Introduction

According to most popular discourses, homelessness is something that wouldn't happen in the countryside. Just occasionally, however, rural homelessness does hit a headline but then, as with this story from the News of the World cited above, normality is soon resumed. Instead of homeless people, rural areas entertain ‘happy hobos’. Instead of being socially excluded, the happy hobo is cared for by a supportive community. Instead of being forced to move on, he has his wood bought for him by kind-hearted locals for whom a supertramp somehow fits their romanticised view of the idyllic life-styles of country living. Readers can sleep safe in their beds as their rural idyll is being enhanced by the mysterious romanticism of the somehow ageless tramp, rather than being transgressed by the harsh social reality of homelessness.

In this chapter we want to argue that discourses from governments, academics, news media and many (but not all) voluntary agencies conspire to create the impression that the spatiality of homeless people is entirely encompassed by city limits. People's everyday experiences, both televisual and ‘live’, have served to assimilate homelessness in city sites/sights, and often to conflate homelessness with concomitant ‘urban’ issues such as the supposed street criminalities of drunkenness, vagrancy and begging. Without wishing in any sense to deny or undermine the socio-political importance of homelessness issues in the city, we want to argue that homelessness is also important in rural areas, and that its significance requires special emphasis precisely because it is usually hidden from view.

Homelessness and rurality appear to be an anathema, and we want to question why that is so. We suggest that in part, the invisibility of rural homelessness is about the ways in which homelessness is defined and recorded. In part, it has to do with the difficulties of gaining advice in rural areas, the assumed futility of trying to find affordable housing in expensive housing markets, and the reluctance of some rural people to admit that they have a problem.