Ending homelessness for good will mean doing so in all communities across the United Kingdom. Although homelessness is disproportionately concentrated in urban areas, we need to address rural homelessness, too.

Rural homelessness has increased by 40% in the past five years, according to research by the countryside charity CPRE. It found that the average house price in rural England was £419,000 in the final quarter of 2022, compared to average rural earnings of just £25,600 a year.

Homelessness in rural areas has a very distinct profile. For individuals and families at risk of or impacted by homelessness, the experience can be very different from that in larger towns or cities. Often rural homelessness is hidden from sight, as research led by the University of Kent has shown.

This is the reason that, in partnership with the Rural Counts Coalition, we have added a collection of photographs of people going through homelessness in rural areas to our free library of images of homelessness. This is the world’s first open source bank of non-stigmatising images of homelessness. 

Images can shape our thinking of an issue much more powerfully than words, and research suggests that is particularly powerful with homelessness. So realistic images of homelessness play a crucial role in fostering understanding and countering misunderstanding and stereotyping.

As we photographed people experiencing homelessness in villages or market towns, or sometimes in areas of countryside a long way from settlements of any sort, they told us some of the challenges they faced that are particular to rural homelessness. In areas popular with visitors, holiday lets and second homes add to shortages of affordable housing.

‘People tarnish you … people just judge’

One of the views commonly associated with a romanticised image of rural life in Shaftesbury, Dorset, where an iconic television advertisement for Hovis bread filmed in its steep cobbled street, Gold Hill, in the 1970s.

Among the most poignant images in our collection is of Chris Hardy, 40, who is from Shaftesbury and has been sleeping on friends’ sofas or in a tent for more than a year. Chris told us that the stigma associated with homelessness has a keener edge in an area of relative wealth and where many people know or recognise one another. And homelessness in a rural community can be especially isolating.

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'People tarnish you and think if you are homeless you are bound to be on drink or drugs, which I’m not,’ Chris said. ‘It is a challenge every day just to keep yourself watered and fed, let alone all the rest of it. I think people just judge, and they don’t really give anyone a chance. The area is quite snooty as it is.’ 

He added: ‘It’s just that within yourself you are so miserable you don’t really know what to do next for each day. Nights roll into days and days roll into nights, it is constant. ‘

Distances and the cost and time it takes to get around were big barriers to him, he said, both in getting access to support or limited opportunities to find supported accommodation or social housing. Chris was accessing support through Shelter Dorset, who provide support and Housing First across rural communities in the county.

‘To get support it means you have got to get on the train,’ Chris said. ‘You have got to get to Gillingham first. Stuff that you want to go and do or organise, you can’t just go there and come back because the day runs out so you have to think in terms of two days’ travelling.

The buses take forever to get there - two or three hours, because they go around all the little spots. To get to Weymouth from here is probably longer than that.’  

‘The storm hit - I’m in the lap of the gods now’

Franc Bryson, 65, who we met in West Sussex after he was connected to support and housing through the charity Turning Tides, described what it’s like to sleep out in a wood in the depths of winter, in biting cold or, occasionally, a ferocious storm.

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Franc said: ‘I would go to the library, mostly to charge my gadgets and get out of the cold. I would check the weather. One time I saw there was a storm coming, in fact two storms, back to back, with gusts up to 90 miles per hour.

‘I thought I should go back to the camp and I went round checking everything was fixed and tied down and then I fell asleep. I woke at four in the morning and the trees were swaying, the hammock was swaying side to side. I thought, ‘this will be the storm then’. And I thought, ‘I’m in the lap of the gods now’.’

The storm did pass, but it was a stressful ordeal. Another time, Franc recalled: ‘In the winter it was minus 6 or 7 degrees and I could see the condensation on my breath and then it froze. There was a filigree of ice on the inside of the sheet.’

The stories underline the isolation of rural homelessness, which can combine with stigma to push people from accessing support. For example, in towns and cities the provision of emergency accommodation in extreme temperatures, known as the Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP), is widely accessed. But Franc’s story of rural isolation shows even these limited interventions may not reach the people who need them. The same is too often true for the range of support services and housing options we know are required to end homelessness for good. 

Co-producing our collection

As we have with all the images in our collection, these photographs were co-created with the participants. We asked them to suggest locations where they would like to be photographed and we showed them digital images in the camera viewer during the photoshoot and deleted any they didn’t like. Participants were able to drop out of the project and not have their photographs used if they wished. We sought to put dignity and co-production at the core of this work. 

We would particularly like to thank the Ferry Project in Fenland, Shelter Dorset, and Turning Tides in West Sussex for supporting this work. Our collection of images of rural homelessness has been added to our image library, which is free to use. We hope that anyone writing about or reporting on homelessness - especially in the media - will use these images and by doing so help to create a more accurate public understanding of homelessness that aligns with evidence. 

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• Greg Hurst is Director of Communications and Public Engagement at the Centre for Homelessness Impact
• View and download the new rural collection here

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