It is not something you enjoy, being on the street. You're cold and you're wet and it is not nice

IT'S degrading, living on the streets, Nigel Morgan admits. Especially when York is your home town - the place where you grew up. "You can see your old friends walking past, people that you knew," he says. "They just don't want to know you."

Perhaps it's because York is his home town that he has never resorted to begging. He knows plenty of other homeless people who have. "You stand next to them and you hear people shouting 'get a job'," he says. "But to get a job they would have to have an address, and they can't get an address until they have some money. For that they need a job.

"People just don't understand what it is like to have nothing and nowhere to go. It is not something you enjoy, being on the street. You're cold and you're wet and it is not nice. Nobody really wants to be on the street. It's just a position that they find themselves in through circumstance."

His own story is par for the course, at least for the younger of the 30-odd people who find shelter every night at the Arclight hostel in Leeman Road. He left home at 16 to live in a flat after his parents divorced. Before long he was taking drugs, starting with cannabis and moving on from there. Soon he was shoplifting to feed his heroin habit - and the rent and bills were going unpaid.

One day, when he was 17, he returned 'home' to find his flat locked up. He had no money, and nowhere to go. For a while he stayed with a friend, until the friend's parents got sick of him and he had to leave. Then it was the street.

He ended up with other homeless people sleeping in the multi-storey car park at The Stonebow. "There's a bit of shelter there, you can get out of the wind," he says. "There's always a group of you, so you've got someone to talk to."

Since then Nigel, now 23, has been homeless on and off for four years. He's been to jail for shoplifting, and in a bid to break free from the local drugs scene, he even left York briefly to try living elsewhere. "But no matter where you go, it is always there."

He's now living at Arclight, which at least gives him a warm dormitory bed every night from 8pm-8am, a hot evening meal, and somewhere to wash his clothes.

With the support of staff at the night shelter, he is determined to try to get his life back on track. First step is to get off drugs; then he wants to find somewhere of his own to live.

"I'm sick of the lifestyle," he says. "Sick of having no decent clothes to wear, sick of having to go out every day shoplifting. I'm just really sick of it. You want to change and show people you can do better."

That's a feeling shared by Dieter Bar. At 25, he, too, has been homeless off and on for years. Brought up in a succession of children's homes across the North East from the age of ten, he found himself at 16 living alone in a bedsit. He took to drugs, and to 'thieving' to pay for his habit. But now, with the help of doctors from Monkgate he was introduced to through Arclight, he has weaned himself off heroin. Next step is to find somewhere to live.

"I've been here about five or six months, and I haven't thieved since I've been in York," he says. "I want to get myself sorted out, find somewhere to live on my own, get a job, have a family."

All the things the rest of us take for granted.

With Arclight's help, Nigel and Dieter and others like them might just have a chance.

Since the nightshelter, which celebrates its second birthday on Saturday, was opened the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of York has fallen dramatically, says Paul Wordsworth, Arclight's chairman of trustees.

That gives some credence to the Government's claim to have cut the number of rough sleepers by 71 per cent in the past three years. But as the Government's critics have pointed out, finding people temporary accommodation such as that provided at Arclight is no real answer. It is a first step: but no more.

"Taking people off the street does not end the problem," Paul Wordsworth says. "We have something like 30 to 40 people a night here. There are no grounds for complacency."

That's why, over the years, Arclight has been expanding the work it does.

There can be many reasons beyond a person's control why they end up homeless, Paul points out. Almost a third of young people who end up on the streets were in council care as children, he says. Others got trapped by drugs, or found themselves homeless after a relationship broke up or they lost their job. Still more may have undergone psychiatric care of some kind - the care in the community programme, Paul says, can be very 'hit and miss'.

For those like Dieter and Nigel desperate to get their lives back on track, however, Arclight can now provide real help. It can help them access benefits - including housing benefit, a vital first stage towards getting somewhere to live. It can ensure they turn up on time for appointments - something that can be difficult to do if your life has lost all shape and pattern through having so many empty hours to fill by drifting around on the streets.

The shelter has good links with local psychiatric nurses for those who need it, and can arrange access to doctors for those who need medical care. Arclight can also try to help those battling to come off drugs get access to detox programmes. "Though there are not enough of those available," Paul admits.

The shelter has also begun to offer residents the chance of simple work experience. Some try their hands at car maintenance, others help out keeping the shelter tidy or do odd jobs - anything which can give them some structure and meaning in their lives.

The charity's biggest challenge will be to find a permanent home. The day will come, Paul admits, when the building on Leeman Road that is now rented from Railtrack will be needed for redevelopment.

"We're not planning anything in the next year or so, we're not facing being homeless ourselves at this stage," he says. "But we will need a new home, and we have to look at future prospects."

It would be nice, Paul says, if Father Christmas were to come down the chimney with £1 million to buy Arclight a new home.

One thing's for sure. There are many worse things Santa could spend the money on.

Updated: 11:47 Thursday, December 06, 2001