News / Society
Need one, take one
A lone coat rack stands in one of the Bearpit tunnels. Thick winter coats hang from the rail and a box stands underneath filled with scarfs, hats and gloves. This unmanned pop-up clothes shop is one of the Need One Take One rails that have been turning up around Bristol over the last few days.
The weather is cold, dank and miserable and it’s the homeless that bear the brunt of it. The rest of us shuffle through the drizzle, getting cold and annoyed, and then get to our destination and shrug off our wet clothes. For a lot of people in the city, there’s nowhere particularly sheltered or warm to get to and those outer layers are all important.
Coat racks and clothes rails are cropping up around the country, and the world, with people donating supplies to help the homeless through the coldest months. Florence Rose, who works at ChkOne, and Pete Elsaesser, a peer mentor at the The Golden Key, set up the first Bristol rail.
is needed now More than ever
“Once you get cold to your bones it’s so hard to warm up, even in a house,” said Florence.
They chose the tunnel closese to Haymarket Walk as it’s where people sometimes sleep, so it would be more likely to be seen by those in need. Three people came to take coats in the half hour it took them to set up.
“It was such a small amount of effort in comparison to the possibility of warmth and comfort it could give someone,” Florence added.
There are plenty of people sleeping rough here, in tents, in doorways, in car parks. Bristol used to buck the trend of rising homelessness in the UK, but now it has the most rough sleepers outside London.
Gavyn Emery set up community initiative Keep Bristol Warm just over a year ago. He says that the safety net “clearly isn’t working”.
“I think it’s a crazy world we live in. It’s 2017 and we still have humans living and sleeping on our streets.”
The ‘need one take one’ rail is a simple enough concept and one that’s gathering momentum across the city, with another rack in the Full Moon.
Pete hopes it’s just the start of a bigger movement: “It would be great to have the clothes rail become a permanent thing or to have multiple rails spread out around Bristol, possibly in hostels and food banks and to create a network where anyone in the local community could donate to their local rail.”
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