Coronavirus prompted an emergency operation to house rough sleepers in Travelodges and Holiday Inns. In many ways it has been a success – but what happens next?
To begin with, Clare Sutcliffe found the shift from sleeping in a doorway in Soho to a king-size bed in a central-London hotel very disorientating. After 15 months sleeping rough, she found it hard to relax and really believe she was in a safe space.
“The first couple of nights, I couldn’t sleep with the light off,” she says. “This might sound mad, but I was a bit scared. It was different; when you’re used to sleeping out in the open outside and then all of a sudden you’re in a bed, in a room, with a door that shuts.” When she arrived at the hotel five weeks ago, she was a skeletal six-and-a-half stone; since then, with three meals delivered to her room every day, her health has begun to improve.
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