Credit: Museum of Homelessness
An exhibition exposing 400 years of systemic hostility toward the unhoused is underway in London this week.
Criminal: An Untold History of Homelessness, Resistance and Survival launched on Thursday, 21 May 2026. It will run until 25 July 2026, with the exhibition on display every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 12.30 to 4.30pm.
Museum Director Matt Turtle said: “We have put this exhibition on as a cautionary tale and an act of resistance. This exhibition matters today because criminalisation as a ‘solution’ to homelessness has never gone away.”
Staged across an outdoor English perennial meadow and the museum’s interior, the exhibition traces the modern policing of poverty far beyond the Victorian Vagrancy Act of 1824.
The exhibition focuses on radical defiance rather than passive victimhood over the centuries.
MoH researchers have mapped a direct line from the 17th-century explosion of homelessness – exploring early colonial land enclosures and the forced transportation of unhoused people from England, Ireland, and Africa – through Elizabethan Rogue literature, Victorian punitive institutions, and modern media disinformation.
Mr Turtle added: “Right now, it [homelessness] is ramping up in many places on earth. In 2025, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade advocated for homeless people to be executed via involuntary lethal injection.”
Crucially, the show focuses on radical defiance rather than passive victimhood. The museum’s interior has been transformed into a space of resistance featuring the Surfing Sofas Publishing House, which offers a physical alternative to digital information disorder.
The exhibition debuts new commissions from prominent UK activist-artists, including Gemma Lees, Matt Bonner, Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives, and Surfing Sofas.
Notably, the gallery features Fairie Newbuild – the first-ever physical sculpture by 10Foot, the UK’s most prolific graffiti writer – consisting of a hawthorn tree trapped inside an industrial skip made of spiky steel palisade fencing.
The exhibition is free to visit for individuals and groups of less than eight people. For more information, click here.
