In London’s world-famous Tottenham Court Road, you may have seen Graham Scott. The homeless 39-year-old sells paintings to passers by.
Mr Scott, who is from Haringey, says he makes a minimum of £50 to £60 a week. If things are going particularly well, he can earn £200.
The proceeds, he told MyLondon, go towards caring for his canine companion, a Jack Russell and Corgi cross called Jazzy, whom he bought for £20 from a woman on the streets. The duo have their own Instagram account.
Graham said he had been ‘doing quite well’ at selling his art. Over three and a half months, he reckoned he had flogged more than 100 pictures. Prices vary, depending on the piece.
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(Image: Facundo Arrizabalaga)
“He’s one of the only dogs out here that’s happy, healthy, gets what he wants,” Mr Scott said. “He won’t eat dog food. He’s on things like chicken, ham, beef. The things that I eat.”
On life sleeping rough, the artist said: “As long as you stick to yourself, you stay out of trouble. You won’t get mixed up in the wrong crowds.
“If you hang around with the wrong people, you’ll end up getting into [a] bad drug life, do you know what I mean? And alcohol abuse. You’ll end up in a lot of trouble; you can end up dead round here, really.”
People ‘aren’t helped until s*** hits the fan’
Getting hold of this food is ‘easy’, Mr Scott said, with charity workers coming round every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and sometimes at the weekends. Graham, however, observed that if he looked ‘more rough, down and out’, he would ‘get a lot more help’. “I’ve noticed that people that look really drugged up, really bad, scruffy, nasty looking, I’ve noticed them [members of the public] help,” he added.
“People like me, that are trying, they just walk past. Couldn’t be bothered, really.” Mr Scott also described how the public ‘look down’ on him, and make ‘nasty comments’.
Generally, Mr Scott thinks the system is broken, claiming that people are left ‘until s***’ hits the fan’ and ‘things go wrong for them’. “That’s when they want to help,” he said.
(Image: Facundo Arrizabalaga)
“It’s all a scam if you ask me.” Mr Scott added that services ‘don’t deserve the funding they’re getting’, and told MyLondon that he has rejected help from them. He said: “I’ll end up doing it myself now.”
Graham said he would like to become a logistics driver and run his own firm. Before he was homeless, he was a theatre technician working for White Light. Mr Scott also used to run his own business, and worked on well-known productions, including Billy Elliot and Les Miserables, around 10 years ago.
‘All of a sudden my door’s now come through, and they’re trying to kill him’
When asked how he became homeless, the artist recalled a harrowing incident in Enfield that occurred around a year and a half ago. Mr Scott said: “I found a lad on the street that was crying.
“I asked him what was the matter. He said that people were chasing him – trying to kill him.” He was being pursued by a gang ‘with knives’, Mr Scott recalled.
(Image: Facundo Arrizabalaga)
He added: “I brought him back to mine, trying to hide him. Didn’t think they were following. All of a sudden my door’s now come through, and they’re trying to kill him.”
Graham said: “I was trying to help someone. That’s all I was doing. It was a young lad. Must have been about 17, 18. Me, I come from a deprived estate, Haringey […] so I know what it’s like.”
“Believe it or not, it was the worst mistake I ever made,” the former theatre technician added, “I reckon he could have been dead otherwise.”
After this incident, Graham did not feel secure in his rented home, and moved out. Afterwards, he was ‘on and off’ the streets. This included living with friends and living in a hostel in King’s Cross for six months.
“It’s not dangerous in hostels, to be honest. It’s how you make it, really,” Graham said. “Like I said, if you want to mix with the wrong crowds, then yes, it’s going to get really dangerous for you. Keep yourself to yourself, man, that’s what I would advise.”
On the street, it’s a ‘dog eat dog world’, he added. ‘All the time’, his possessions are stolen, if he does not ‘keep an eye’ on them.
‘Someone needs to take control of it’
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, promised during the mayoral election campaign in the spring that he would eliminate homelessness in the capital by 2030. When asked if he thought this would happen, Mr Scott said: “No. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
“They’ve been saying that story for years, if you ask me. Literally years […] It’s just another promise. ‘Give us this funding and we’ll do this, and that, and that’.
“For me it’s just so they can waste more money on whatever they’re going to waste it on.” Instead, ‘someone needs to take control of it’, Mr Scott suggested. He added: “What they say they are going to do, they have to stick to it.
(Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
“I think there has to be some sort of official that’s saying, ‘if this does not happen, then we’re going to stop your funding, you’re going to be punished for it […] you’ve broken the rules, you haven’t stuck to your contract – that’s it’.”
Data suggests that 11,993 people were seen sleeping on the street in the city in the year to March. The statistic is from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN), and is the highest figure ever recorded for a single year.
Mr Khan told the London Assembly in July: “One of my main priorities is to seek funding certainty for rough sleeping services in London. Long-term funding certainty will help us to deliver tailored support and sustainable routes off the streets. To end rough sleeping, we need to build more homes in London – including more genuinely affordable homes.
“I am determined for London to make a meaningful contribution to the government’s target to deliver 1.5 million homes by the end of the Parliament. The asks set out in the London Housing Delivery Taskforce joint position statement remain relevant to unlocking all types of housebuilding in the capital.
“We also need to prevent people becoming homeless in the first place, which is why I will work with the Government to finally ban section 21 evictions and give renters the security they need.”
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