In pictures: What it’s like to sleep in your car while homeless in a heatwave

Andy Burnham has pledged “to end rough sleeping in our country”, with funding just announced to offer every person a route off the streets. I am a photographer documenting that issue from inside.

I work full time as a mechanic in the Bristol area. Outside work, I am currently living between my car and campsites after becoming unable to safely return home. This means continuing to arrive at work each day while finding somewhere to sleep, keeping my work clothes clean, charging essential equipment, protecting my possessions and trying to secure stable accommodation. I have been photographing this experience as an ongoing project titled Quiet Life, Volume One: No Fixed Address.

A significant part of the period I documented coincided with the recent hot weather and heatwaves, including nights when I was sleeping in my car.

The work explores a less visible form of homelessness. I remain employed and outwardly functional. This is not a project created in response to the announcement. The project is about survival, work, place, dignity and the transition back towards stability.

A Room With a View

There were worse places to wake up. I spent a lot of time looking for somewhere I could park without being disturbed, and occasionally that meant waking up somewhere like this. During the hot weather, finding somewhere for the night was also about where the car might cool down and whether there was any shade in the morning. The view could make it feel like freedom for a moment, but I still woke on the back seat needing to work out where I could wash, eat and spend the day.

Home for the Night

At night the car looked almost ordinary from the outside. That was useful. I didn’t particularly want anyone knowing that everything I needed was inside it, including me asleep across the back seat. The problem during the heatwave was that sunset didn’t magically cool the car down. I couldn’t leave the engine and air conditioning running all night either. So I opened the windows as much as I was comfortable with, tried to keep some privacy and eventually got tired enough that sleeping was all that mattered.

How to Hide a Bedroom

For the first few nights, this was home. I slept across the back seat with some bedding, a pillow and whatever else I needed shoved into the space around me. The heat made an already uncomfortable way of sleeping considerably worse. Even after the sun went down, the car stayed hot. I could open the windows, but then I was sleeping in a car with the windows open and everything I owned inside it. There wasn’t really a good option, just whatever worked that night.

Running Water

Water stopped being something I could just assume would be there. In the heat that became important pretty quickly. I needed it to drink, wash, cook and get through the day before going back to work. Once I got onto the campsite I could fill a container and keep it by the car, which made life slightly easier. Before all this, getting
a drink meant turning on a tap. Now it was another thing I had to remember, find somewhere to fill and make sure I didn’t run out of.

Read more:

• How many people are homeless in the UK? And what can you do about it?
• Intentionally homeless: What it means for your housing rights
• There is no single image of a ‘homeless person’. Let’s bust the myths about homelessness

Home, for Now (see main pic)

After several nights in the car, a campsite gave me somewhere to put up a tent and leave the back seat behind for a while. It was safer and gave me more space, but the heat didn’t disappear. The tent heated up quickly in the sun and the car still held most of what I owned. It became storage, transport and a fallback bedroom all at once. Having a pitch made things easier. It still wasn’t home, but at least I had somewhere I was supposed to be for the night.

Work Comes Home

I kept working full time until I eventually used up all of my remaining holiday. By the end of a shift I was tired, dirty and usually thinking about where I was sleeping, what needed charging and whether I had enough clean clothes and water for the next day. My work boots and tools ended up inside the tent because there was nowhere else for them to go. The line between work and home had become very literal. I could still do my job. Everything else became more complicated.

Ramada Laundrette

I was still going to work every day, so clean clothes mattered. Sleeping in a hot car meant waking up sweaty before the day had even started, but I still had to turn up looking like any other employee. This outdoor laundrette at a Ramada became one of the places where I could keep that part of my life functioning. A lot of homelessness was like this for me: not dramatic moments, just finding ways to do completely normal things without having a home to do them in.

See more of Sam’s photography here

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