A veteran rough sleeper has laid bare the horrors of living on the streets at Christmas, as a series of life-saving new homeless pods land just in time for the freezing festive period. In 15 years of rough sleeping, Mark Griffiths, 58, has slept under railway bridges and in bins, he’s battled pneumonia, been subjected to violent attacks and seen fellow homeless people set on fire.
He’s been so desperate for a warm bed at times that he’s smashed up windows just so the police would put him in a prison cell for the night. Since July, he has been living at the Salvation Army's lifehouse in St Helens, Merseyside - but he says his thoughts are always with people still on the streets at this time of year.
Now Mark has praised the charity for launching a series of brand new homeless pods, providing a warm bed and shelter just in time for Christmas. The Salvation Army trialled the pods in York during Covid, before launching them this weekend in Merseyside.
The heated, self contained microflats have a single bed, toilet and sink also have plug sockets and state of the art lifeline technology to alert authorities if the person inside stops breathing. Speaking about his years fighting to stay alive on the streets, Mark told the Mirror how he would beg other rough sleepers to put cardboard beneath them after he nearly died of pneumonia.
He said: "I always tell people you have to find some cardboard to sleep on, because the freezing ground will pull all the heat out of your body. "When you start to get hyperthermia you feel tired and you think ‘I’ll just get my head down for an hour’, but it'll be the last hour you ever get. ".
