As we look towards World Homeless Day on 10 October 2026, I’ve been reflecting afresh on the meaning of home. As AD of Cardboard Citizens for the past five years, this is a subject we as a team think about a lot.
Cardboard Citizens believes theatre can change how we see one another, and can change the narrative of homelessness and poverty, and more recently we’ve been focusing on how housing insecurity and homelessness impacts children and families.
There are currently more children living in temporary accommodation in England than at any point on record. More than 177,000 children. Just let that sink in. I’ve experienced homelessness myself, but now as a new Dad and reflecting on how it shaped my younger life, it’s a fact that hits even harder.
Beginning today and over the coming years, we will be working in partnership with Crisis on a national programme of public engagement about home, housing insecurity and family homelessness.
At the heart of this programme is a show for 8 to 13 year olds and their families, adapted from Jacqueline Wilson’s much-loved The Bed and Breakfast Star – one of the first children’s books to explore homelessness from a child’s perspective.
We’re kicking off the national programme on Friday 30 October at the Southbank Centre with a free creative workshop for children aged 5+.
Together we’ll be getting inspired by The Bed and Breakfast Star and asking what home means to you and your family.
What does home mean to you?
By Chris Sonnex, Artistic Director of Cardboard Citizens
Recently someone knocked at my door.
A perfectly reasonable thing to do, of course.
I froze. Clasping a 10 week old baby.
I wasn’t expecting visitors. There was no delivery due. So, naturally, the only logical explanation was that it was a bailiff, coming to chuck me out of my house and put me, my wife and our very brand new baby on the street.
I froze as if this imaginary bailiff was a Tyrannosaurus rex. A T-Rex that could see through walls but, crucially, couldn’t see you if you didn’t move.
I mean, I was up to date on the bills. The rent was paid. My debt repayments were being made.
But in that frozen moment, none of that mattered. The guttural fear wasn’t going to be reasoned with.
So I breathed.
I tried to convince my parasympathetic nervous system to chill the fuck out.
Not every day is a fight.
Not every day is a flight.
Today it’s freeze.
When you spend much of your childhood and adulthood with very little money, with the genuine fear of being evicted again, of sleeping somewhere unsafe, of not having somewhere proper to call home, your body remembers things your brain thinks it has dealt with.
The trauma responses can arrive at different times. Unexpectedly. Sometimes years later. Sometimes, sadly, as a completely normal part of your life.
So there I was, standing still, hiding beside my front door with my tiny baby in my arms, while the person outside turned out not to be a bailiff at all, but a lady wanting to tell me about their God’s plan for me.
It got me thinking about the meaning of home.
Three months before my son was born, and literally a week before the renters’ reforms came into effect, I was handed a Section 21 notice for having the audacity to negotiate with a rent increase.
Sometimes there isn’t a fictional enemy at the door.
Sometimes the old foe comes back in a very real way.
In a particularly Shakespearean twist, the date we were being told to vacate was my son’s due date.
We eventually reached an agreement that meant we could stay in the house we’d lived in for years.
By paying even more rent.
Rent that, at some point, we probably won’t be able to afford.
And so the spiral goes.
That was what was in my head as I stood frozen beside that doorway.
The doorway became a kind of liminal space between safety and insecurity.
Schrödinger’s bailiff.
How can home mean anything at all if, for so many people, it can be dragged out from underneath you so easily?
A rent increase here.
Another mouth to feed there.
An ever-piling list of debt and trauma, intertwined like devil’s ivy.
For millions of people, home has become intangible.
For people who have experienced homelessness.
For people living in poverty.
For people trapped in the private renting loop, being pushed further and further from the places they were born, the places they settled, the places they want to raise their families.
For people watching rents soar while empty billionaire-owned properties sit around them, helping inflate a housing market they will never be able to buy into.
It’s like that game where you shoot water pistols into balloons until they burst.
Spoiler: it’s everyday people that burst.
They may never own a home.
They might spend their whole lives paying someone else’s mortgage.
And for those who desperately need social housing, there simply isn’t enough of it.
Home isn’t bricks and mortar anymore.
For too many people, home is ideological.
An aspiration.
A dream.
Never is that more obvious than when you think about the more than 177,000 children living in temporary accommodation in England today
Families dreaming of having a kitchen.
A visitor.
A bedroom.
A front door that is actually theirs.
A place where they can potty train their baby without wondering when they will have to move again.
Dreaming that the word temporary might actually mean temporary.
When the statistics tell us otherwise.
So what could home possibly mean to you?
Or to me?
Back to the 41-year-old man frozen at his front door, reliving a younger trauma with his new child in his arms.
It occurred to me that, if all was well with the world, home would be a real, tangible thing for the masses, we could all envision what home means to us and how it looks, and what adorns the walls and surfaces, that we all could make generational memories of a house.
But right now, without stability that many crave, home has to mean other things.
To some, it is safety.
To some, long leases.
To some, friends.
Family.
Community.
The industry you work in.
The people who will catch you when you fall.
And to the little baby I was holding (while hiding from a nice lady in her 60s), home is in my arms.
He’s safe.
He’s warm.
He’s loved.
He doesn’t have to think about any of these heavy things yet.
But I do.
And right now, for me, he and his mum are all that matters.
They are safety.
They are home.
Join Us
Cardboard Citizens: The Meaning of Home
Southbank Centre, The Clore Ballroom
Friday 30 October 2026, 10.30am to 12pm
Age 5+
Free entry, unticketed
