Financial Times/Alice Troy-Donovan: At home with the FT John Bird Big Issue founder talks about homelessness and the House of Lords

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At home with the FT John Bird
Big Issue founder talks about homelessness and the House of Lords

John Bird is the first person with personal experience of poverty in the upper chamber

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Alice Troy-Donovan January 12, 2018
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John Bird has never been so loyal to a house. “Before we moved here, the longest place I’d lived was an orphanage when I was seven. I was there for two and a half years.” Now 71, the man who launched the world’s most widely circulated street paper to tackle homelessness is finally showing signs of staying put.

Sitting back in an outfit that appears to express his intriguing split allegiances — top half, grey business suit; bottom half, dark boot-cut jeans and Doc Martens — Bird tells me he has not moved house for an unprecedented three years.

“I’ve lived in about 120 different places in my lifetime. I’m not in love with owning property, like the rest of this country is. Napoleon said that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers. Now we’re a nation of mortgagors.”

Author, journalist, ex-offender, entrepreneur, former “Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist”, Bird is known to most as co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue, a street magazine with household-name status in the UK and part of an international network of Big Issue publications. Having borrowed “some of our future” from the bank, he is now also a homeowner.

In 1991, Bird established the general interest magazine as a social enterprise employing homeless people as street vendors. The Big Issue’s business model is straightforward: vendors buy the magazine for £1.25 and sell to the public for £2.50. The aim, innovative at its inception, is to turn potential beggars into “micro-entrepreneurs”. The magazine now forms part of The Big Issue Group, along with an investment arm which has ploughed over £30m into social enterprises and charities in the past 13 years.
The family’s favourite room © Hannah Norton

Bird is a raconteur with a story worth telling. In 2015, he became a “people’s peer” in the House of Lords, one of four appointed by an independent commission with the aim of bringing the second chamber closer to the general population. As his maiden speech to the house emphasised, Bird is the first person with personal experience of poverty, imprisonment and homelessness to obtain a peerage.

He is unsentimental about his current home — a 17th century thatched cottage in a Cambridgeshire village — but the place has grown on him. “It’s got a big garden, it’s in a quiet lane. There’s room.” Nestled between fenland and the river Cam, the house is 350 years old and a work in progress. “Every bit of damp and rot meant that we could afford it.”

It is less than an hour away by train from Bird’s offices in the Lords, but there is little evidence of his professional life at home. “I don’t really have an office, I just leave stuff around,” he says, gesturing towards his royal red Lord’s briefcase at the foot of the stairs.
The kitchen © Hannah Norton

Things are tranquil when we arrive, but Bird cheerily warns it’ll be a “madhouse” when his two youngest children, aged 10 and 12, return. He and his wife Parveen (Bird has three adult children from previous marriages) have kept furniture in their sitting room to a minimum, allowing plenty room for play.

Space was not a given in Bird’s early years. He was born in a Notting Hill slum, sharing the space with five siblings, two parents and seven other families. It was the kind of building, then a mixture of grandeur and grimness, he estimates would now cost £13m. Bird tells me these buildings though were “crammed full of the poor, creating slums overnight”.

This home was shortlived: by age 10 Bird had spent three years in a Mill Hill orphanage following his family’s split-up. He has “learnt to love” his parents, speaking frankly of their incompetence and the difficulties of supporting a large family on his father’s builder’s wage. Would he move back to Notting Hill? It is now “synthetic” and “too ersatz” for Bird’s taste, “pretending it’s edgy, when really it’s edgy with shed-loads of money”. Besides, he says he has “always wanted to live in the country”.
One of many bookcases © Hannah Norton

His mother was from rural Cork, an Irish heritage Bird is clearly proud of: on the mantelpiece in his living room sits a 2006 Community Award from the Irish Post newspaper. Close by is a framed picture of Bird meeting the Pope last April. “I’m only one generation away from the fields and bogs of Ireland.”

With mock-grandiosity, Bird introduces this space as his “reading room”. The moniker is apt: books adorn three of the walls and fill what was once a fireplace. In his maiden speech to the House of Lords, Bird told how he was encouraged, aged 10, to learn to read and write by a probation officer at his juvenile detention centre (he was detained several times as a child and young adult for petty crimes). Books are now central to his home life, where you are more likely to stumble across a collection of Geoffrey Hill poems than a stack of Big Issues.

Next to a £150 collection of Harvard University Press annotated Jane Austen novels (a 71st birthday present to himself and a rare ostentation for Bird), a Japanese translation of his 2008 book How to Change Your Life depicts Bird brandishing a Big Issue against a Hollywood backdrop.
Bird in the summer house © Hannah Norton

It was a desire to better the quality of his own life, as well as those of the disadvantaged and marginalised, which led Bird to establish The Big Issue. Debt was one driving factor: “I’ve always been useless with money, but I’m also a great believer in debt as a constructive experience. Borrow money from the future and you can use it to bring about enormous changes in your own life.”

Redemptive turning points pepper Bird’s life story. After a period of delinquency and rough sleeping in his teenage years, he attended Chelsea School of Art and, in his own evangelical language, was “civilised” by the experience. Falling in with a group of Marxists in Paris in the 1960s was another Damascene conversion: “It’s unbelievable, but before then I shared the racist, anti-Semitic views of my parents.” His art school training allowed him to work as a self-employed printer throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a craft he plans to revisit at home: “I’m looking at having a small printer in the shed,” he says.
Sketchbooks in the summer house © Hannah Norton

In the house, stacks of sketchpads and overflowing notebooks are scattered around. Bird picks up one, full of charcoal drawings by his children: “I wish I had the confidence to do this — every child is a Picasso and they get destroyed by growing up.”

When we meet, Bird has had a “good few days” in his other “House”, questioning Lord Agnew, the schools minister, on education policy. “Why is it that we’re failing 38 per cent of our children who then become 80 per cent of our prison population, fill up our A&E departments, are long-term unemployed and are more likely to be depressed or to have health problems?”
Painting easel © Hannah Norton

Known for his outspokenness, Bird had to “play it straight” in the interview for the House of Lords. However, his uninhibited manner has not deterred high-profile politicians: I spot a letter from former prime minister David Cameron next to pictures of his young children. It was sent to Bird to congratulate him on the birth of his daughter in 2006, after they had met to discuss the “Big Society”. “I said to him: ‘David, I reckon it cost £0.3m to produce you as a leader of the party of the posh. We’ve just done a survey of Big Issue vendors in London and on average 80 per cent had been in local authority care for five to 10 years. So, to produce a Big Issue vendor costs over £1m. You’re dirt cheap.’ ”

In his Marxist days, Bird would never have contemplated engaging with a rightwing politician. Social business has made him far less partisan: “I realised I would have to speak to everybody in politics, on the left and the right.” He is, he says, “here for the poor, not the poor as an ideology”.

    Borrow money from the future and you can use it to bring about enormous changes in your own life

Our tour has been haphazard, Bird jumping from one room to the next. Every object mentioned spurs a story. Occasionally, in Bird’s universe, a story spurs an object: “I want to sell 1m tea towels through The Big Issue Shop. It’s very symbolic: you would never give a tea towel to a homeless person. A tea towel means you have your own place.”

I am unsurprised to learn that the tea towel features doggerel written by Bird. How does he manage his creative pursuits alongside being Baron Bird, a perennial speechmaker, award-giver (and receiver) and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue? “I don’t need much sleep.”
Favourite thing
© Hannah Norton

Bird shows me his beautiful Mont Blanc fountain pen. “I printed and published a book in the 1980s for the Royal Academy of Arts, called The Genius of the Royal Academy. They wanted to get me a thank-you gift, so I said, ‘why don’t you give me the money and I’ll go and buy something?’ They gave me £60 and I went to the Burlington Arcade and bought my first and last Mont Blanc pen. I think they cost about £400 now.” At various times, Bird has promised to bequeath the pen to both his sons, Paddy (42) and Sonny (12).

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Letter in response to this article:

Approach to social issues needs a rethink rather than repairs / From Yvonne Beaumont, Chipping Norton, Oxon, UK
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
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