Brixton Soup Kitchen: The Soup Kitchen with a Twist
Nearly a decade ago, a grassroots organization was created as a food bank for the Brixton homeless community. Today, it’s accomplishing so much more than that.
In the predominantly Black and Afro-Caribbean community of Brixton, a neighborhood of South London, lies the Brixton Soup Kitchen, an invaluable resource for those facing homelessness. Founded nine years ago by Solomon Smith and run by a small team of employees and volunteers, the Brixton Soup Kitchen has provided relief to countless homeless people in England, regardless of where they hail from in the country.
On the corner of Moorland Road and Coldharbour Lane sat a gaunt group of people, who could easily be mistook as leisurely senior citizens of the community. For residents of Brixton, though, they understand that the individuals sitting on that lush, grassy mound — lined with rust-colored bricks — are waiting for the Brixton Soup Kitchen to arrive. And when Solomon’s van finally pulls up, it’s practically a reunion among the regulars and the staff. It’s apparent that Smith is a natural, and has been doing these kinds of charitable acts for decades, well before the Brixton Soup Kitchen was born.
From the tender age of 12, Solomon has been giving whatever food his family could spare to the homeless in his town of Brixton.
“Always seeing there was homelessness around, I realized the best way of action was doing something yourself,” Smith said, reflecting on his early encounters with community members who struggled to survive in their poor community. “I think in America, you call it the projects, but in the U.K., we call it council estates. In these council estates, only 10 percent of people would have enough food in their homes,” Smith recalled of his past neighbors.
These observations made a huge impact on Solomon, who would go on to contribute even more to his less fortunate community members and, eventually, help individuals outside of Brixton. “Even though we’re called Brixton Soup Kitchen, we’re feeding people all around London. We have an open-door policy for anyone to come and get a meal,” Smith adds, emphasizing just how far-reaching their organization intends to be.
The soup kitchen doesn’t just have an open door to everyone, but they seek out different homeless communities outside of Brixton, as well. “We do outreach to the local communities, giving them groceries, giving them food from Nando’s, giving them clothing. And we usually go to West End Strand, and we give out cooked food and toiletries to homeless people… every Wednesday,” details a long-time volunteer of eight years, Isaac Obeng-Ansong.
This area Obeng-Ansong mentioned, West End Strand, is named among “the top clusters for rough sleeping in the borough.” According to a heat map created by the official city of Westminster Committee, “rough sleeping and begging clusters show that there are some areas where there is overlap, especially in the West End and along the Strand.”
The lengths the Brixton Soup Kitchen and its volunteers go to in order to reach London’s most vulnerable individuals is undoubtedly widespread. They are intentional with their outreach to various communities, and it shows in how their organization operates.
Being a predominantly Black community, Brixton inhabitants deal with discrimination and government neglect daily. When speaking on the struggles Brixtoners face that can increase their chances of being out on the streets, Smith outlined the harsh realities of their society. “Here, it’s very hard for people who are Afro-Caribbean to get the good jobs. If we put Brixton on our CV, we’re going to get declined [because] they’ll automatically class you,” he says, speaking from personal experience.
With this understanding of how the UK government fails its struggling and homeless citizens, Solomon expanded Brixton Soup Kitchen to be much more than just a source of food. Those who come to the soup kitchen to eat also have “a place to job search, a place to do their CV or cover letters, they can go on the internet to speak to their family.” They even have “a service where a housing officer comes down and helps them get on the housing register,” he adds. Having such a wide range of resources available to the homeless was always a big goal for Smith.
“I remember when I had to go to different services, if I needed help with my housing, I would have to go to the housing center. If I needed help with job search, I had to go to the job center. And these were places I’d have to travel to,” confesses Smith. For homeless people, this process of commuting from center to center would cost them a lot of time and money, luxuries that they don’t have.
Another service provided by Solomon and his team is free legal advice for guests every week. After reaching out to different lawyers about doing pro bono legal aid, the Brixton Soup Kitchen was able to secure free legal advice from lawyers that come in on Thursdays evenings. When contemplating the number of guests that likely deal with homelessness due to landlords raising the rent or eviction, Solomon comments that the “percentages [of people needing an eviction lawyer] would definitely be the highest.”
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there were over 70,000 households made homeless in 2021, according to figures from The Observer. Due to landlords raising tenants’ rent, many found themselves facing homelessness after the pandemic’s temporary measures to prevent rent gouging were dismissed. The evictions that followed surely played a part in Britain’s increasing homelessness rates. This is why the Brixton Soup Kitchen’s legal aid is so vital to homeless individuals, as it supplies those that were wrongly evicted a chance to get back on their feet.
“I wanted to make it as convenient as possible because their life is already hard. Being homeless is hard,” the Brixton Soup Kitchen founder concludes about the plethora of services they offer in one location.
The launch of the Brixton Soup Kitchen was back in January 2013, nearly a decade ago. And in its nine years of business, they’ve been operating completely from donations and selfless volunteers who shared the organization’s “vision,” such as Obeng-Ansong, who’s been with the soup kitchen “from the start”.
“There’s bigger charities that have been running longer than us, they’ve got more staff than us, who know how to reach out for those contracts,” which are also known as charity funding, Smith elaborates. “There are charities that know how to get to those funds, but for us, who’s got such a small team, we just have a team that literally does the work. We don’t have a team that does the paperwork,” he says.
Because of their limited access to government charity funding compared to bigger charities with more manpower, Solomon and his team haven’t received any help from the government in the nearly 10 years they’ve been managing the Brixton Soup Kitchen.
“Us getting donations, us sending out letters, people seeing us on social media” are the main ways “we’ve been surviving for the past 9 years,” explained the head of this organization. Obeng-Ansong is one of the people creating and sending out those letters helping to keep the organization afloat. “It’s been chaotic, to be fair. However, we’re filled with experience of making nothing into something,” the long-time volunteer says with optimism.
“It’s our soup kitchen with a twist,” Obeng-Ansong says, looking off in the distance.
