AMW

Melvin Hall

It is the start of 2024. Penge is sodden and grey with winter rain. Potholed tarmac meets pavement meets stone: a ramp leading up to a set of doors which, on the other side, lays carpet. The carpet is brown, but coming from the dullness outside, appears golden. In the months to follow, I will watch the sun begin to shine through the window onto this carpet, creating a slowly travelling streak which, in truth, even if temporary, is golden, moving in a warm crescent around the entrance of Melvin Hall.   

The first time I meet John, he is sitting on a leather couch by another set of doors which open into a dining hall; to his left, the kitchen window counter, over which coffee and tea is served.  A man is sitting next to John, and upon seeing me, immediately attempts offer his seat. His name is Nick. He has been coming to Melvin Hall for four years. He says that he comes here mostly for the social aspect, but there was a period when he was losing his home, and things were uncertain, and that the food bank and the Monday meals were helpful during that time. Nick worked in Computer Programming, but was made redundant due to eyesight problems. After that, he went on to do work campaigning for the local parks that were under threat of development, doing odd jobs—gardening, delivering newsletters, occasionally decorating—on the side. Due to health problems, Nick now has to rely on benefits until his pension arrives in four years. Nick was born and raised in Penge, but when he lost his home, he was moved further into Bromley. He cites this as lucky, given the lottery-like nature of state-provided temporary accommodation. ‘I could’ve been put anywhere. Gillingham or Luton or somewhere, so I’ve been very fortunate to still be able to keep my GP and Dentist, and my support network, which is my friends through Melvin Hall.'

Nick, 'It's nice to meet up and be looked after.'

Managed by John and his wife Carol, along with a team of other volunteers, Melvin Hall Community Group is a nonprofit that opens its doors every day for vulnerable people in the community. On Monday and Thursday afternoons, anyone is welcome to a three course meal for a £2 voluntary donation, no questions asked. On Wednesdays, it functions as a food-bank. Thursday mornings is Mini-Athletics; later in the evening, Gateway is held, a class and club for those with learning difficulties. Friday evenings, Narcotic’s Anonymous; Friday mornings, Sing and Sign (baby signing music classes). On the weekend, the hall is hired for children’s parties and events. 

At the start of 2024, Bromley Council informed Melvin Hall that their rent would be increasing by 114%, from £27,500 to £58,835 per year, with the costs of maintenance and repairs, insurance, and all bills, to be paid on top. The community group makes most of their income from renting out the hall, and are only just able to afford the current costs from that. This is alongside a social rent increase of 7.7%, the maximum that can be enforced. But the lease states that the building cannot be let as a commercial premise: it must be non-profit. The council, who at the end of last year approved plans to begin charging Blue Badge holders for parking in council owned car parks, have argued that the rent increase is in line with current market values.

But Melvin Hall serves a purpose beyond these listed functions. For many of its clientele, it is their main source of company and community, their only safe space and, on Mondays and Thursdays, the only time they eat a properly cooked meal. For many of its clientele, Melvin Hall is a home, somewhere and something that they know will be there for them for 51 weeks of the year. ‘They’re integrated here,’ John says, ‘Wee Jan comes on a Monday. She’s always in the Thursday night class. Always. Then she’s nowhere.’

John

‘People with substance abuse with narcotics anonymous wouldn’t have a home. People for the Drop in, who are lonely, wouldn’t have a home. I’ve told Bromley Council: You keep on piping on about loneliness—come up here, come up to our place and you’ll see loneliness. It’s not for us, it’s for the people.’

Gateway, a support and social club for adults with learning disabilities/difficulties, is also a nonprofit. John says that their turnover is £9,000 and they spend about the same. The people who attend pay a £3 subscription, but it is only the Penge branch that still has that price. The Orpington branch had a rent increase on their hub, so they had to increase their subscription to £5 a night. As a result, some of the clientele have been forced to stop attending. ‘An extra two [pounds] may not be a lot to you and I, but it is to them.’ 

The importance of the support that this club provides cannot be overstated: it is, for many of those attending, the only thing of its kind. John tells me about one client, Pauline, who will occasionally come. She’s blind and in a wheelchair, so she takes a taxi, ‘It’s £22 to get here and £22 to get back. That’s £44 to come here for one night. The people with learning difficulties come to feel safe, it’s a place where they can feel safe.’

Whilst John and I speak for the first time, most of the clientele are already sat inside the hall and eating. Occasionally, someone comes up to get another tea or coffee, while a few late arrivals walk in from outside. One of these is Eileen. Hanging up her coat, she asks John if he has heard anything from the council yet. ‘Nay.’ I had just asked him how the clientele would be affected, were Melvin Hall to be shut down, and John repeats this question to Eileen. 

Eileen

She says she wouldn’t be alive.

Richard has epilepsy. He was diagnosed with it aged 11. When his father died, Richard’s Mother could no longer take care of him, so aged 20, he was admitted into a home for epileptic people, and stayed there for 20 years. Aged 40, he was given access to a new drug that stopped his seizures enough for him to be discharged. He worked as an Admin Assistant at a charity until it was shut down. He says that this is the only time he gets to eat a home cooked meal, that it’s what he looks forward to every week. He is now 74.

Bingo is usually played after the Thursday lunch, with the prizes being food or toiletries. Some weeks have passed since my first visit, and some bingo games played during that time. It is usually hosted by Carol, but Sam is reading the numbers on this occasion, per her advice from the JobCentre, as this can count as volunteering and work experience. Halfway through the first round, Cathy enters. She had been sitting outside of the supermarket when someone told her about the space, that it was open right now and serving food. She sits down to eat opposite me and, upon realising what we are doing, excitedly asks if she can join in. ‘I love bingo’, she says, rubbing her hands together in anticipation, her tongue soon sticking out in concentration as the numbers roll in. Cathy has an 11 year old Jack Russell called Darcy. She says that once Darcy goes, she’ll have no reason to be here. She says she won’t do it violently: maybe have a good drink, cry about her one last time, then a few sleeping pills, rest assured she’ll be seeing her again. She says that she has three children and all are in care, that she had become addicted to crack in Hastings seven years ago, but is trying to be clean now. She says that she now lives two doors down from a crack house and that the council ‘know it, but don’t care.’ She’s 33 with short cropped hair, skin on the back and sides. She wears an eyebrow piercing and no earrings. She says that her ex also called himself a freelancer, that that was the first time she heard it. She says he died from legal highs. She says he was only 28. She often sits outside of the supermarket, opposite a homeless man that she says is a compulsive liar. She loves bingo—she won on her first time. ‘B-I-N-G-O’ she sung.  Cathy gives Darcy bone strengthening supplements. She says it has made her hips swing, as Darcy certainly didn’t get it from her. She says she sold a £200 drill for £5 yesterday. She says she puts it all into Darcy. She says there’s nothing left for her here. She asks me if I’ll be walking my dog later.

Pat is short of Patricia, but she says that only figures of authority call her that. She usually sits with Eileen, Evaughn and Evaughn’s husband, Michael. She wears a different nail colour each week, which she does herself. She lives below Evaughn and Michael, and that was how she found out about Melvin Hall. Other than the lunches, Pat goes to the foodbank on Tuesdays. ‘It’s the only place left. They’ve closed everything else down,’ she says. ‘London’s a terrible place to live right now, with everything going up. Everyone is so upset all the time. It’s alright if you’re quite well off. If you got plenty of money, then you’re alright, you can keep your head above water. For anybody else, living on just your pension or your benefits, it’s horrendous. You can’t keep your head above water.’

Pat

‘They give you a rise, then they put the bills up. So you’re no better off. I’ve got grown up children, but they’ve got their own life. It’s hard. I help my youngest girl out as much as I can, and then she helps me back, and that’s how we go on. We go around in blinking circles. It’s just horrendous.’

‘We just soldier on and do what we can do to survive. I am a fighter, so I try to be positive, not let anything get me down.’

It has been over a year since Bromley Council imposed the rent increase, which has been since delayed by various rent extensions and a continuing legal battle which has cost what little money Melvin Hall had to spare, along with John and Carol’s mental and physical wellbeings. He says that he wakes up thinking about it, as early as 04:30 in the morning. This unease carries onto the clientele, who are aware of the potential fate of the community group, and the uncertainty of it all. 

Labour have just announced their plans to cut more than £5 billion from the welfare budget. This involves making it more difficult to apply for Personal Independence Payments, which are there to support people with the additional costs of their disability; freezing said payments so that they do not rise with inflation; and cutting payments for those found unfit for work, those who visit spaces like Melvin Hall—what little of these spaces remain—and who, for many, see them as all they have left. For it is not simply financial struggles or loneliness that makes spaces like Melvin Hall so sacred for its clientele: it is, for many, the only space where they are seen. 

After years of austerity and decades of both Tory and Labour politicians espousing ideas of the ‘scroungers’ of our society, to whom all our ‘hard earned money goes’, there is a tendency in the English psyche to see those in need as lazy, weak, or as having simply ‘not looked elsewhere’ or ‘worked hard enough’. It is a strange mix of classism which often—and especially in the case of Melvin Hall—seeps into ableism and ageism; a mindset that, were you to inspect, would likely view a disabled, or homeless, or elderly person receiving care as unfair—as they did not ‘earn it’. This mindset is as much fuelled by the rhetoric peddled by our governments as it is by ignorance. This ignorance often presents itself as a vacuum in people, within which the seeds of prejudice and greed, planted by politicians, can grow. And ignorance has a way of developing unto itself, so that over time, one’s ignorance becomes one’s knowledge, growing larger and larger from its own ideas so that eventually, in an area where one did not know anything, they now know everything. And this newfound knowledge lacks any of the sensitivity, the respect for being right or wrong, the general empathy that might make one hesitate to indiscriminately apply their views onto another. Instead, it comes with the self-assured swagger of hatred, for it was from the hand of hatred that those seeds were originally planted. 

But so peripheral are the groups that these clientele fall into, that they often are not placed into the role of public enemy in public consciousness, a role which other groups—transgender women, migrants, Muslims (it goes on)—often are. Instead, they are referenced insofar as something that is ‘costing our society’, as an invisible burden, an enemy who we can defeat by turning the other way. So the hatred falls short into something resembling apathy, which is better in line with English societal values anyway, where individualism has reduced the word ‘community’ into something belonging to a nostalgic bygone era, realised only in the present day through attempts at re-creation in the form of council-approved street parties, a phenomena that has increasingly occurred in Penge and Beckenham in the last decade. Are these parties a bad thing? No. But they hold something representative of our idea of community: community as something annual, participatory inasmuch as others also participate (i.e. provide food and drink), demanding insofar that one can demand as much back, if they so wish. It is convenient, reciprocal, isolated, and, by virtue of house prices and the segregation between council and private housing, reserved for only those of a certain class. 

The problem that arises from this current setup is: Where does someone like Pauline fit into the equation? Or Nick, or Richard? Or Pat? We might say that they would be more than welcome to our party, and for some, that ideological assurance is enough to make them feel that they are on the side of moral good. But the slow violence* of our government and councils, seen through the rent increase of community groups, the charging of Blue Badge parking spaces, and more welfare cuts, gradually restricts the blood flow to these vulnerable groups until they are quite literally killed. For that is the aim of these policies and ideas: to cut off anything that receives without giving its equal share back. So embedded is this ideology that no disability, financial circumstance, age or their combination can deem a person, in the eyes of many, as worthy of care. Though quiet and rarely in the foreground, it is an act of violence. It has only one eventual goal. And with each government, red or blue, this goal comes further in sight. 

An online petition was raised in response to the rent increase, but the council required a certain number of physical signatures. At the start of 2024, John, Carol, Evaughn and Eileen went to Penge High Street to seek further signatures from the public.

It is now 2025. Following a six month lapse, the slow streak of sunlight has started its second crescent path across the carpet of Melvin Hall, since my arrival over a year ago. John and Carol are almost in their 15th month of navigating the bureaucratic limbo of council communication. This communication between the parties is asymmetrical, with responses from the council coming weeks or months at a time, seemingly at random. Though they are currently in another interminable stint of silence, a few weeks ago their lawyer was sent a new heads of terms, to potentially precede a new lease. This lease would bring with it a new rent of £35,000 per year: a sizeable drop from the original increase, but still £7,500 above the original rent, which was only just afforded at the time. The weekly lunches have been paused since John undertook surgery a month ago, but even with his recovery–slowed by the stress of the last year–the return of these lunches seems distant, for even the cost of the gas and electricity has become too much, let alone the cost of food. This is in part because of the lack of hall-hire bookings since the rent increase: due to each rent extension only lasting two months, the group has only been able to take on bookings for that period, especially given the nature of most of them being for children's birthday parties. ‘We couldn’t disappoint the kids,’ Carol tells me. 

She says they keep on hoping. 

Carol

* Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2013; in John Pring, The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, 2024

The new figure begs the question of the necessity of the council’s decision to increase the rent in the first place, and even the necessity of this new amount. If the rent increase was so important—bearing in mind that the lease requires any successive tenant to also be a non-profit—then how is it that the council are able to go back on themselves? Here lies the ultimate source of strength for the slow violence of the state: arbitrary, bureaucratic indifference, spread across multiple people—units—whose efforts are often contained within an eight hour window (at best), and whose care is limited to the care of their position. Where what is a livelihood, a life, a death, to us, is a number to them, tangible insofar as ink on a to do list or pixels on a screen.  Who benefits from this rent increase? Where does the additional £31,335, now £7,500 per year go? And is this new end worthy enough to dismiss the repeated pleas and testimonies—both in court, on the phone, and by email—of John of how the closure would affect Melvin Hall’s clientele? It is there, in the indifference to those pleas, that the problem lies. There in the indifference to the circumstances of the vulnerable, those who fall under the responsibility of this same council and government. 

It is there that the problem lies and there where it further manifests. 

If not in Melvin Hall, then elsewhere. 

If not now, then soon.

At the time of publishing (July 2025) Melvin Hall has reopened on Thursday lunchtimes as a cafe. Due to lack of funds, however, they are unable to afford to resume their lunches—the gas alone is too much, let alone the cost of food.

An online donation link will soon be available, but for physical donations such as food, and for further support, please get in touch at melvinhallcommunitygroup@hotmail.com