THE PRINCE RUPERT HOTEL FOR THE HOMELESS
CHRISTINA LAMB
Wm Collins, 308pp, £20
Before Covid struck, the Prince Rupert hotel in Shrewsbury was a sumptuous, timber-framed four-star hostelry, 900 years old. But then it was forced to close and its management responded to the government’s ‘everyone in’ initiative – in which hotels were asked to take in rough sleepers during the pandemic. Before long, they had 100 rough sleepers living in their four-postered ensuite bedrooms. Journalist Christina Lamb, veteran reporter of war worldwide, learning of the new residents of the Prince Rupert, asked to spend a year with them. As, Hephzibah Anderson wrote in the Guardian, ‘This humane, humble book is the result – a work of scrupulous reportage that offers no easy fixes, dispensing with sentimentality as it chronicles brutal backstories, tender dreams and profoundly disheartening patterns of behaviour while somehow finding grounds for real if slender hope.’
Many of the rough sleepers were drug or alcohol addicts. Others were suffering from untreated mental illness. Many had not slept in, Victoria Segal found, ‘The closequarters story Lamb tells in is messy, complicated and resistant to being tucked and smoothed away by housekeeping. Like the residents’ constantly overflowing baths, it leaks through the neat limits of feelgood “human interest” into something much darker and more resonant.’ The hotel lost more than 150 spoons after they were requisitioned for heating heroin, and a machete was found under a mattress. The staff responded, wrote Segal, ‘with dogged good sense, dispensing Easter eggs, birthday cakes and second and third chances to people who hadn’t had them before’.
