File:Piccadilly Gardens 1970 (1922321774).jpg

English: bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=1922321774&size=large

In 1970 I got involved in a volunteer organisation that provided a nightly ‘soup run’ around the back streets of Manchester. Helpers gathered at ten o’clock at the alternative book shop, Grass Roots, on Upper Brook Street, where a huge vat of soup had been prepared in the shop’s back kitchen.
Squashed in the back of a van with the large steel urn brimming with soup and clutching packs of polystyrene cups we set off for the regular muster points in the seedy quarters of the city, the underground car parks and derelict wasteland. Shadowy figures stood in huddles in anticipation of hot sustenance, and jostled forward silently to receive their cups. Many were unable or reluctant to communicate and scurried back to their cardboard boxes; some were quite chatty. I had several conversations with a scruffy, bearded man in a trenchcoat, with matted hair. He’d been a doctor at one time and was struck off the register for performing illegal abortions. His wife and family had left him as a result, and things went steadily downhill; he lost his house to mortgage lenders and finally ended up on the streets. He was remarkably lucid and philosophical about his situation, saying, “…as long as I have the stars above me, I’ll be okay”.

A scan of a negative taken on a Mamiya C330 twin lens.