'I've been sleeping rough in Manchester since I was ten - it feels weird to have a bed'
This new year is extra special for Stephen Agnew. It marks the first anniversary of him getting his own flat - after thirty years of homelessness.
Despite being just a child though, Stephen says he didn't feel alone. "I didn't feel lonely or unloved because I had other homeless people around me, some were teens and some were in their twenties and it felt like a community," he told the M.E.N. Aged 15, Stephen was ordered by the courts to attend a secure unit for vulnerable children in Northumberland. He found it comforting to be with others in the same boat. "In the end we became a unit," he recalls.
"There were nights where it was freezing and there was one morning when I woke up and my best friend has a needle in his arm and had died of an overdose. It was horrible - I suffered with anxiety and depression because of it. It took the soul out of my life. It was a lonely and scary place to be." "I don't feel sorry for myself," he says of the years spent on the streets. "It has shown me hard times, but it has shown me to survive in some aspects. There is nothing that I would regret."
Then, in January 2022, with the help of Greater Manchester Housing First, Stephen got the news he was eligible for a studio flat in Blackley - and for the first time in three decades he moved off the streets of Manchester and into his own home.
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