A double decker bus has been converted into a shelter for homeless people seeking refuge from the cold winter.
Sammy Barcroft and Joanna Vines, from the Rucksack Project, a community-led initiative which asks the public to donate a rucksack containing essentials to people on the streets, came up with a solution to the homelessness crisis.
“Someone suggested to me in 2016, ‘why don’t you get a bus and convert it into a homeless shelter?’” Ms Vines told the Metro.
“In January I put a plea out on social media saying, ‘Would anyone like to offer me a bus?’ and I got three offers,” she said.
Stagecoach, a bus company, offered a 20-year-old double-decker bus which had been due to be scrapped.
Ms Vines accepted the bus and began the transformation, which took eight months to complete and cost around £6,000, raised through donations and crowdfunding.
“I parked it up in Fareham near me, and then put out a plea like DIY SOS to fit a kitchen, bunk beds, etc,” she said.
Between 70 and 80 volunteers, including local electricians and plumbers, came together to help out and a college in Portsmouth offered to create bunk beds.
A local housing association even provided a kitchen.
The bus, currently parked at St Agatha’s Church in Portsmouth, is now a shelter with 12 bunk beds, a living room and a kitchenette.
It will be run by a local church as part of its Robert Dolling Project, which supports homeless people in the area.
Figures released by the charity Shelter show more than 300,000 people in Britain, roughly equivalent to one in every 200, are officially recorded as homeless or living in inadequate homes.
Freezing temperatures in winter, as well as wind, rain and snow, leave those with nowhere warm to stay in a life-threatening situation, at risk of exposure and hypothermia.
