When Jade and John came across Stuart Potts early this year, they were sleeping rough in Manchester city centre. It was during January’s brutal cold snap, but the pair couldn’t find a homeless shelter that would take them in as a couple, and they didn’t want to be separated. “We’ve been on the streets together; we’ve been through some of the worst nights of our life together,” said Jade, who is 38, with a hoarse voice and a broad Rochdale accent.
Still, when someone from a local charity told them about a man putting homeless people up in his own house, they were suspicious. “I thought he was just going to be some fucking … ” Jade paused, looking for the right word, “teacher or something.” But when they met for a pint to scope him out, Jade was immediately reassured. “He’d been on the streets, and he’d been to prison. He was really normal, we just felt comfortable. He’s not judging.” They stayed at his flat that night.
Stuart Potts, or Pottsy, as his friends call him, is an unlikely do-gooder. He has a long criminal record (“mostly petty stuff”, he says), and has spent much of his life in and out of prison. For a period, he lived in a tent by the canal in Salford and in Manchester city centre. He was formerly addicted to crack cocaine. A stout, tough 43-year-old with close-shaved hair, he holds his body tightly: chest out, shoulders back, wide-open eyes darting about, observing and assessing as he talks. He speaks at a million miles a minute, swearing constantly, rattling off memories of being run over by a drug dealer, getting stabbed with a broken bottle, going to prison for kicking someone’s head in. Describing an abortive attempt to go to Cocaine Anonymous some years ago, he cackles: “Everyone was fucking talking about crack, and all I could think about was how much I wanted some crack.” The story of his nervous breakdown, he relays as a farce (“dancing naked under the apple tree like a psychopathical nutcase”). Many anecdotes are animated by a scathing contempt for authority: “the system”, the police, council functionaries with “no fucking compassion”.
Potts talks with the cynicism of someone who has hit rock bottom, several times over, and had to pull himself back up. When he describes the worst moments of his life, however, it’s usually softened by a memory of someone helping when they didn’t have to. These days, helping others has become Potts’ focus. It’s not really a job, since he isn’t paid; it’s more of a need, something that eases his own anxiety and keeps his demons at bay.
Potts lives in a one-bed flat in Middleton, a town in Greater Manchester. Ever since he moved in, back in April 2020, he has let homeless people come and stay: an ever-changing cast of strangers who sleep on the sofa and in the caravan he has parked outside the flat. He doesn’t charge rent, but has a few basic rules: hard drugs and violence are forbidden, and everyone has to pitch in with housework. Space can be tight. The first time I visited, in February, there were six people staying: two in the caravan, four on the large U-shaped sofa. They shared the living room with Bullseye, a mixed staffordshire bull terrier Potts rescued when a neighbour went to prison. The most people he’s had staying at one time is eight. “That was too many,” he told me. “I was stepping over bodies.”
His work is entirely informal, operating outside the auspices of any governing authority, charity registration, funding body or council department. Last year, the council rang Potts, asking to inspect the flat since he was advertising it as a shelter. “They said: ‘We need to know if the cooking facilities are safe,’” Potts recalled. “I said: ‘All right, I’ll kick them out on the street and we’ll see what the cooking facilities are like in a fucking tent, shall we?’” He gave a dry laugh, shaking his head. (The council didn’t come: he successfully argued that since it’s a private property, they had no right to inspect.) The entire operation is funded out of Potts’ pocket: a universal credit allowance that after his rent – £595 a month – leaves him with less than £100 a week.
The drastic increase in homelessness and rough sleeping over the past decade and a half is visible on the streets of every major city in the UK. But even those who are distressed by this are unlikely to host strangers in their own home. Potts, though, sees his actions as logical and obvious: people need help, and if you can provide it, then you should. “I don’t need this space – I can sit in my bedroom and watch TV,” he said, motioning at his modestly sized front room. “If more people helped others, the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it?”
* * *
Potts stresses that his “mum brought me up good and proper” – but as a teenager growing up in Salford, he started getting into trouble. “We’ve had our hard times with Stuart, but a lot of it was typical boy stuff,” his mum, Pat Malone, said. “We used to say he was a lovable rogue.” Potts went to prison several times in his late teens and 20s, including an 18-month stint for beating up a burglar who had broken into a friend’s house. After he got out, he had a chequered career: working in factories, as a cobbler, locksmith and painter and decorator. But gradually, life stabilised. He got married, moved into a comfortable council house, and had three kids. Then, in 2016, after more than 15 years, the marriage broke down.
Faced with the prospect of losing his children, Potts went off the rails and started using crack. “It was a coping mechanism, masking the thing, but it made it 10 times worse,” he said. “The worst mistake of my life.” He used crack for about six months, then had a breakdown and was sectioned. “It was a really terrible time, seeing your child go through that,” said Malone. After three months on a psychiatric ward, Potts managed to rent a flat of his own, with help from benefits. But he was still struggling. To distract himself as much as anything else, he gathered donations of sleeping bags and tents from friends, and handed them out to homeless people.
The man who propelled Potts from giving out bedding to opening up his own home was a rough sleeper called Stephen Bolton. Potts encountered him sitting outside a Tesco near his flat. Bolton was in his 50s, a heroin and crack addict who had been homeless for years. It was raining and Potts asked if Bolton wanted to stay with him. “I told him I wouldn’t have any drugs at mine, but if he wanted help, he was welcome.” A few weeks later, Bolton decided to take him up on the offer. Potts helped him go cold turkey: “He was sweating his bollocks off.” He gave Bolton beers and the odd diazepam “to take the edge off”, gradually transitioning to vitamin C as a placebo.
Bolton stayed for nine weeks, until Potts proudly told a neighbour what he’d done. The neighbour informed the landlord, who admonished Potts for bringing a “smackhead tramp” into the flat and evicted them both. (“I wanted to go round and break the bastard’s legs,” Potts said, of the neighbour.) Within a few weeks of being back on the streets, Bolton relapsed, and died of an overdose. “He went down the rabbit hole again,” said Potts. “It made me so angry.”
Potts is bombastic and funny, full of righteous outrage and profane humour. But when I asked what made him approach Bolton – a stranger to him, someone with a serious drug addiction – and offer to take him in, he was uncharacteristically lost for words. “I’ve always done stuff like that,” he said, then tailed off. “Love of people I guess.” He can’t explain why he did it, and can’t understand why other people find it strange.
After being evicted, Potts was homeless too, sometimes sofa-surfing, sometimes sleeping in a tent. Time blurs when your only focus is where you’re going to sleep that night, and he can’t say exactly how long it went on for. But it was a dark period. “I’ve been kicked while I’ve been sleeping, pissed on, spat at,” he said. One night, when he was sleeping by the canal in Salford a group of teenagers picked up his tent and tried to throw it in the water. But he also remembers moments of kindness, such as the woman called Debbie who let him stay the odd night on her sofa when the temperatures got really cold. “Not everybody’s the same, are they?” he said. “If these people what helped me didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be sat where I am now.”
In 2017, Potts received a life-changing tip that would set him on a new, much more ambitious path. Another rough sleeper told Potts he sometimes squatted in empty buildings, and Potts decided to try it. Squatting in a residential property is illegal, and he was soon evicted. But it planted the seed of an idea: researching squatting law, he discovered it is far harder to evict squatters from commercial properties.
Potts had noticed a doctor’s surgery in Eccles, in Salford, that had been empty for more than a decade. “I thought, why are people sat out here freezing when the building’s empty? I’ll take it over.” He posted about the squat on Facebook and people rushed to help. (“I know a lot of people round Salford,” he said.) Within 48 hours, “we had beds, mattresses, cookers, fridge-freezers, microwaves, TVs, bedding, food in the cupboards, staff on board who were volunteering”. He went out to inform rough sleepers, and within a few days 18 people were staying.
Evicting squatters from commercial properties requires court action, and in this case, it took seven months. When they were finally evicted from the doctor’s surgery, Potts found another building, then another. For a brief period, Potts was running three separate squats at once. He developed a system for the people he was housing: “I had the ones that had more drug and alcohol issues at the vet’s. Once they’d progressed a bit, I moved them to the chemist, and once they progressed more from that, I’d move them to the pub.” By the autumn of 2019, they were set up in the Unicorn, an abandoned pub in Eccles. Potts dubbed it the Saving People Shelter Project, printed a banner and hung it outside the pub.
There is significant evidence that placing people in secure, long-term accommodation can go a huge way towards stabilising their lives. In policy-speak, this is called the Housing First model: giving people homes with no conditions attached, rather than the traditional approach of expecting them to tackle addiction or mental health problems first. Research shows that 80-90% of people in Housing First schemes maintain a tenancy for a year or more, compared with 40% for traditional approaches. Since 2008, Housing First has been Finland’s national policy, and in that time overall homelessness has decreased 47%, and long-term homelessness more than 70%. In his own, wildly informal way, Potts follows something akin to the Housing First model: find people accommodation and the rest will follow.
Life in the squats wasn’t always perfect. Paul Doyle, who was homeless after his release from prison, lived in the Unicorn and helped Potts run it. “We had some trouble – your smashed windows, or people using drugs. Then we’d just sling them out,” he said. But mostly, it was quite stable. There were about 14 of them at the Unicorn, some of whom were working, including a postman who had got into rent arrears and lost his home.
Potts speaks about this period with an evangelising zeal. “I haven’t got any money. If I can do that, surely to God the government or the local authority can do it, can’t they?”
* * *
Potts’ freewheeling approach has been an essential part of his success. But that impulsivity has also landed him in trouble. After being evicted from the Unicorn in October 2019, Potts opened a new shelter in another abandoned pub, the Albert Edward, also in Eccles. A few weeks after they moved in, it was Remembrance Sunday. About 300 people gathered around the Cenotaph war monument in Eccles, a few metres from the Albert Edward.
Shortly before the two minutes’ silence began, Potts leaned out of the window and set off two fireworks. He says it was intended as a mark of respect, something like the cannon that fire at Remembrance events in London. This was not the way it was interpreted. People panicked. Among them were war veterans, who told local media the sound had triggered PTSD symptoms. Potts was arrested. The next day he pleaded guilty to one count of throwing fireworks in a public place and one count of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
Potts apologised, but the judge was unconvinced of his remorse. He was sentenced to 16 weeks in prison. Potts was a prominent local figure at this point, and the Manchester Evening News even ran a live blog from the hearing. People were furious about the incident, seeing it as two fingers up to the war dead. “I didn’t do it for any malicious purpose, and my friends know that,” Potts told me. “But a lot of people still don’t like me.” Malone, Potts’ mother, has observed this too. “Stuart’s grandad was in the war, so he’s got a lot of respect,” she said. “But people don’t forget. Some people, when they’ve had a drink and they see him, they start on him for no reason.”
While he was in prison, the squat fell apart, and Potts lost his flat. When he was released, he was placed in a B&B the council uses as temporary accommodation, then moved to other temporary accommodation in Middleton, just north of Manchester’s city centre. Soon after his arrival, the council said they were discharging their housing duty towards him because he had made himself intentionally homeless by going to prison. He relayed this with a cackle of disbelief: “I said: ‘Are you mad?’ I said: ‘I didn’t want to go to prison.’”
Potts needed somewhere to live and heard that a flat over the road was available. Potts spoke to the landlady and explained that he had no money for a deposit (typically, tenants have to pay a month’s rent upfront, plus another month), but would find a way to pay it if she’d let him move in. “I said: ‘I haven’t got a pot to piss in at the minute. I’ve got no money, but the benefits will pay for the rent, if you’ll trust me.’” The landlady agreed. “That was a massive break for me,” he said. “Otherwise, I’d still be squatting, or on the streets.”
In April 2020, Potts moved in, furnished the place and relaunched the Saving People Shelter Project. From the outset, he was upfront with the landlady about his operation. She didn’t object as long as there was no damage to the property or trouble with the neighbours. He has maintained warm relations, helped along by a habit of redistributing excess donations from the shelter – recently, several hundred pastries from a local bakery – along the street. “Ask anybody round here about Pottsy and they’ll tell you what a good heart he has and it’s true, he has a heart of gold,” one local resident told me.
Potts’ flat is on the ground floor. The front door opens straight into the living area, which is dominated by a large sofa and a big TV. The walls are covered with framed collages of family photos; Potts now has seven children, three from his first marriage, and four born subsequently to different mothers. Some live with their mothers, others are in the care system, and one has been permanently adopted. He sees and speaks to some of his children regularly, while others have limited contact with him, either through their own choice, or because they’re in care. Potts talks often about his mistakes: his breakdown, his self-destructive response to losing his family, his drug use. “I don’t like some of the consequences of my actions,” he told me. “But I don’t regret any of it, because without those experiences I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I wouldn’t be able to help people.”
The people who pass through are a cross-section of those who have fallen through Britain’s frayed social safety net: migrants with no recourse to public funds, men who aren’t considered vulnerable enough for housing support, long-term rough sleepers who can’t prove a connection to any local area. Since 2010, as homelessness in the UK has soared, barriers to getting help have multiplied. The demand for services is overwhelming. “Sometimes if we go through the council, it takes hours and hours and there still isn’t a bed for someone at the end of it,” said Jonathan Billings, who runs a local charity, Egg, which helps homeless people find work. “Stuart’s place is informal and there’s not really rules or structure to it, so from our perspective, it’s a very good emergency option. He’s got a good way with people – he’s relatable, as he’s lived through it himself.”
His mum worries about how dangerous it is for Potts to take strangers into his home, some of whom have serious issues. But she can see how it gives him a level of stability and purpose that seemed impossible a few years ago. She is not the only one who worries about his safety. “What he’s doing is remarkably generous, and he is a good guy, but you can’t get away from the fact it’s an unregulated project, which means it’s high-risk, both for him and for others,” said one person who works for a homelessness charity in Manchester. “I can see why he does it, since a lot of these people literally have no other options, but that’s a structural problem. The council should be providing beds, not this one bloke.”
* * *
Solving that structural problem in Manchester – and across Britain – has proven thorny. When Andy Burnham became Manchester’s mayor in 2017, he pledged to end rough sleeping. His flagship homelessness policy is A Bed Every Night, which promises that anyone who calls the council will be accommodated indoors. Like most cities in the UK, Manchester has a dearth of social or affordable housing to move people into. Over time, the system has bottlenecked: demand from new rough sleepers is growing, but beds aren’t opening up. Accommodation that was designed as a temporary stopgap is now accommodating people for weeks or even months.
Despite multimillion-pound investment in services in Manchester over the past seven years, overall levels of homelessness in the city are still increasing, and rough sleeping has increased for the past two consecutive years. This is partly due to changes way beyond the power of the Manchester mayor’s office – for instance, in the asylum system. There has been a 13-fold increase in the number of asylum-seekers sleeping rough in Manchester within the last year, which Potts has noticed. “My house is like the bleeding United Nations,” he said. Simultaneously, the number of no-fault evictions has risen sharply, while catastrophic funding crises at councils around the country have further curtailed homelessness services. “Provisions in Manchester are very, very good, but they can only do so much. What we need is more affordable housing and more social housing,” said Billings.
One of the central challenges of the homelessness crisis is making the leap from short-term fixes to long-term solutions. Providing a shelter bed for a night requires resources – but in many ways, it’s the easy part. For a person to make their way out of the world of emergency accommodation into a home of their own is astonishingly difficult. As well as the shortage of affordable housing, making the transition typically requires people to navigate a vast tangle of bureaucracy – and to do so when they may have no income, extremely limited resources and nowhere to live.
When someone arrives at his flat, Potts immediately starts trying to find somewhere more sustainable for them to live, and to clear any obstacles in the way of that goal. As 2022 drew to a close, Dave Lees arrived at Potts’ place, after someone he knew from the pub found it online. Lees is now 71, a tall, thin man with deeply cracked wrinkles and long grey hair. He had become homeless about five years earlier, when the house he shared with his dad had to be sold to pay for his dad’s dementia care. In March this year, I returned to Potts’ flat, and Lees was over for a visit. We sat on the sofa, daytime TV playing on mute, as Potts rolled Lees cigarettes. “One domino goes over, the next one, and the next one,” said Lees. “And that little phrase: ‘Things can’t get any worse.’” Potts laughed at this. “I never say that any more, mate. Never.”
After losing his home, Lees moved between friends’ places, with periods sleeping rough. “It was only a short while sleeping out,” he said. Potts interjected, kindly: “There’s no shame in it. I’ve done it, haven’t I?” One effect of moving around so much was that Lees didn’t have any documentation: no photo ID, no bank cards. Many people who experience homelessness are stuck in this vicious circle. Without a birth certificate, you can’t get a passport. Without photo ID, you can’t get a bank account. Without a bank account, you can’t get benefits. Lees was eligible for a state pension, but with no bank account and no documentation, he couldn’t claim it.
In many parts of the UK, people have to prove their connection to a local area in order to qualify for any kind of housing support. This can be impossible for those who have been sofa-surfing or sleeping rough, who don’t have utility bills or other proof of residence. Lees couldn’t prove his connection to Salford, although he had lived there for most of his life. Potts has seen this play out hundreds of times, but his voice rose in frustration as he described it. “I said: ‘He’s not living anywhere at the moment. He’s a man and a bag.’” Over a period of months, they took it step-by-step, gradually building up the documentation Lees needed to get a bank account, his state pension and benefits. This process – meetings, phone calls, endless form-filling – took a full year. Lees slept on Potts’ sofa throughout.
In November 2023, 12 months after Lees arrived, he moved into a one-bed flat in Potts’ own building. (Potts had been “on at the landlord” about it for months.) Potts gave Lees his TV, and Malone gave him her old sofa. “You can rest easy now, can’t you?” Potts said to Lees. “A door you can close behind you, without the chaos.” Lees is the second person he has moved into a flat within his own building.
Since he moved into his flat in 2020, Potts says “hundreds” of people have passed through. Some stay for a night or two, others – like Lees – for months. A Polish man is just planning to move after living in the caravan for two years, while he sorted out his EU settled status and trained as a forklift truck driver. Potts never asks for rent, but if people do find work or get benefits sorted while they’re staying, he expects them to chip in where they can – buy and cook the odd meal for the group, or contribute to bills. “He doesn’t have many rules, so the ones he’s got, you’ve got to abide by,” said Trevor, who moved in at Christmas, after a mental health crisis. Potts went on holiday in late February, leaving a group of four people in his flat. “If it was me, I’d be on pins the whole time about what was happening at my gaff,” said Trevor, shaking his head thoughtfully. “He’s a very trusting man. There’s not another one of him.”
Even so, Potts is tough about upholding the rules. Not long before my first visit in February, he kicked someone out after seven months. The man had got drunk and aggressive. Potts told him to leave, without hesitation, but he felt hurt. “I thought he was my friend, but he wasn’t,” he said. (A few months later, the man apologised, sending Potts an emotional WhatsApp video of a new flat he’d moved into, saying he’d never be able to thank him enough for getting him back on his feet.) Soon after that, Potts asked a transgender woman to leave, after she refused to help with cleaning and described the other residents as “savages”. She accused Potts of bigotry. “She said that’s why I was kicking her out,” he said, sounding astonished. “I don’t give a toss what your sexuality is. If you’re a cunt, you’re a cunt.”
Thanks to his work running the shelter, and as an activist and advocate, Potts has been propelled into the slightly uneasy position of being a respected spokesperson on criminal justice. Last year, he was due to give a speech about the difficulties faced by ex-prisoners at the Tory party conference, but was denied entry due to his criminal record, an irony that was not lost on him. Potts doesn’t see himself as someone doling out support from on high. He views himself more as a knowledgable friend trying to leverage a temporary run of luck to help others before things turn again. In his mind, even his current home can feel contingent and tenuous. “The truth of it is, I could be homeless again tomorrow,” he told me.
* * *
Knowing you have a bed is liberating, and can free the mind to start thinking about the future. Jade, the woman who was staying with her boyfriend, John, was full of this sense of possibility when I met her in February. She had deep bags under her eyes and wore a fluffy dressing gown adorned with the Disney characters Lilo and Stitch. “Stuart told us more information within 10 minutes of being here than our last hostel did in three months,” she said. She had big plans: applying for ID, finding work, saving for a deposit, moving into a flat. The two of them had been homeless for about a year. Jade had, in the past, suffered domestic violence, and struggled with drug addiction. Her three children are in long-term foster care. Despite the sleeping arrangements in Potts’ flat – sharing a sofa with two strangers and a large, snoring dog – she was relishing the feeling of normality. “I love having a hot shower every day,” she said. That night she and John were planning to cook a meal of roast pork and garlic potatoes for the group, as they’d got some money through from benefits payments.
But despite best intentions, it doesn’t always work out. A few weeks after Jade and John arrived, someone donated a Tesco voucher to Potts. He used it to buy a large joint of beef, thinking it would make a nice change from their typical meals of pasta and soup. A few days later, the beef went missing from the fridge. Jade disappeared for several days. Potts looked at the footage from the CCTV camera he has outside the house, and saw the car of someone he knew to be a crack dealer, parked up outside. When Jade returned, Potts said, she was “off her tits”. “I’ve been on crack, so I know, I recognise it, and I don’t want to be around it,” he said.
Potts didn’t have to kick Jade and John out, because he’d already arranged for them to move into a multiple-occupancy house owned by a couple he knows. Drug use is prohibited there, too, and Potts hoped it was a one-off relapse. The next time I visited Potts, Jade and John had moved out. They were doing well, and Jade was looking at getting a caravan. But a few weeks later, they had used drugs again, and were evicted. Potts lost contact with them entirely, and doesn’t know where they are now. “It’s sad,” he said. “But people really do have to want to help themselves.”
When it does work out, it’s a kind of magic. On a bright spring day, I went with Lees to his flat, which is on the floor above Potts’ place. The walls were freshly painted, and natural light streamed in through uncurtained windows. Lees had used some of his pension money to buy art supplies, which were neatly stacked in the bedroom. He used to be a sign painter, and was excited to start drawing again. Before I left, Lees showed me something: a blue ring-binder, full of plastic wallets, each holding a different document. Birth certificate, national insurance number, tax return, bank statements, tenancy agreement, gas bills. Proof of existence. So mundane, so vital. “I won’t be letting go of this again,” he said.
Some names have been changed to protect anonymity
• Follow the Long Read on X at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
