Rachel*, a 40-year-old lawyer, knows what it’s like to find yourself on the streets of London with nowhere to go in winter. Thrown into homelessness after escaping an exploitative living situation, she ended up in St Pancras station for more than a week, relying on food handouts and relentlessly contacting charities and housing organisations in the desperate hope of finding sanctuary.

“I couldn’t quite believe how I’d fallen so far, so fast,” she tells Stylist from a women’s respite shelter run by the Single Homeless Project (SHP), where she now has an emergency bed. “When you’re sitting there upright because there’s nowhere comfortable to lie, and you’re too afraid to go to sleep in case something happens to you, you start to lose all hope. I was never sure I’d make it through the night.” 

Rachel is just one of thousands of people who have found themselves at the sharp end of several crises this year. In London alone, there were more rough sleepers from July to September than in any three-month period before, half of them homeless for the first time. In October, Citizens Advice helped more than 8,000 people with homelessness issues – the charity’s highest figure on record for a single month.  

A critical lack of affordable housing in the capital has only been worsened by the cost of living crisis and soaring numbers of Section 21 no-fault evictions. In the first quarter of 2023, the number of households made homeless as a result of landlords selling up or raising their rent rose by 27%, according to government data. But even these worrying figures don’t tell the full story, because homeless women, especially, are falling through the cracks.

Women make up two-thirds of what specialist services call the ‘hidden homeless’ population: those not officially counted as rough sleepers because they’re not seen bedding down in the open. 

“The press and public often hold a standard image of someone who is homeless: a middle-aged, usually white, man with a dog, sitting on the pavement. This image is far from the truth,” explains a spokesperson from the Marylebone Project (TMP), the UK’s only women-only homelessness service that’s open 24/7 and 365 days a year. “When women find themselves without shelter, they will often choose places to rest that are populated, or are pushed into unsafe situations like engaging in sex work or going back to a dangerous partner.” 

They cite the first Women’s Rough Sleeping Census, conducted by several organisations in 2022, which found that women with nowhere to go were riding night buses, sheltering in stations and hiding in supermarket car parks to feel less vulnerable. 

“Rough sleeping is incredibly dangerous for women,” says Francesca Albanese, executive director of policy and social change at Crisis. “They’re often exposed to frightening levels of sexual harassment, abuse and violence, which forces them to hide out of sight and away from the support they need to leave the streets behind.”

This catch-22 is exactly what organisations like SHP, TMP and Crisis are working tirelessly to tackle, as we head into what is set to be the worst winter yet for homelessness in the UK. Joanna, a staff member at TMP who has lived experience of homelessness herself, says that now more than ever there must be an awareness that homelessness is a universally pressing issue – and that it can happen to anyone. 

“All it takes is job loss, relationship breakdown or bereavement,” she says. “Think about how it would feel if it happened to you. If you lost everything: your home, your safety, people around you that you trust, your work, clean running water to wash in, your belongings, your peace of mind.” 

“If you were in this situation, really in it right now, wouldn’t you want somewhere safe to go? Not tomorrow, meaning tonight you’ll have to risk being attacked on the street, have to bed down on a filthy, hard pavement, exposed, terrified and alone,” Joanna says. 

“It comes down to valuing people, and saying every person’s life has value. We are all people with dreams and hopes and desire, and no one should be out on the street suffering.”

Frontline workers understand that overcoming homelessness is about more than just providing shelter; that tackling the deep-rooted inequality forcing so many women onto the street is key. But they are united in their belief that drastic governmental intervention is needed to increase the amount of safe, affordable housing available to people in the UK – especially in London, where overcrowding and skyrocketing rents are still going unchecked.  

Joanna is one of many fighting for change, knowing what it’s like to constantly come up against the red tape and barriers to rebuilding your life. “The women we have the honour to support are consistently solving their own problems, finding ways to overcome, staying strong, being resilient, battling to survive,” she says.

“They want to get on with their lives and not be stuck in limbo, they want to retrain, to recover from the past, to have a future and to not have to keep being reminded of what has happened to them.  Being homeless is not who you are, it just means you don’t have a home at that time. So please, let’s focus on helping that person help themselves.”

Read more on how you can help tackle homelessness, from donating clothes and Christmas meals to lobbying your MP.

*name has been changed

Images: Getty