Open door policy

Last September the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggested that homeless people be euthanised via involuntary lethal injection. This was not a crass joke but an earnest policy recommendation. Kilmeade was upping the ante after his co-host, Lawrence Jones, called for the unhoused population to be incarcerated if they don’t accept public service provisions. “Just kill ‘em,” Kilmeade countered.

Kilmeade later apologised but many were left wondering how this new moral low had been reached. In London, Matt and Jess Turtle decided to find out.

The Turtles are the remarkable couple behind the Museum of Homelessness (MoH), which opened next to Manor House tube station two years ago. The MoH is more than a museum. It’s a place where people experiencing homelessness can sleep, seek advice, even get help to bury their pets. Non-homeless visitors can meet homeless people there and chat with them without a begging interaction. Matt and Jess Turtle also embark on epic feats of public documentation. Every year the MoH holds a vigil on the steps of Trafalgar Square’s St Martin-in-the-Fields, commemorating the homeless dead. The data on these deaths, which largely evades official statistics is painstakingly accrued: the mortality rate for 2025 was 1,611.

This month the MoH launched a new show called Criminal: An Untold History of Resistance and Survival. Its aim is to detail the advent of Britain’s criminalised homeless during the enclosures of the 1600s and illustrate how the story of homelessness and the story of empire are not separate. Criminal also features an original sculpture from 10Foot, “London’s most notorious graffiti writer”.

“Museum of Homelessness is a rare institution that gives material solidarity,” 10Foot tells me over the phone from Paris. 10Foot’s first-ever sculpture takes the shape of a skip, made from three-spike palisade fencing, inside of which a hawthorn, a shrub used to enclose the land in the 1600s, has been planted.

“Art needs socio-political intent, especially at this moment. A lot of ‘art’ in London feels like homeware for the global elite,” he says. The MoH “go upstream to the cause, they trace the origins of dispossession and hence classism, racism and homelessness. This is the very analysis we are missing; it’s an important show.”

I arrive in the heat. Visitors have parked themselves on the “anti-hostile architecture” erected for the show. A little path weaves around large metal panels explaining the 1597 Vagabonds Act, and the colour-coded maps of Charles Booth, and Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. On the trees hang antisocial behaviour injunctions transformed into Buddhist prayer flags.

I’m met by Jess, who grew up in a radical housing group called the Wallich. Jess isn’t the type to piss about. She immediately starts telling me about how the far right is weaponising homelessness to stoke racial divisions. Matt is playing chess with an organiser from a renters’ union; the game finishes and he joins us. Jess calls the exhibition, with its relaxed, picturesque garden, an “antidote” to the important but often quite bleak work of the museum. The key, Matt says, is to “not shy away from some of the difficulties, and not sugar-coat things, but also to highlight community building, togetherness, creativity and compassion”.

Much of the exhibition is about linking history, he says, connecting “things like the joint stock companies that transported homeless people to parts of the emerging British empire [and] the CEO of St Mungo’s.”

Inside the museum I meet Surfing Sofas, the MoH’s poet in residence. Visitors are invited to sit down with him and make a zine together. Surfing Sofas was homeless for more than a decade. He has recently moved into a flat but there was a flood and now his kitchen is covered in mould. As he talks, he carefully extracts a pink tulip cut from a copy of Vogue using a scalpel.

Has homelessness made you resilient?

“It instilled a level of patience,” he says, “it’s been a long waiting game.” It has also made him highly familiar with rejection, a more or less constant facet of homeless life. “Studies have shown that the brain processes rejection in the same way it processes a knife wound,” he says. “I’ve tried to get out of my situation a number of times, and I feel like I’ve always been left to slip through the cracks…” At that, he gets slightly choked up. “Is it resilience?” He asks himself, “or is it numbness?” Then he recites a poem. One line in particular sticks with me: “They say home is where the heart is. But I do not have a home.”

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