When I was a teenager in the late 1970s, tramps were a familiar sight. They nearly always dressed in the same “uniform”: a long, shabby overcoat with string-tied boots and a straggly beard. Yes… I know that sounds like a stereotype—but I saw them dressed like this.
They could usually be seen either sleeping on park benches or gathered in groups chatting and drinking on the steps of disused buildings etc.
They weren’t homeless in the modern sense of systemic failure and desperation, but part of a now extinct subculture, with its own unspoken rules.
The word “tramp” has largely vanished from modern vocabulary. We now speak of the “homeless”, a term that covers a wide and shifting range of circumstances: people living in tents, hostels, cars or sofa-surfing. Many are young (under 40), affected by addiction, mental health issues or a system that has failed them. They are often seen sitting outside banks or in sleeping bags in shop doorways. But they are not tramps, not in the older sense.
“Tramping” was a way of life: itinerant, solitary and based on a sort of freedom. The tramp of old was usually an older man (though a few women tramps did exist), sometimes an ex-soldier or labourer, who had dropped out of ordinary life through choice.
He would sleep most nights in the “spike”: the local workhouse-style “doss house”, where you were allowed a bed for one night in exchange for chores. George Orwell wrote about spikes in Down and Out in Paris and London, describing the indignities of the places from firsthand experience.
This subculture also had its “infrastructure”. Certain cafés, park shelters, hostels, church halls and quiet parts of railway stations were its hubs. Some cities had what might be called "tramp cafés", often in poorer areas, where for a few pence you could get a mug of tea, a badly-made sandwich and sit unbothered for hours. Ralph McTell in Streets of London mentions these. There was one in Berry Street in Liverpool, that I would go to occasionally with a school friend out of a sort of fascinated curiosity.
Sometime in the 1980s, tramps vanished from our streets. One reason for this is that spikes were abolished and city centres became cleaner, more policed and more commercialised. Loitering was outlawed. And being visibly poor became unacceptable.
Another reason is that the very idea of dropping out lost its romantic cultural acceptance. The tramp of old was seen as a figure of a bygone era; romanticised in literature and folk songs as a sort of wise old philosopher. Today, the idea of living outdoors, without possessions or ambition, is no longer viewed as eccentric, but is seen as a problem to be solved.
So tramps have disappeared, not because they chose to, but because society made it impossible for them to exist.
