It was in the lift somewhere between the 42nd floor and the street that I “volunteered” myself to run this year’s London Marathon for Shelter. I had just taken part in the charity’s Vertical Rush fundraiser, which involves making your way up 932 stairs to the top of what used to be the NatWest Tower and London’s tallest building, and is now Tower 42 and something like 20th on the list. Shelter was looking for late entries to fill the last of its charity places, my lift companion informed me, and that there was barely a month and a half to go shouldn’t be a problem for a veteran campaigner like me. There was enough left of the rush from the recent vertical for me to mutter what I was later told was a definitive “yes”.
Running on fumes
I am, according to Daniel Defoe, from hardy running stock. In his mid-1720s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, he wrote of a pre-industrial Staffordshire: “The people of this county have been particularly famous, and more than any other county in England, for good footman-ship, and there have been, and still are among them, some of the fleetest runners in England.” He credited this to “the hardy breed of the inhabitants… and to their exercising themselves to it from their child-hood; for running foot-races seems to be the general sport or diversion of the country”.
Defoe might have taken a different view if he’d visited a century or two later. The Stoke-on-Trent City Museum is currently showing an exhibition of early 20th-century glass-plate images by the local photographer William Blake. Blake employed an ancestral cousin of mine to run his shop, which means that I’ve been trying to help identify some of the people in the photos. Blake is best known, however, for his “smokies” – photos of the industrial landscape of the Potteries at a time when every local domestic fireplace, as well as more than 2,000 pottery bottle ovens, were belching out thick plumes of airborne carbon, tar, oils and ash.
Even by the 1950s, when the Clean Air Act finally began to address the issue, the typical bottle kiln had a fuel combustion efficiency of less than 3 per cent. And those of Staffordshire’s “hardy breed” whose lungs hadn’t already been destroyed by breathing the local air, or inhaling the dust in the mines or pot banks, were doing their damnedest to aid the process by smoking cigarettes. I don’t remember “running foot-races” being high on the list of local recreations when I was growing up in the area.
Shark tale
Times change, and on a recent training run there while visiting my sister I watched in admiration as seven-year-old Alwyn Escolme completed his 100th adult parkrun – which is one more than me. I’m still beating him on marathons, though.
At 69, I’m likely the oldest in Shelter’s 250-strong marathon team. I’ve shown my age by failing to recognise the name, let alone the music, of the celebrity singer-songwriter entrant Tom Grennan. Others in the team include someone who will be running as an inflatable shark (to represent modern landlordism) and two dressed as houses – one of whom tore his Achilles tendon while raising £20,000 in 2021, but has still returned to run the marathon again.
Britain’s heartbreak hotels
I had direct experience of homelessness as a young man (I was 30 before I got my first secure, decent home), and so a large slice of my early work in journalism was about housing. I even edited Shelter’s housing magazine Roof (now defunct) for a short time. One of the many articles I wrote in the 1980s – a cover story for one of the Sunday supplements – looked at the growing scandal of homeless families in temporary accommodation: “heartbreak hotels” as the all-too-familiar headline put it.
Looking back at it today, I see that a report marking Shelter’s 20th anniversary in December 1986 bewailed that 12,000 homeless families would be spending Christmas in temporary accommodation. Government data from February shows that there are now 109,000 households across England in that position – a record high and up 10 per cent in a year. These include 142,490 children, many of whom have spent their whole lives without a settled home.
One of the first donations I received for my marathon fundraising was from a former Shelter employee I worked with 40 years ago. Our younger selves would never have imagined that the scandal we were so shocked by then would be so much greater now.
[See also: The cathedrals courting controversy]
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This article appears in the 03 Apr 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Fragile Crown