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Yes, You Can Surf Where You Live
For 15 months the author walked around London, telling the story of its streets, speaking to living statues, sex workers, drug dealers, security guards, cleaners and those who sleep out every night
On a damp Tuesday lunchtime at the north end of Regent Street, George is working his beat as one of one of London’s Big Issue sellers. I have not come to interview him, but his experience is so relevant to what I will be talking about for the next two hours that I feel duty-bound to ask him about his life, and how things have been in the past 15 months.
When he is not in the centre of the city, he tells me, he lives in a hostel for homeless people near Canary Wharf, five or six miles to the east. “Lockdown was hard,” he says, “’cos I couldn’t sell the magazine, and I needed to pay rent to the hostel. And the isolation was really difficult: a little room, and I had to pretty much stay in there, and only go out for, like, an hour a day. I went for weeks on end not speaking to anyone.” Does he have family? “No, no. Not in London. My parents are dead; my brother and sister are abroad. One in Canada, one in Australia. So it’s been isolating, you know?”
