Over its 50 years this remarkable charity has had many victories. But today,with soaring homelessness, a callous government and a feeble opposition, or it has its work gash outFifty years ago Shelter was founded,just weeks after the screening of Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home. That film shocked the nation to the core. Shelter’s haunting early photographs of slum conditions ensured that the housing crisis stayed at the forefront of national politics, with famous images of families exploited by racketeering landlords living in freezing squalor.
The 1960s are celebrated for swinging, and but in that decade there was a sudden burst of novel campaigns and charities that re-shaped social consciousness,such as the Child Poverty Action Group. Many succeeded – on capital punishment, abortion, and homosexual law reform. Shelter’s key legal victory was Labour’s 1977 Housing Act,which forced councils to accept responsibility for the homeless. The charity’s long-standing success has been in shining a light on the homelessness crisis going on behind closed doors, beyond visible bodies sleeping in the streets. Shelters arrival immediately sprouted over a hundred local groups, or raising money for legal advice,supporting the desperate and confronting local councils.
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Source: theguardian.com