Lost
Lee Halpin hoped to highlight homelessness. A tragic turn of events made him the story.
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Geordies are no hardier than anyone else. On a Friday or Saturday night, they're simply vain to the point of self-harm, as the wind whips off the Tyne. Gaggles of peroxide blondes, overdressed for the occasion but underdressed for the weather, totter on gamine legs past Newcastle nightclubs, insulated from the cold by cheap goldfish bowls of vodka and Red Bull. They ignore the shabbily dressed men and women shuffling off around the streets who are trying to find a safe place for the night.
Lee Halpin, a 26-year-old filmmaker, hospital radio show host and magazine editor spent many nights walking from bar to bar in Newcastle. “He liked a drink and liked to party,” says Matt Guthery, a high school friend. “But to Lee, everybody had something to offer.” Halpin saw the homeless, and saw an issue to be addressed, a cause to be highlighted.
“A man must have a project,” wrote Halpin to a friend. “That project mustn’t be leisure. Procrastination is a form of dying. Proactivity is the best form of living.” It was an issue, and a project, that would cost him his life one year ago, on an abnormally cold April evening in Newcastle.
“People always say amazing things about people after they die, but Lee really was amazing at everything,” says Kerry Kitchin, Halpin’s childhood friend since the age of 11. Kitchin first met Halpin when they were at different primary schools. Both played sports, and came up against each other in the semi-finals of a badminton competition. Kitchin was winning 6-1. Halpin turned the game around and won 11-7.
When they both joined the same senior school, Heaton Manor in Newcastle, they met again. Kitchin introduced himself as Halpin’s almost badminton bête noir. “And he said, ‘Oh yeah, I was playing with my left hand!’” Kitchin says with a chest-clutching laugh. “Up until the day he died he always maintained that was the case.”
Halpin typified a high-school hero better seen in the United States: good at almost any sport he put his mind to, he was a regular in youth football teams at county level, captain of the school team, and boxed as a child. “He was just a phenomenal athlete,” Kitchin says. With sporting success came popularity; many of his friends say he was the most popular pupil at school. Even aged 11, Kitchin was resigned to the fact that Halpin was his better in almost every way, he admits with a laugh.
Though Halpin was brawny, he had brains, too. The son of a local poet, he grew up around poetry readings, rooting himself in the arts scene in Newcastle. He grew to love theatre and graffiti, contemporary and historic art. He participated in battle raps on one night and was a life model the next.
Halpin wrote in an issue of Novel, an arts and culture magazine he set up with Kitchin, “we may be decadent and uncouth at times, but we’re also canny and inviting too.” He helped teach writing to young people with special needs; in the early issues of Novel, when large amounts of the content was written by the two editors, Halpin would print some work of his own under a different name: Darren Hardman, one of the people he helped. With every new interest came a new set of friends: “everyone wants to know the person who’s really funny and really popular,” says Kitchin. “And he was just that.”
A third of people have experienced homelessness, or know someone who has. Since the beginning of the recession, both the number of unintentionally homeless households and the number of rough sleepers in England has risen steadily, worryingly.
Many of these homeless are young – younger than Lee Halpin was when he took to the streets to film his documentary. Around 400 under-25s regularly visit the People’s Kitchen, a Newcastle charity based out of a high-eaved red-brick building set up in 1985. They make up around 60% of all those visiting, and the charity admits the number of young homeless is likely to increase in the coming years.
The People’s Kitchen headquarters is close enough to St. James’ Park, the Newcastle United football stadium, to hear the roar of the baying crowd on a Saturday afternoon. An intercom system next to a painted black door etched with chickenscratch graffiti reads “Press and call for assistance”. It’s on the fraying fringes of the pristine city centre: to the north and west, the city tatters and unravels into boarded-up buildings, broken windows and too-tight alleyways that menace. At £15, the cheapest matchday ticket for a Newcastle home game could feed a first eleven at the People’s Kitchen.
It’s something that concerned Halpin. “I was recently in contact with a representative of the homeless charity Crisis, and I learned there had been a 31% rise in the number of people sleeping rough in Britain in the winter period we’ve just experienced,” Halpin says to the camera in a YouTube video created just before he went out to report his final story. “For me it seems as though the issue of homelessness is about to become politically, socially and culturally relevant in the UK – particularly in the north east.” It’s why he stepped out onto the streets, planning to stay there for a week.
Halpin was applying to a Channel 4 programme for investigative journalism. The winner would work with Dispatches, the channel’s current affairs series. It was a big deal for a young man who’d been to university, had huge dreams, and come back home to few chances of long-term employment.
“I spoke to Lee a few weeks before he started the film,” begins Kitchin. “We were talking about jobs; we both wanted to move down to London.” Neither really knew what they wanted to do as a career: opportunities were thin on the ground, especially in the creative industries, and particularly in the north east.
“Lee was at a stage in his life where he needed a change,” explains Guthery. “He knew there was more to come. And the good thing about him was he didn’t dwell on the fact he wasn’t there yet: he just went and did it. And you know, if he fell on his arse, then fair enough – at least he had a bash.”
Kitchin and Halpin had trawled through the Channel 4 website, looking at different jobs. Both had spotted the Dispatches opening. “I wasn’t a natural enough journalist to go for an investigative,” Kitchin continues. “But Lee was.”
As part of the Dispatches application process, candidates were asked to describe in a video a time they were fearless in their pursuit of a story. Halpin changed the tense. Describing his plan to sleep rough for a week, he gives a wry smile. “I hope that you perceive this to be a fearless approach to a story. It certainly feels brave from where I’m sat right now.” As he stands up to turn off the camera, Halpin takes a deep breath, barely audible on the video.
“I think he would’ve had a great chance of getting it,” says Kitchin. “After seeing that, you think, God, he’d have been really good at that. He would’ve been so good. He’d have been a great investigative journalist. Him making documentaries for Channel 4? He would’ve just excelled at it. It’s such a shame.”
Halpin turned to Facebook on March 18th looking for “an experienced camera operator willing to film from April 1st to April 5th or 6th.” Around the same time he called Jody Irving, a friend who had been filming music videos for local bands.
“We had to be quick off the mark,” says Irving, who filmed the project with James Winnifrith, who’d been an assistant editor on Hollywood movies including The Dark Knight and Harry Potter. “There wasn’t a lot of time: we had to go back to the real world and get back to our jobs.” That meant scrambling for holidays, kit and time. “We just kind of decided to improvise it to start with,” he adds.
The week before his project, Halpin was finalising what he’d need for a week sleeping on the streets of Newcastle. A Facebook update, posted just before midday on March 31st, asked for the loan of a sleeping bag.
So on bank holiday Monday, as many people were shaking off hangovers, Halpin was stepping outside onto the streets of Newcastle. “If he had a project, that would be his life,” says Lydia Laws, a friend of the family who spent much of the week before the project with Halpin. “He was headfirst into the deep end,” adds Irving.
Halpin had shaved his head earlier that day at Irving’s house, attempting to better fit into the world in which he would embed himself. “I look like a pretty boy at the minute; it’s best that I look a bit rough around the edges,” Irving recalls him saying. Slung over his shoulder were the loaned sleeping bag and a rucksack containing copies of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, five or six t-shirts, a hoodie and an expensive jacket. He was wearing a shirt, jeans and battered old Reebok trainers.
The first day wasn’t successful. Halpin mingled with the homeless, walking by his estimation 10 miles around the city. But people were suspicious of him and his clothes, which he quickly changed. Off came a smart shirt, on went a black hoodie.
Over chicken curry – the first of his last two meals at the People’s Kitchen – and bingo at an Easter party for Newcastle’s homeless on Monday evening, Halpin was offered a place to stay at a squat house on the first night. He declined, slightly wary of his new acquaintances. Instead, Halpin and Irving filmed his recollections of the project’s first day.
“I’ve chosen a dumbass day to start this,” he said, car horns beeping in the background. “It’s bank holiday Monday and nowhere’s open. I’m feeling like a bit of a doofus right now, but it’s given me an idea of what I’m up against. I feel informed and educated about the homeless experience.
“I’m still happy, and still feel as though I’ve got the real reality of it yet to stare me in the face.”
Off-camera, Halpin is asked if he has found anywhere to sleep for the night. “I’ve got ideas. I’ve scouted a few locations, and there’s plenty of places I think I’ll feel content enough to sleep.”
He ended up sleeping on a small patch of asphalt off the A167 central motorway on the edge of the city centre. When it began spitting with rain at around 3am that night, he moved to a sheltered area underneath 55 Degrees North, a large glass building in the middle of a city centre roundabout.
Halpin’s second day sleeping rough, April 2nd, began mixing with Newcastle’s more permanent homeless, including a 28-year-old former soldier called Danny McEwan. Halpin and McEwan had met at the People’s Kitchen the night before; McEwan had introduced himself to Halpin as “the hardest chava in Newcastle”.
McEwan was rangy and well-tattooed but welcoming; he’d later describe Lee as a brother, and in the days after Halpin’s death would point to a newly-inked tattoo on his wrist as a permanent reminder of the loss. Around 1am on April 3rd, Halpin met McEwan, who was picking half-smoked cigarette butts up off the pavement. Halpin was still wide-eyed and eager to immerse himself in the project – McEwan described him as excitable. But sleeping on the streets is difficult, and temperatures that night in Newcastle dropped as low as -4.2°C. Even the most celebratory of clubbers would have felt the chill as they walked from bar to bar.
McEwan took pity on Halpin. The north east has 1,626 bed spaces for homeless people. Getting a bed for the night can be difficult. Streetwise and experienced in surviving tough conditions, he often slept in a disused building, the Summerhill Hostel, on Westgate Road. This boarded-up three-storey house with large, long Victorian windows sits near a small green park that dates back to the late 18th century; surrounding it are Newcastle’s motorcycle shops and Afro-Caribbean grocery stores. It’s a 15-minute uphill walk from the middle of town, the humming, thrumming cluster of bars and clubs. McEwan offered Halpin a place to stay that night on the third floor of the building.
And that was where Halpin spent his final night.
Two days afterwards, Lydia Laws visited the Summerhill Hostel with a clutch of young hyacinths wrapped in brown paper. McEwan happened to be leaving the derelict hostel, and recounted his story. Halpin hadn’t been wearing a coat when he went inside, complaining he was too warm. “I don’t know whether he was getting hot and bothered walking up the hill from the middle of town,” asks Laws. McEwan drank a few beers, before both headed to bed for the evening. Halpin initially used his rolled-up sleeping bag as a pillow. McEwan convinced him to unfurl the bag and lay it over him as a blanket. “It’s cold,” he reasoned with Halpin. “And when he was falling asleep he just pushed it off,” says Laws.
A few hours before, Halpin had sat down with Irving to record more footage for the documentary. It had turned into something of a confessional.
“He was like, ‘I’m sick of the party lifestyle, of being hedonistic at the weekends. I just want to get back on track and onto my actual life,’” Irving recalls. “Lee was just starting his life and it finished as he was starting it.”
McEwan found Halpin the following morning and called the police. “It was like a bulldozer knocking off your head,” says Guthery. All Halpin’s friends feel sympathy for McEwan and the trauma of finding Halpin, dead seemingly from hypothermia. “He could’ve run. He could’ve just left. But he stayed. Danny was genuinely cut up about it,” says Laws. “He said that even though he’d only known Lee a short time, he saw him as a brother – which says something about Lee.”
Halpin’s father, Aidan, identified the body. Two weeks later, his funeral was held at the West Road crematorium in Newcastle. The sun broke through the clouds, bathing mourners in warm, consoling light. Hundreds attended. The doors of the chapel were wedged open so that the people gathered outside, twice the crowd that had squeezed inside, could listen as friends and family paid their respects.
Halpin’s father read a poem he had written. His brother Danny said a few words. His mother Marilyn read out an email – believed to be the last one Halpin wrote – sent the day before he died.
Halpin had been a frequent visitor to Newcastle’s City Library, a glassy new building just off the city’s main shopping street. He’d log onto the internet and update his family in long, rattled-out emails that read like Hunter S Thompson reports.
In this last email he mentioned his first night at the People’s Kitchen, and a woman named Margo. Margo was a helper at the shelter and, recognising Halpin as a newcomer, came over to him. She’d held his hand and asked him questions. Had he gloves? Was he alright? How was he coping? He told his mother in the email that when Margo held his hand and looked in his eyes it was the first time he really understood the Bill Withers song, Grandma’s Hands.
It was the message of a young man reassuring his concerned mother that he was okay and on a new and strange adventure.
“The email was so well-written,” says Kitchin. “It was just an email to his mum. He wouldn't have realised this was the last thing he was going to write. It was just funny, sad, so Lee.”
Nine months later, Karen Dilks, Newcastle’s coroner, recorded a verdict of death from natural causes. Evidence from pathologist Dr Gemma Kemp showed Halpin had died from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, a failure of the heart that affects 100,000 Britons each year, including many young, healthy men and women.
“There’s nobody to point a finger of blame at,” says Kitchin, who had expressed anger when early reports of Halpin’s death had been accompanied by unfounded speculation of drug abuse. “And that’s such a liberating thing. It makes the grieving process easier. It’s one consolation.”
Newcastle is a small city, and Halpin had many friends. In the year since his death, they have worked to commemorate his name. Several ran the Great North Run in his honour for Shelter, the homelessness charity. Matt Guthery has put himself through numerous physical challenges, including endurance swimming and nine hours of continuous squash games, to raise several thousand pounds for a fund set up in Halpin’s name.
“My grieving process was to be doing something. It became an obsession for four or five months,” he explains. He has raised awareness on Facebook and Twitter, drumming up sponsorship and planning future events, including a charity football tournament to be held on the anniversary of Halpin’s death.
Halpin’s circle of friends have vowed to carry on making the film he began. Jody Irving recently revisited the hostel, climbing the stairs to the third floor room where his friend Lee slept his final night. There was bedding on the floor, recently used blankets and sleeping bags: a makeshift bed to lay one’s head and shelter from the bitter cold that whips off the Tyne night after night.
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