by Leneta Hey
In the spring of 2023, my family came across a Facebook post shared by Greater Manchester Police, originally dated August 2022. It read: “There are concerns for Keith Tarpey, 50 years, who has not been seen for some time. If you have any information on Keith’s whereabouts, please contact PC Helen McNeil. He is known around the Ashton area.”
Beneath the post was a photo of a man with a robotically straight face, uncombed auburn-brown hair, and sad, unlit eyes. The man in the photo was my father — a man I hadn’t seen in fifteen years.
When we called McNeil to ask if there was any more information, any sign of an investigation, or anything else she could do, she cut in with a flat, almost rehearsed tone: “We’ve put a post up. There’s nothing more we can do. It’s almost impossible to trace a homeless man.”
That was how we discovered my father wasn’t just a missing man, but someone society had already turned its eyes away from. We knew then that it would be up to us to search for him, and that it would be much harder than we had initially thought.
The first place we visited that spring was the Station Pub in Ashton, run by Pauline Town, a landlady who had received an MBE for her services to the homeless. She handed out more than 150 packed lunches a day and had employed people who had previously slept rough in the area to help around the pub. She knew every homeless person in Ashton, which is why we had chosen to start there.
Like most towns on the outskirts of Manchester, Ashton felt like a shadow cast behind the city’s illuminating presence and bright, relentless developments. The town consisted of closed bingo halls and shuttered arcades, orange- and green-tiled shopping centres, and parish churches that smelled faintly of urine.
When we arrived at the pub, a woman who looked to be in her fifties was filling plastic bags with sandwiches. “Hiya love, can I help?” she asked, warmly.
Her kind eyes, gentle smile, and curly black hair streaked with grey revealed the woman we had seen in the Facebook photos and local news articles a few days earlier — it was Pauline.
“Hello. We’re looking for a man who has been reported missing in this area”, my mother said, holding up the picture of my father’s mugshot.
Pauline smiled. “I know Keith.” she said. “Nice man. When I stopped seeing him, I called the police.”
She took us to a booth where ale and Coke had soaked into the wood, leaving a sticky lacquer and a stale sweetness in the air.
“He was always polite,” she added, glancing at the photo again. “Kept to himself mostly.”
My mother leaned in slightly. “Do you remember what he was wearing? Just so we know what to look for.”
Pauline nodded, as if picturing him right there in the doorway. “Always the same. Black beanie. Camouflage backpack. Small black trainers, worn down a bit.” It wasn’t much to go off, but it gave us somewhere to start that summer, when we sat outside cafés, markets, and bus stations, scanning people who walked past.
Pauline helped as much as she could, sharing the post on Facebook and asking around; she even took us to the place she knew my father had slept from the winter of 2021 to the summer he went missing.
It was a back alley behind the library, where a narrow flight of steps led down to a kind of stony chamber, warmed by a large boiler.
“We got a team which offered him accommodation.” Pauline said, “That’s when he left.” Before we could speak, Pauline said what we had already been thinking, after having no leads or luck in Tameside: “I’ll keep a lookout here, but you’re better off looking in the city — that’s where a lot of homeless people go, especially as it gets colder.”
The start of my second year at university meant that whilst my mother could keep searching in Ashton, I could look for him in the city. As my train pulled into Manchester each morning, 200-metre-tall glass clouds pinpointed the city and simultaneously darkened it.
Deansgate Towers cost Renaker £385 million to build, offering 1,508 luxury-style apartments. At the same time, Manchester was the third highest in the country for people experiencing homelessness; as of 2023, 7,000 people slept rough- my father being one of them.
I had, since the news, become aware of the city’s dystopianesque priorities: luxury London-style urban spectacle over problems like the housing crisis. That awareness deepened when I had spoken to a Shelter volunteer who had sat beside me in the main entrance of Victoria station.
When I asked why there were so many homeless people in Manchester, the five-foot-five blonde haired man replied “Manchester doesn’t have homes that people can afford to rent. Private rents are going up and up. People are getting evicted. They go to the council because they are homeless, and the council has no social homes.”
Just then, my back cramped on the metal, and I thought about the kind of architecture the council had invested in for regular people: the sloping seating at the tram stops, the bus shelters with “arm rests” that barely reached past the hips, the spikes that dug into my shoes outside Selfridges and Manchester Metropolitan University — all of which made it impossible for the human frame to rest, sit, or sleep on.
With a futuristic exterior of shiny steel, strange angles, and spiky patterns, it reflected Manchester’s sleek, forward-facing self-image. Yet, to me, it was a kind of true mirror which exposed how the city really felt towards poor and homeless people, that was anything but forward. The message was clear: you are not welcome here.
I began to see the city as nothing more than a place of wet concrete, glossy productivity, and chic baristas. People on Oxford Road and Market Street walked quickly past the homeless who occupied ledges and doorways every 40 yards. It was as if the homeless were invisible — as formless and dismissible as the petrol fumes and strawberry vape they walked through each day.
For this reason, when I looked for every man with a camouflage backpack or black beanie, or with a slight reddish tint to his hair, I made sure the homeless knew I was looking, that I saw them.
When I approached them and gave them a photo of my father, I listened and got to know them individually. Cot’ney, who roamed between Manchester and Oldham, lost his home to addiction. He wore a jacket two sizes too big with the sleeves always rolled up. Dave, a man in his twenties from Rochdale, slept beneath scaffold on Coronation Street covered by a bit of tent.
John sat outside Starbucks near Victoria and always smiled because it cost him nothing, and the couple bundled together in the doors of Marks & Spencer’s didn’t speak much but when they did, I found, were surprisingly funny.
And whilst they kept to themselves throughout the day, they all agreed on one place they went to at night — the arches of the public library on St Peters Square. “I feel safe there, there’s always people walking past n’ that”, Cot’ney told me once, pulling in his coat in and rolling a cigarette. “It’s better than a dark alley, av’ been mugged and beaten up there, like”.
Another time, on Market Street, I bumped into the couple sharing a cup of tea: “It’s convenient.” The woman said, passing the cup to her partner, “We’re near the ‘Don’t Walk Past’ team who give us coffee, bedding, food.”
The camps beneath the arches had their benefits -visibility, safety, convenience- but there was also a sense that the arches did more by giving the homeless a sense of community. “We’re all the same in those tent”, Dave had told me once, sitting cross-legged outside of Greggs, half-wrapped in his sleeping bag.
I had read in the paper that the Red Tent Camp began as a protest by Emma Mohareb on the lack of temporary shelters and the misuse of empty buildings in the city. There were 30 tents in the Spring, and by Christmas, they had increased to nearly 100.
Then a rumour spread that the people in the tents were migrants, and the public quickly wanted rid of the pests which invaded their city of progress. The council shooed them off like pigeons.
I thought of my father when I saw the pigeons wandering around the city, creeping close to anyone who might give them food, and then fleeing if anyone got too near. Even their grey-feathered coats reminded me of the grey jumper in his mugshot.
The pigeons were the only tolerable part of the city, and I felt a closeness to them; their cooing made more sense to me than the cutting, narrow-minded opinions I had come to hear in the city. I had learned that people had many things to say about the homeless, especially in the lead-up to Christmas, when the markets opened and rough sleepers from the outskirts of the city came in search of warmth, food, and company.
“People say they’re homeless and they have a flat up the road” a man muttered in the queue to his friend at the Bratwurst stall. The other laughed “yeah, they’re all either druggies or immigrants anyway”. Their words hung in the cinnamony, smoke-filled air.
How could they blame the person and not the policies and institutions which did nothing to help them? Also, how could they believe that addiction or being born somewhere else cancels out a person’s right to safety? That their suffering is less legitimate?
Then, a terrifying thought came over me. Over the past eight months, I had developed the anger, passion, and empathy of an activist — of someone who truly cared. But why now? What had sparked it?
The reason was that I had discovered someone with my own blood had been in the same situation. I say “someone with my own blood” because I had known very little about my father before the search; he had been absent for my entire childhood.
Yet it took someone related to me not just to notice the homeless crisis, but to feel it. To feel it pressing close in my chest, heavy and inescapable. It was individualism in its clearest form; the idea that one doesn’t care enough unless there is an indication of it being them one day.
I hadn’t previously felt indifferent to the homeless, but it hit different when the story became my father’s and thus a part of mine too. In that moment of self-realisation, I felt just as selfish as the people I had judged in the city. And that selfishness turned into an all-consuming guilt that made me desperate to get away from the city.
I decided to drive across the border from Greater Manchester into West Yorkshire, where I parked on Cragg Vale Hill, overlooking a reservoir that flowed towards me before breaking against sloping rocks.
The air was cool. An unusual white sun poked through the clouds in the winter sky. I was surrounded by brown mosses, gravel and stony walls, sandy-coloured weeds, and two grey birds which landed near my front tire.
Something about the birds made me realise I had developed a depressing, closed off view of the world, pondering only on what was broken and who was to blame for the homelessness crisis.
There was, indeed, a long list of problems: the police incompetence, the hostile architecture, the stereotyping, the prioritisation of city progress over the people. But despite these glaring truths I had uncovered about society, I had also become, like many people do in the fogginess of grief, partially ignorant to it.
The pigeons near my car, who relied so much on each other for their navigations, reminded me of all the people I had come to depend on during my search. I thought of Pauline and her charity work, of Cot’ney, Dave, and John, of the couple in the doors of M&S whom I had come to know, and of the Don’t Walk Past volunteers I had seen in December taking part in a rough sleeping challenge, where they, along with members of the public, slept in the freezing cold on Piccadilly Gardens.
The memory seemed to soften my view of the general public, as images flashed into my mind of people stopping to speak to the homeless instead of walking past them. Dare I say it, there were, in fact, beautiful, promising elements of the city, elements entirely brought about by a humbler contribution than corporate vision and urban spectacle — that contribution was the good, old-fashioned kindness of strangers.
This truth was enough to make me turn my car around, back into the skyline of cranes, and to keep stepping off platform six at Victoria each day, as I continued searching for my father.
Notes
Davies, Ethan, ‘The Red Tent Camp outside Manchester Town Hall — and why ‘its not helping anyone’ Manchester Evening News [online] 2024 < https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/red-tent-camp-outside-manchester-28980499> [accessed 4 May 2025]
‘Deansgate Square’, Renaker [online] https://renaker.com/our-developments/deansgate-square/ [accessed 4 May 2025]
‘Learn about homelessness in Manchester’ Manchester Homelessness Partnership [online] < https://mhp.org.uk/homelessness-in-manchester/> [accessed 4 May 2025]
Vickery, Kit, ‘Selfless landlady who transformed pub into lifeline for homeless people and families in poverty awarded MBE’, Manchester Evening News [online] 2021 < https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/selfless-landlady-who-transformed-pub-20797584> [accessed 4 May 2025]
