Text: Siobhán McGuirk Illustration: Marcie Mintrose
This summer, after five years of organising temporary and pop-up exhibitions, the Museum of Homelessness (MoH) opened the doors of its new home in Finsbury Park. Like MoH itself, its launch exhibition – How To Survive The Apocalypse – turns museum conventions inside out.
At its heart is a celebration of people and community – visitors, volunteers, interpreters, contributors and, most of all, its object donors, all of whom have experienced homelessness in London or across the UK. But Apocalypse doesn’t start with the objects. It doesn’t even start inside the museum. At the outset of our allotted time-slot, visitors gather together in a group, outside the building as weather allows, for a collective welcome that is always warm.
There, the team tells us about this special place, and the urgent context of this special exhibition: the charity Shelter estimates that 309,000 people are homeless in England alone – a figure that includes 1 in 51 Londoners. Government research further shows that almost half (47%) of the families living in temporary accommodation have been there for more than two years.
Text: Siobhán McGuirk Illustration: Marcie Mintrose