About Centrepoint

Centrepoint is the leading national youth homelessness charity running a number of emergency shelters, hostels, foyers and flats across Greater London. Each year, it helps homeless young people with accommodation and advice and helps them find a job and a permanent place to live.

Centrepoint is a partnership agency in the Rolling Shelter Programme, a scheme funded by the government’s Rough Sleepers Unit that operates all year round and targets vulnerable young rough sleepers. Centrepoint also runs a job brokerage service "Streets Ahead" for homeless people.

Centrepoint works preventatively too. Set up in 1989, the national team provides consultation services, advice and training to local agencies across the country to help improve local housing and advice for vulnerable young people.

Centrepoint’s education team runs peer education programmes, working with local agencies and schools to design and deliver prevention workshops and strategies about leaving home.

In 1997 Centrepoint set up the "Safe in the City" charity in partnership with the Peabody Trust. The charity aims to prevent youth homelessness in London by identifying and addressing the risk factors that can cause young people to become homeless.

Through its research into and publications about the causes and effects of youth homelessness, Centrepoint helps shape policies that affect young people at risk of social exclusion. Through its advisory role on the New Deal Task Force, Centrepoint campaigns to ensure that the New Deal for 18-24 year olds is accessible to all homeless young people.

Centrepoint has traditionally focused its efforts in London but in 1989 in response to the growing demand for advice from agencies outside London, it set up a national development unit (now called Centrepoint National Services). National Services provides consultancy services to specific geographical areas, helping local voluntary and statutory agencies design, deliver and implement coherent youth homelessness strategies. The first regional development project was piloted in Oxfordshire in 1991 and, following its success, others have been established across England, from Cornwall to Durham.

Centrepoint’s vision of the future is one where no young person is excluded from society through poverty, lack of employment, homelessness, discrimination or abuse. The visible sign of our success will be the eradication of the need for any young person to sleep on the streets.

Our history

In the winter of 1969 a young curate, Ken Leech, became so concerned about the young people sleeping on the streets in the West End that he decided to do something about it. He and a group of volunteers opened the basement of his church, St Anne’s in Soho, on December 16 as a temporary night shelter.

"We went ahead without planning permission. In fact, we only consulted two people; the Holy Ghost and Westminster Council Rodent Officer. We cleaned the basement, borrowed beds from Guy’s Hospital and scrounged food from local pubs. We had little more than £30 in the bank when we started," Leech said.

Back then, Leech had no idea whether the project would succeed but was concerned with the immediate needs of young people suffering hardship on London’s streets. It was not intended to become a permanent service and the movement had no name.

‘Centrepoint’ was coined as an ironic reference to the newly erected office block at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. The property developer owners of the building found that, due to the rates and taxes of the times, it was cheaper to keep it empty than to use it as offices or accommodation.

The name stuck and, as the numbers of young people needing emergency shelter did not dwindle, the night shelter, which was only intended to run for three months, stayed open. Thirty years on, Centrepoint estimates that it has helped more than 60,000 homeless young people.