Temporary accommodation: an unimportant history of the appalling present

On 24 November 1984, dozens of households descended on Camden Town Hall to stage a sit-in protest about the horrendous conditions in their temporary accommodation (TA), the Olympus hostel. They demanded relocation. Two of the contingents were heavily pregnant women who preferred the cold, hard floor of the council building to what was supposed to be the state-provided safety net in the face of homelessness.

A few days earlier, a fire had ripped through their TA hostel on 46 Gloucester Place in Westminster. A Bangladeshi woman, Shamin Karim, and her young son and daughter – aged five and three – suffocated to death on the top floor of the building. Writer Salman Rushdie covered the story for The Guardian and, in quiet anger, described it as an ‘unimportant fire… Nothing spectacular; just a cheap bed and breakfast establishment going up in flames’.

He explained in unsparing detail how the family never had the chance to escape: their room was at the top of the building above an unenclosed staircase, safety lighting on the stairs was not functioning, the fire alarm had been switched off, fire extinguishers were empty, and fire exits blocked. It was a story of callous negligence, though not without warning signs.

The Olympus had been grossly overcrowded. Its private landlord – who also owned adjacent properties and other TA accommodation in Westminster – was later found to have crammed up to seven people to a room. Beds squeezed in next to cookers. One household resorted to putting their baby to bed in the bathroom for lack of an alternative sleeping space. In the neighbouring property – also housing homeless families from Camden – the banister had come away from the staircase and water leaked through sockets. One mother told of how her baby had died from a sewage leak-related infection in the Olympus before the fire.

Most families placed in that building, Rushdie pointed out, were from minority ethnic backgrounds, living in those appalling conditions for prolonged periods. Camden Council placed them there, out of borough, to help “manage” their homelessness emergency and spiralling costs. Out of sight and apparently out of mind; a single mother occupant told the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood News that Camden housing officers never visited the Olympus in person.

As I discovered in recent research for Lifelines, a study commissioned by Justlife into the history of temporary accommodation in England, many aspects of this story have echoes of Victorian workhouse treatment of the destitute – and warnings for the present.

Under the 1834 New Poor Law, the British government formalised workhouses as the only relief a destitute person deemed capable of work could receive from the state. These mass communal institutions were deliberately cruel – dehumanising “inmates” on entry with public washing and lice inspection. Meagre rations had to be earned with hard labour. Families were separated: men, women and older children deposited in different unhygienic, overcrowded wards. Younger children of single mothers were spirited away – sometimes to private, for-profit outfits that set them to work – lest they catch the contagion of unmarried poverty. Irish paupers were removed from English workhouses and repatriated to Ireland in their hundreds of thousands, their poverty exported no matter how long they had lived in England. These punitive practices were an administrative solution to spiralling relief costs and apparent worklessness – poor people and unwelcome “outsiders” scrounging off the state.

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While the Poor Law was scrapped in name in 1948 and, for those needing emergency housing, replaced with ‘temporary accommodation’ provisions under the National Assistance Act, ideological concern about deservingness and scrounging persisted. Single men experiencing homelessness were directed to Reception Centres for “rehabilitation” towards a more settled way of life; evicted “problem families” were sent to welfare homes and separated, children taken into care; Commonwealth migrants called to Britain and without accommodation were dispersed across England to minimise racial imbalance in White communities – or dissuaded from accessing state assistance altogether. Poor TA conditions – overcrowding, squalor, and relocations out of area – were mechanisms of social ordering, and a deterrence against “underserving” people seeking housing help. Mechanisms that went on to cost the Karim family their lives.

Such ideological threads trace to the present, too. Their harmful impacts veiled by administrative fragmentation: Black and Asian households are still disproportionately placed out-of-area, cut off from jobs, schools and lifelines; councils are not always informed about homeless households placed in their area by other local authorities, excluding families from vital health and welfare services.

Where injustices garner headlines – such as family members sharing beds and sleeping in kitchens – they are viewed in isolation and explained via reference to “unprecedented” costs and caseloads. Or, in the case of destitute asylum seekers, via their immigration status. In the worst instances, an inquiry might be called or a single provider shut down. But exporting practices and accountability gaps endure, suggesting a deeper, systemic rot.

Just look, again, to the Olympus. In the aftermath of the fire, neither Camden, Westminster, nor the Greater London Council took responsibility for failing in their statutory duty to check fire safety at the private contractor’s hostel prior to the disaster. Westminster declared they didn’t even know that particular building was being used to house homeless families.

These oversights strained credulity given the Daily Star had run a series of exposés earlier that year about that same landlord – whom they dubbed “Mr Evil” – and the substantial profits he was making from Camden council by overcrowding homeless households in his substandard properties elsewhere in Westminster. Exposés to which Camden responded. Elsewhere, a Labour Councillor had called out high fire risks and related deaths in under-regulated bedsit blocks in neighbouring Kensington and Chelsea just a few months prior to the fire.

Known knowns, to borrow a risk management phrase.

What “knowns” are we failing to act on today? Perhaps the ones about huge profits being made by private landlords and estate agent “brokers” for outsourced TA in London; proceeds that do not feed back into quality as a third of TA poses serious health risks to tenants. Perhaps the scores about unsecured windows or damp and mould causing injuries, illnesses, and deaths in TA. Perhaps the hard data: TA contributed to the deaths of 104 children between 2019 and 2025, 73 per cent of whom were under 1-year-old, 38 per cent of whom were from a minority ethnic background. One hundred and four devastated families.

The deaths of Shamin Karim and her children in 1984 are as urgent today as they were over forty years ago. They were part of a pattern of TA management that has become deeply entrenched: Victorian-era practices of differential treatment for different homeless groups; the naturalisation of substandard conditions as an acceptable “price” for managing escalating costs; the exporting of homelessness and outsourcing of responsibility. Poor Law “deservingness” with a new public management makeover.

It took three deaths and an occupation of Camden Town Hall for Olympus families to be rehoused from their death-trap TA in 1984. What will 104 deaths change today?

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Lifelines: A history of temporary accommodation in England 1834-2011 was published by Justlife on 9 June 2026. Jessica is the author of Eviction: A Social History of Rent, (Verso, 2025).

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