You have to be fast to survive on the streets, they say. That’s one thing Richard Curtis is not. Panting and stopping every 10 metres to catch his breath, Curtis drags his suitcase through the brown slush in Covent Garden on Wednesday night on his way to a weekly street handout.

With an air temperature of -4C, for Curtis it was like trying to breathe soup. The 66-year-old suffers from lung disease – stage IV chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – which cold air and large changes in temperature can badly aggravate. For a rough sleeper on the coldest week of winter, it is a major handicap.

“The cold makes life very difficult for me,” he croaks, in a toothless high-pitched whisper. “Because with this lifestyle – if it is a lifestyle – you need to be very active. There’s certain places where there’s the street handouts, there’s certain places where things happen at a certain time of day, so you need to move around. And if you’re slow you’ll just miss it.”

The “beast from the east”, which brought snow and a deep freeze this week, has caused chaos across Britain. But few will have felt its impact more than the thousands of homeless people on the streets.

Government figures claim there are just 4,750 people sleeping rough on a given night, but homeless charity workers are critical of the methodology behind the count. Crisis estimates there are about 8,000 sleeping on the street, plus another 8,000 hidden homeless who snatch their sleep in toilets or cars or public transport. Add in those who are sofa surfing or living in hostels or squats and the true figure balloons to 144,000, the charity says.

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With so much unacknowledged pressure on the system, even those as vulnerable as Curtis may find themselves without the support they need. A week earlier, Curtis had to leave University Collegehospital, in Euston, at the end of a three-night stay caused by an exacerbation of his lung disease. He cannot understand why doctors discharged him to a situation likely to send him back sooner rather than later. Yet, kitted out with a host of inhalers and corticosteroids, he carried a letter that explained his position in the starkest terms: “Discharged to the streets.”

It was the third time in as many months Curtis had been admitted for his breathing, according to medical notes he shared with the Guardian. He also has other ailments, which he says have led to many more hospital visits and stays. Stress incontinence caused by an enlarged prostate means he can barely stray more than a few metres from a toilet, which means spending much of his time loitering in McDonald’s.



Last summer, he says, he nearly lost both legs when cellulitis in them became infected, turning into large, weeping ulcers. Antibiotics cleared the bug. He has a medical record of heart failure.

Curtis spent five nights on the streets after his last discharge. Then on Monday, as emergency shelters opened in response to the freezing weather, he found a place in the Whitechapel Mission, an independent charity in east London. We met in the common room on Wednesday morning, just after breakfast.

It was warm, yet Curtis’s bespectacled, unshaven face peered out from beneath a hood and woolly hat, and he was wrapped in a coat. “Slept in the West End, and I went down to Stratford one night … Just for a change of scene more than anything else.

“Anyway, Monday I was here and I was told quietly they were going to open this up again as an emergency shelter … Great. So I came here Monday night. We slept up in the church upstairs. I was sleeping on two settees up there. I thought: hang on, I’m sofa surfing in a church!

“I was here Monday night, Tuesday night. I will be here tonight, obviously. How long this lasts? Just until the beast has gone, then back to where I was.”

Curtis had run out of salbutamol, which fuels his inhaler. That meant a trip to Euston, where Camden council runs a drop-in clinic for homeless people. It is there that Curtis has been able to set up a post box to receive letters from the hospital. Getting there involved a stop-start trek through the snow to catch the 205 bus, then a long ride through central London.

As we travelled, Curtis explained his housing difficulties. He said he had several times been in contact with Pathway, a homeless healthcare charity working in hospitals. They had helped him to find a hostel but he claimed that each time he had been asked to leave. He called the Camden hostel a “dumping ground” and accused staff of excessive bureaucracy, including asking him for his passport. “You try getting a passport when you’ve got no address,” he said. “It’s impossible!”

A case worker at the mission had been trying to find him a place elsewhere. Beds were available, but nowhere would take him on once they learned of his health problems, he said.

Back at Whitechapel Mission, Tony Miller, the director, explained that Curtis’s problems were perhaps more complex than he admitted. “There are places which are specifically designed for high need and there are places that are specifically for low need, so that can be an issue,” Miller said. “… Most of the people have got complex needs and it’s not just as simple as a hostel.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A homeless person’s makeshift shelter on a street in London. Photograph: Jack Dredd/Rex/Shutterstock

Curtis is 20 months into this latest period of homelessness, which he fell into amid the stress of caring for his dying partner. He has a 32-year history of sleeping rough, on and off, after going off the rails with drink in his 30s. “I’ve kind of got used to it – ‘entrenched’, I think is the common term,” he said.

“Maybe you could say at some stage it was an escape from reality. It was, for some people, it was a refuge, away from all the bad things happening in their lives. To a certain extent you can even take control, in the sense that, get up when you want, go to sleep when you want, eat when you want.

“The social norms that are there – got to eat at breakfast, dinner time, you know? You can make it different. There’s a certain amount of camaraderie to it. There’s a certain amount of subculture to it. But in fact, when you look at the bigger picture, all homelessness is a – imagine you had a microscope, and all you did was turn it round. What is it? Society looking at itself. That’s all it is.”

According to research by Homeless Link, 78% of people who are homeless report having a physical health condition, compared with 37% of the general population.

“Sleeping rough is dangerous and bad for people’s physical and mental health at any time of year,” says Rick Henderson, Homeless Link’s chief executive. “But the risks are even greater in freezing weather conditions like those we are currently experiencing.”

That night and the night after, Curtis had a hot meal and a warm bed. But on Friday, with more snow forecast, he got in touch via Twitter. Circumstances had changed: “Shelter closed back on streets. How long before need medical attention again? Here we go back on roundabout!”

• This article was amended on 7 March 2018 to correctly describe the charity Pathway and the nature of the assistance they gave to Richard Curtis.

