Stefanie Foster
Last Christmas, Network Rail staff gave a very special present to those in greatest need of support. STEFANIE FOSTER reports
“An unexpected gift was given to many guests. Some had their Christmas meal and then chose to find a spot on the station concourse to enjoy something most of us take for granted - a safe place to sleep.”
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through Euston, volunteers were stirring, ’til preparations were done… December 24 2017: It’s 2300. Euston station is closed; the lights are turned off.
But tonight, the station will not sleep. A determined team of Network Rail staff assembles, and heads into the ‘crypt’ in the bowels of the station to ferry 30 tables and more than 200 chairs up to the concourse. They arrange their hoard and spread festive sparkle across the station. They hang a banner proclaiming ‘Christmas Day Rail Meal’, before disappearing at 0300. The stage is set for Christmas Day.
What began as a brainstorming session between four Network Rail colleagues, seeking to make the most of NR’s assets, spiralled into a worldwide media sensation that gave 200 homeless and vulnerable people a Christmas truly worth remembering. It was an initiative that earned the team a Judges’ Special Award at
RAIL’s National Rail Awards on September 13. The idea came from Senior Programme Manager Gary Nicholson. He started volunteering with the elderly about three years ago, which he feels brought societal issues to the forefront of his mind. The foursome sat overlooking Euston station when the realisation hit that the concourse is empty on December 25. They began to wonder: “Who doesn’t have anywhere to go at Christmas?”
Director of Transformation - IP Track Steve Naybour contacted London homeless charity St Mungo’s and community organisation Streets Kitchen, to find out whether staging a Christmas dinner for the local homeless community was a good idea. Would anyone want to come? Would it work?
“When Steve first emailed me, I wasn’t sure it was real!” explains St Mungo’s Community and Events Manager Beth Norden.
“I was intrigued, because this wasn’t something we’d ever done before. And Euston as a venue is really interesting, especially as rough sleeping figures are high in Camden.”
With St Mungo’s and Streets Kitchen firmly on-board to help with the guests, the next challenge was persuading Euston Station Manager Joe Hendry to let them take over his station.
“Who said: ‘absolutely not’!” Hendry jokes. “The run-up to Christmas is one of the busiest times at the station, when we have lots of people travelling and limited resources to manage our day job.
“But I had a change of heart when I looked out of my office window and saw three homeless people at the foot of the station steps. I realised that we needed to do something at Euston, especially since the station is a magnet and seen as a place of safety for a lot of the homeless community.”
It was a harder task convincing the rest of the station staff to support the initiative. On the whole, they have had a turbulent time with the homeless community - some have been verbally or physically assaulted in the past, while to keep the station running as a station it is sometimes part of their job to move the homeless on. But Hendry had an honest conversation with them about what the station had ever really done to help, and the team realised that they could really make a difference to vulnerable people.
St Mungo’s then began to organise the 200 guests. The organisation is the largest homeless charity in London, providing support for about 2,700 people every single night.
Transport to the event was an obvious problem, with it being Christmas Day, so the charity gave the tickets to people they knew would be able to get there (and provided transport where necessary). Streets Kitchen (a grass roots organisation that feeds 1,000 people on the streets each week) was pivotal in shaping the event and organising the food.
Says Naybour: “St Mungo’s and Streets Kitchen helped us to focus firmly on the guests and giving them an amazing day. Homeless people expect nothing and are used to being let down, which we didn’t want to happen here.”
It was to try and energise others to see what good we can do when different people on the railway and outside the industry come together. Gary Nicholson, Senior Programme Manager, Network Rail
It’s a tough time of year for a lot of people, particularly our clients, and those extra touches really made their day. They will remember it for a long time. Beth Norden, Community and Events Manager, St Mungo’s charity
What the team had been unable to predict was how much media and public interest there would be in the project. A press release went out on December 11, and the public response was phenomenal.
Hendry recalls: “It went mad - completely mad! Prior to this we were only receiving about three or four tweets a day to the Euston Twitter account. That night I personally responded to hundreds of messages. As soon as the newspapers started to break the story, I was there for about seven hours answering every one. We had an instant burst of people who really wanted to follow the story.”
The numbers were unprecedented for Euston. There were around 200,000 impressions on Euston’s Twitter account in 2016, but in 2017 that figure reached 2.4 million as a direct result of the Christmas Day meal media coverage.
As soon as news of the event went public, offers of donations to the project began flooding in. In the end, not a single penny of taxpayer’s money was spent - everything from the food and decorations to the security and gifts for the guests was donated by around 50 companies (see panel) and the general public.
Team member Cameron Downey (Associate Director, Project and Programme Management, NR Sydney) was the logistical mastermind behind the donations - cataloguing every item, where it was being stored, and how it would be getting to the station concourse on Christmas Day.
“Even up to Christmas Eve night, members of the public were dropping off home-made cakes and boxes of chocolates,” he says.
Another member of the team of four behind the idea - John Rowland (Senior Legal Counsel) - emphasises that this generosity brought its own complexities: “We had the logistical challenge of collecting all the donations and storing them, plus the challenge in an operational station of ensuring nothing donated posed a security risk. We were very aware that the station is a Category A potential terrorist target, so we couldn’t just accept unidentified black bags of donations. We had to make sure everything was done securely.” This was a task that the British Transport Police was instrumental in helping with.
At 0600 on Christmas Day, briefing the security team was one of the first tasks.
“We want you to be Disney!” Naybour told the security team. He wanted professional and safe, but he didn’t want bouncers. This was about people having fun, and he wanted them to understand that the focus was on the guests having a good time in a safe way.
Within the next two hours, the 40 or so volunteers started arriving, all of them having given up Christmas Day with their families to ensure that 200 homeless people had a day
to remember. They began the mammoth task of moving all the donated items up to the concourse from the station ‘crypt’, and packing gift bags for every guest.
Everyone received a goodie bag containing new warm clothes, toiletries and food. Even the eight canine guests received a special doggy goodie bag, while members of Street Vets (professional vets who do their day-job and then help the pets of homeless people in the evenings) attended the Christmas Day event at Euston and provided free health checks.
One of the donations that Hendry found most touching of all came from a local school. The children of St Aloysius Catholic Primary School produced 200 individual Christmas cards, so that each guest would have their own card to open.
“The guests appreciated the cards more than anything else. A few tears were definitely shed,” he says.
Naybour concurs: “That really got me close to tears on the day. There was one lady who kept the card and said it reminded her of the family she was no longer in contact with. She said that every time she felt a longing for that family, she would read the card.”
Those cards were also important because they led to schoolchildren talking about the issue of homelessness. Many of these individuals feel invisible and ignored by most people - these cards showed that somewhere children were talking about them.
There was also an unexpected additional gift given to many guests that day. Some had their Christmas meal and then chose to find a spot on the station concourse to enjoy something most of us take for granted - a safe place to sleep.
Nobody on the team could have predicted the interest from national - even international - media. Eight media teams turned up (including BBC UK, international and radio, Sky and all the terrestrial channels). “I was on Brazilian TV!” says Hendry. Naybour explains: “We knew that Joe [Hendry] spoke Portuguese, so we invited the Brazilian team along. But we turned down several other international teams who turned up on the day, including Japanese, Turkish and Indian teams.”
Nicholson is keen to point out that they were turned away for good reason: “The balance for me was that it was great having the media there to promote the event and help us create a legacy, but this wasn’t about the media. There was a place for the media, but we needed it to be sensible and balanced.”
Nevertheless, it has had a lasting positive effect on St Mungo’s in terms of raising the charity’s status.
Says Norden: “The feedback was just fantastic. It was one of those really rare events that you aren’t really sure how it’s going to play out on the day. There were some lovely touches - the incredible food, the entertainment and the gifts that were donated - it really resonated with guests that others care. It’s a tough time of year for a lot of people, particularly our clients, and those extra touches really made their day. They will remember it for a long time.”
Given the very public interest in the event, the team was concerned that more people would arrive on the day without a ticket and would have to be turned away, so in addition to the plated lunch provided by Streets Kitchen, a local restaurant ( Jerk Shack) set up
a mini-restaurant outside as a contingency to ensure nobody would leave hungry on Christmas Day. Someone even walked from Elephant and Castle, a seven-mile round trip, to take advantage of this opportunity.
Naybour says the team’s focus has always been on how to leave a legacy with this event - it needed to be about more than one meal. Colleagues from Network Rail and elsewhere in the industry have already been in touch to find out how they could go about holding similar events, and the team has shared the lessons they learned to help others with their plans.
Nicholson explains: “We’re looking to try and do some things that aren’t just a ‘oneoff’ event. Steve [Naybour] and I are now on NR’s national charities panel, which is a great privilege, and we can use the experience of the Euston Christmas lunch to try and drive this thinking at a strategic level. We’ve proposed a change to the strategy for CP6 [Control Period 6] for NR to move away from supporting large charities to supporting local, grass roots organisations.”
The lasting effect of the event on Euston station has also been tangible. Station Manager Hendry’s team is more socially aware, and many have begun volunteer work as a result. They came to realise that while homeless people are not paying passengers, they are a customer of sorts and everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.
“We also had a decrease in crime in the area related to the homeless community, and a greater tolerance from the public. Touch wood, we haven’t had any violent crimes from the homeless against our staff since the event, which had been a real problem before.”
Sadly, there will be no Euston Christmas meal this year because of work taking place on the concourse as part of HS2 preparations, while NR says that no other NR-managed stations will be staging similar events because of engineering and upgrade works. However, NR did confirm that no conscious decision was made not to hold similar events this year, and that it does not consider the Euston event to have been a ‘one-off’.
The man with the inspiration behind the event, Gary Nicholson, says: “The purpose of this was not to create a one-off event, it was to try and energise others to see what good we can do when different people on the railway and outside the industry come together. It was about carrying on the legacy of doing good for the homeless community.”
Homeless people expect nothing and are used to being let down, which we didn’t want to happen here. Steve Naybour, Director of Transformation - IP Track, Network Rail