With pink lipstick and freshly brushed hair, an attractive woman queues to buy a cup of coffee at a restaurant overlooking the departure hall of Britain’s biggest and busiest airport. It is just before 7am, and the passengers ahead of her at Costa will soon be rushing to catch their flights all over the world. Yet Eram Dar has no passport and no ticket. What’s more, she isn’t in a hurry to go anywhere. Eram’s home is Heathrow’s Terminal One. Over the past year and a half, she has lived at the airport with all her possessions in a blue canvas bag. Today, she plans to do a bit of window shopping at the airport’s stores and, perhaps, buy a bowl of pasta for lunch. She often finds a discarded newspaper and reads it to while away the day.
As night falls, she will sleep on the floor between an American Express currency exchange booth and a Wall’s ice-cream vending machine on a corridor that leads to Terminal One from the underground. She says simply and in a middle-class English accent: ‘Living at Heathrow is like being in a good hotel. It is warm, very clean and you don’t get bothered. I think I’m very lucky to be here. ‘I sleep in the same spot every night, if another person hasn’t grabbed it first. Sometimes the airport passengers peer down at me as they walk by. The night cleaners mop and brush around me. I just close my eyes and put my scarf over my head to block them all out.’ Eram is one of an astonishing number of people who, it was revealed this week, live at Heathrow. It is a scenario reminiscent of Stephen Spielberg’s film, The Terminal, which starred Tom Hanks as a stateless Eastern European tourist who sets up home at New York’s JFK airport after his own country is erased from the map by war.
Over the past three months, it has been discovered that 111 people are sleeping permanently at Heathrow, and the numbers are growing – 20 homeless are believed to be living at Gatwick and more are expected.
With all the security and surveillance in place at this airport, how in the world can this happen. I thought this story was another BS Daily Mail piece, until I ran across this in Time Magazine.
Should be living in an airport:
http://tinyurl.com/47dald
Mister Ketchup, I think I threw up in the back of my mouth.
Interesting none the less, but the bigger issue at hand is homeless people.
What does happen with the homeless? It seems they are mostly “illegal?” Can’t sleep on park benches, on the beach, in National Parks, in libraries, illegal to loiter. I googled my local services and it seems they provide meals but no overnight unless you are an abused woman.
I’ve seen stories (10 years ago?) about homeless veterans preferring street grates to the crime that takes place in homeless shelters but right now, I can’t really find any homeless shelters. Do the cops take you there after you get arrested for being homeless??
Depressing to think about.
As far as homeless shelters go, they could do far worse than airports. What people may not realise is that airports are increasingly becoming the preferred holiday accomodation for budget travellers…
http://www.sleepinginairports.net/
It’s better than living on Skid Row.
Have you seen what house prices are like in Britain? Houses in every area in UK have doubled since 1997. And even a really basic flat in London can cost £260,000, that is over half a million US dollars.
No wonder so many people are homeless now.
It is all artificial of course. Labour, traditionally the working class party, needed to appeal to middle-class voters, so they kept ramping up the housing market to benefit house-owners.
Meanwhile, they make lots of crazy planning laws, so no one can build any new houses, and due to taxes, no one wants to refurbish the hundreds of thousands of empty houses.
#6 – That was a real buzz kill. You’d think some of oil companies could spend their profits on the homeless children at least.
#6. Jager- good link.
>>God: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGV_FpKP2ro
Uh-on, Mr. Meister.
You’re risking the standard dvorak dot org slash blog spiritual beat-down if you go posting this kind of stuff.
Any suggestion that people of faith are anything other than callow dishonest money-grubbing hypocrites, abortion-doctor shooters, or honor-killing monsters is dealt with very harshly here.
Did anyone notice the guy on the bench looks like John?
San Francisco is famous for its panhandlers, but it pales in comparison to Paris.
http://modele-social.blogspot.com/
The fact is, even with a safety net, there is a percentage of any society that prefers to live on the streets. The vast majority of these people have chemical dependencies or have severe mental health issues. In the US we cannot lock people up for those reasons, so the problem will not go away.
#10:
Actually, no. It is a sad fact that most of the big churches are run by crooks, but as far as I can tell, Larry Jones Ministries seems to be on the up and up. He gives me some hope that not all TV preachers are full of evil.
#5 – edwinrogers
Interesting link. It sounds like Charles de Gaulle is a dump.
#10 – McCullough
Thanks. 🙂
#11 – Mister Mustard
The religious organizations just provide band aid, not a solution. The city should have solved this problem a long time ago.
I would bet this happens at 24/7 big box stores and public colleges too.
Sad, but homeless people are now a fact of life in all cities.
You would think that local and state governments would do something beyond having the police roust them.
Long run, probably be cheaper to put them in an apartment, clean them up, send them to school to learn a trade (unless they alread have a trade) and put them to work.
Either with local companies, the city, or county.
But no! Our government will dump billions and billions of dollars on companies that should be left alone to go out of business!