Manchester's new homeless camp has good intentions. Is that enough?

By Jack Dulhanty

Thursday night on St Peter’s Square. Trams passing through are emptied and refilled, and rain falls so lightly it floats. A few feet from the porticoes of the Town Hall extension on the square’s West side, a woman called Emma Leyla Mohareb is dancing to grime music playing from a portable speaker that’s glowing in multicolour. She is joined by her infant son and a handful of homeless men.

There’s Declan, a 31-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who has been on and off the streets, in and out of prison, for five years; Frankie, a 36-year-old Iranian refugee, former Red Cross worker and journalist who has been homeless for the past three months; then Zac, a 34-year-old former businessman who has been homeless since 2022 and, with Emma — who isn’t homeless — works as a de facto organiser of the encampment of red £30 tents, lined under the porticoes.

The camp grew out of a protest against the government’s response to the conflict in Gaza. Emma was protesting with others in St Peter’s Square last month when she saw homeless people in sleeping bags under the porticoes, Manchester’s most visible social problem playing out right under the council’s nose. It gave her an idea. She organised a seven-night “sleep-in” protest, rallying fellow activists to join her living under the covered arches with people who were sleeping rough. She wanted to draw attention to both the government not halting arms sales to Israel and what she sees as its indifference to the homeless. 

‘Fund Our Communities Not Genocide’, as the demonstration came to be known, started on Friday 22nd March. By the time the seven days had passed, the camp had grown to include a larger number of homeless people, who were given tents by activists staying in the camp, or left tents by those returning home. “We started to realise we could make this a bigger thing for the homeless,” says Mary Kilduff, one of the original activists. “The homeless wanted to stay in the camp.”

“I didn’t want to say no,” Emma says. She’s from Hattersley in Tameside. As a child, she’d run away from home and spend nights in the city centre. “I didn’t like where I lived, I wanted to be away from there,” she says. 

She spent time with homeless people back then and was later a volunteer at the homeless camps that sprung up around the city centre (outside the town hall, in St Ann’s Square, under the Mancunian Way) in 2015. She chained herself to a fence outside the Midland Hotel during the 2015 Conservative Party conference, refusing to move until then-Prime Minister David Cameron left the city. Currently, she is studying law and running a community project called Reach 4 Change, which supports people in their old age. 

Over the last few weeks, the homeless camp has grown in size. There are around 20 tents under the porticoes opposite the tram stop and around half that number outside the police station on the other side. Those two locations are referred to as ‘Camp One’ and ‘Camp Two’. 

The camp isn’t just some ragtag collection of tents: it’s a Thing, that has its own Instagram account, @manchesterhomelesscamp, and even operates a waiting list for tents. 

Organisers say that council workers and police have tried to clear people out of the tents most mornings, and accuse them of acting aggressively — but “I think they have got less aggressive each day,” one activist with knowledge of the encampment says. Emma says the council cares more about the bad optics of the tents lining a big public square than they care about the people in them. “We’re showing people the homeless crisis,” she says.

During a speech outside the porticoes this week, Emma told a crowd: “We are going to continue our protest — well, not our protest, our community — and we’re going to continue getting tents, and continue helping the homeless, until Manchester City Council starts taking responsibility for who they have a duty of care to.” At one point she said, “it took me — Emma from Hattersley, who's got two children — to come to town and tell them that this is wrong.”

Emma makes it clear that she doesn’t think the camp is a long-term solution. The idea is to get the people living in it housed sooner by drawing attention to their situation. “I don’t want to see them in a tent,” Emma says. “I want to see them in accommodation.” But this strategy has concerned local homeless charities and the council, who say that vulnerable people and refugees are being caught up in a haphazard, unmanaged camp. 

“It’s irresponsible activism,” one charity boss, who asked not to be named, told me when I rang around homelessness charities in the city. “If I thought shouting at Andy Burnham, [deputy council leader] Joanna Midgeley and [council leader] Bev Craig would get these people housed, I’d do it.” 

They say that the camp won’t get anyone housed any quicker, and will more likely give mixed messages to the people living there about the services they’re entitled to and how to access them. Midgley told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that, so far, accommodation has been found for 38 people who were sleeping at the camp. She added that the support they received “was always available to them and not because they camped outside the town hall”. She says the camp has brought “a range of challenges, including political graffiti about a wide range of issues on the Town Hall and anti-social behaviour.”

There are different motivations within the camp and amongst the activists ostensibly in charge, but they all share good intentions. Emma wants the council to house people, seemingly without regard for the backlog that gets in the way of that. Mary wants to raise funds and be active on social media. Zak, who is himself homeless, is more focused on what’s happening on the ground.

“We’ve had a woman here who was pregnant, one guy with tachycardia, people who need care,” Zak tells me. Normally these people are scattered across the city in doorways and back alleys, he says. The camp means they can be more easily accessed and helped. But it doesn’t change the core problem. “We can’t offer them help to get off the streets,” Zak says. Only the council can do that. 

According to Zak, Andy Burnham has visited the camp several times. Burnham promised to end rough sleeping by 2020 when he first ran for the mayoralty, but that didn’t pan out. After several years of falling numbers, the official count recorded 149 people sleeping rough in Greater Manchester late last year, compared to 102 the year before. Burnham says this is a “direct result” of government policies, including freezing housing allowances and asylum policies.

Speaking to some of the homeless people living in the camp, you can see it has been a boon to them. Declan, the 31-year-old who has been regularly sleeping rough since 2019 (“it’s flown by, really”), says he prefers living this way to being alone on the streets. “Say something happens in one of the tents,” he tells me, “and I’m shouting ‘come on lads, help me out!’ Everyone would come to protect me.”

Declan has a previous conviction for arson and says he can’t be put in supported accommodation because he’s a risk to the public. “Manchester Council said ‘we’ve got no priority over you because of your charge’, Bolton Council have said it — where I used to live. They’re basically saying: you’re stuck. The system is just fucked.”

While we’re chatting, others come over and introduce themselves. Some of them stop Declan and ask if he’s OK talking to me. “I wouldn’t be talking, would I?” he replies. Jacqueline Draisey, who will be 50 on Father’s Day, slings her arm around Declan and says she’d like to speak to me next. I see Declan try to get out from under her arm. He seems annoyed; at multiple points during interviews, people get angry at me for being there and speaking to their fellow campmates.

I wonder aloud to Mary, an American software engineer and original camp activist, about the safety implications of so many vulnerable people living in such proximity. She admits there is one man, with a previous conviction for murder, who has come by a few times and tried to drag people out of tents, particularly people of colour. “Other than that,” she says, reigning her dog Heidi in on her lead, “they’re pretty self-policing.” 

Mary has been leading the camp’s fundraising drive; money which gets spent on tents. She says Mustard Tree, a local homeless charity, has tried to do a deal with Manchester City Council in which homeless people can trade in their tents for accommodation. But, she says, when homeless people did this, they ended up back at the camp, out of a tent. When I contacted Mustard Tree about this they said: “No, we are not asking people to give up their tents.”

The charity also suggested that in the case of asylum seekers specifically, the encampment is perpetuating rough sleeping. “We have found that people sleeping outside the Town Hall have little information around housing options, after receiving their Leave to Remain status by the Home Office,” a spokesperson tells me. “This has led to uncertainty and hopelessness which means some people have no option but to sleep rough.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the organisers of the camp have found the task challenging. None of them works for a homelessness charity and differences have emerged about how the camp should run. On Thursday, Mary dramatically quit the group, posting a tearful video on TikTok that suggested there had been some sort of falling out. “This what you get when you try to help. And you get this from your own fucking leader, too,” she says. 

Emma says Mary was trying too hard to professionalise the camp. She wanted to send out press releases and hold “mapping meetings” where the “OG Manchester Homeless Crew” could discuss broader strategic goals. “She was trying to overwhelm the group,” Emma says. “I let her do the Instagram, I let her do the fundraising,” but, she says: “Mary has decided, because she can't have the mapping meeting, that she doesn't want to do fundraising anymore. Which to me shows, well, did you even have an interest in helping the homeless people?”

Mary never gives me her side of things, but posted on her Instagram story that she won’t “let people verbally abuse me anymore,” and that the behaviour of the OG Manchester Homeless Crew is toxic. 

For the camp’s critics, the row encapsulates the core problem: an idea like this might be well-meaning, but that doesn’t make it the right way to tackle one of urban society’s most complex challenges. “The level of seriousness is not appropriate,” says the charity boss about the camp organisers. “This is people’s lives.” 

The homeless camp resident Jacqueline tells me that she’s just got out of prison and has landed back on the streets. We are sitting on the benches by the tram stop with a full view of the porticoes and the encampment. I count around 20 tents within view. In one, a man and woman lie on their sides and look out onto the square, tranquil. Three men sit in a rough triangle on the floor beside one of the tents and don’t speak. On the side closest to the cenotaph, the tents suddenly stop, and a girl who looks to be in her 20s lies on the bare floor in a heap, rising only to smoke. 

“Jail saved my life,” Jacqueline says. “It got me off all the drugs.” She says this camp is “drug-free”, but adds that everyone is drinking. She also says that, earlier, she smoked some of a spliff, but isn't going near any crack. At one point, speaking to Emma on the phone when she’s at the camp, I hear her sing “Spice Up Your Life” to a group leaving the camp to smoke spice, the synthetic, once-legal high. 

Emma says she has told the homeless on the camp that she can’t stop them using drugs, but asks they do it away from their tents or else “I won’t be happy about that”. Some of the people living in the camp don’t speak English or don’t want to speak to me, and mostly sit in the mouths of their tents watching passersby or sleeping. Sellotaped to one tent is a poster reading “Homeless not Heartless”, and on the wall behind someone has scratched the name Winston Churchill. 

“I don’t think it’ll be here forever,” Declan says of the camp. 

“Do you want it to be here forever?” I ask.

“It’s the only option I’ve got,” he says. “And it keeps you out of the rain.”