, probably because the council is ashamed that they’re still standing.

I think the council massages the figures. It suits the council to have people claiming benefits, absolutely. They get a payout from central government, and they get European money. I can’t understand all the empty properties, because if I’m looking at these three buildings and let’s say there’s 100 flats in each block, or maybe 120, that’s 360 flats multiplied by three people, that’s nearly 1,000 people who could be housed. And at present probably 40 flats are being used.

The greatest thing someone can do to help a homeless person is offer them hope. I linked into a great charity called the House of St. Barnabas and they changed my entire outlook on life. Now I’m working full time which is something I hadn’t done for years and years. I work as a kitchen porter, it’s probably one of the worst jobs you could get but I’m quite happy because I’m earning slightly more than if I was signing on. I’m not making vast sums of money but there is that sense of self-worth.

I don’t like to see young people begging. They don’t make tramps like they used to, for instance the old boy in the scruffy clothes and the bottle of meths. Now I mainly see young people with a dog, and I think, you should be up and trying to do something. And I’m not judging them, I understand how helpless they feel sometimes.

I would ban drinking alcohol from the streets. That’s one of the biggest plights I see today and I’m not talking about homeless people, just people who sit in public spaces drinking alcohol and creating a nuisance. I think that’s an old fashioned thing really, I could see my father saying that.

If I had to encourage people to visit, I’d describe London as a bright, green city with a great future. I’d recommend all the tourist places of course, and then the offbeat places like walking down by the river by the old docks, near Greenwich where the old Woolwich railway is, historical London.

I do the London Bridge tour for Unseen Tours. I was homeless in London Bridge 40 years ago. I worked in the old market when it was a fruit and veg market on a casual basis. People did not want to live in London Bridge or Southwark then, they were moving out. There were many many empty properties and we needed somewhere to sleep, so we’d kick in a door and sleep in an old house or an old factory. Even black cabs didn’t want to go south of the river, it was that bad. But someone must have been buying up the properties, because now people are flocking to the area and millions of pounds are being spent there. And funnily enough they don’t seem to have touched the sewer system because it bloody stinks. But that’s the way isn’t it, everything on show and underneath it’s falling to bits.

My favourite parts to show people on the tour are the Winchester Palace down Clink Street, where the old prison used to be. Although I don’t get over to this part, I love where the old Marshalsea prison was, and where Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was set. There is so much history over there. I tend to do the same route and I keep things light, it’s more of an eccentric tour with historical facts, but with my spin on them.

If I could start an awards ceremony I’d give awards to charities like Crisis and Shelter. We all know Pret do sandwiches at Christmas [that include a donation to homeless charities], but homeless people generally can go into any Pret and be given a coffee and a sandwich, and that’s something that’s not spoken about. At the end of the day places like Pret and Eat give all the sandwiches they haven’t sold to a collection point, which are then served to charities. It’s nice that there are people like this and they don’t blow a trumpet about it, they just do it.

In a utopian London there is employment. I could say no resentment amongst different cultures and everyone getting on with everyone else, but that really would be utopia. Give everyone a job, and give everyone the chance to have a job.



Read John’s poetry here.