Back in 1966, while England was celebrating winning the World Cup, I spent the summer on a more sobering mission, exploring the slums of our major cities.
There I discovered another, less happy country: thousands of families packed into crumbling houses ; 30 or more people sharing one tap and one toilet; damp stripping the wallpaper from the walls and entrenching itself in clothing and bedding; hovels infested with mice and rats.
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
I looked into the desperate and exhausted faces of young mothers trying to keep their families together in one overcrowded and unhealthy room. I saw kids, already world-weary, with no space to play, bedevilled by ill-health or, worse, driven to delinquency, as their lives were wrecked by conditions that made it impossible for them to thrive.
What I was uncovering was the human face of shocking official statistics, notably that 3 million families were living in slums or grossly overcrowded conditions, and 1.4 million occupied houses were unfit for human habitation.
In a report to my co-founders that became known as The Green Book, I exposed a national scandal and developed the plan for Shelter.
We would, I wrote, declare “a national emergency” . We would be more than just a charity, not just raising funds to help the homeless, but campaigning, too, about the need for more investment in housing.
Shelter was launched on 1 December 1966, a couple of weeks after the BBC had, coincidentally, screened Cathy Come Home. We quickly became the new face of charity, compassionate but angry. By the time I retired from Shelter in 1971 I had every reason to believe we had built the foundations for a better-housed country.
Who would have believed that 50 years later – in 2016 – the words “national emergency” would apply once more?
Once more we face a desperate need for affordable homes. Families are living in overcrowded and terrible conditions. Renters are unable to cover their costs and living in fear of eviction. The young have virtually no prospect of owning a home of their own.
Once more, Shelter identifies a national emergency and calls for emphatic action.I hope the country will respond to its urgent rallying call with the same combination of anger and compassion with which it supported our work 50 years ago.
Des Wilson was co-founder and first director of Shelter.
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