The last women of Inglefield

The Last Women Of Inglefield

Lynch, the manager, has worked here for 15 years and has "seen and heard everything". Clearly a warm woman, she knows all 69 residents by name and speaks to them as she would like someone to speak to her daughter or mother.

Pulling open the doors from the bright and airy reception area brings a stifling heat. Built in the 1970s, the archaic heating system hasn't been modernised and can't be shut off, which turns the building into a three-storey boiler room.

Walking the top floor landing is a test of the senses. Your eyes strain to adjust to the light in the corridor. As women emerge from their bedrooms it's almost impossible to make out their faces. The red-tiled floors and green walls soak up the orangey light that casts shadows on the heating pipes that line the ceiling above to create a darkened haze. Punctuating the corridors are CCTV cameras and fire-safety signs. The heat is unbearable and makes for an oppressive atmosphere, one that lies closer to an institution than home.

Inglefield Street is earmarked as part of the decomissioning of Glasgow's hostels. A new assessment/reception centre will be built with capacity for 25 women, and all rooms will have ensuite bathrooms. It will have a holistic approach to services in which women's complex needs will be met by specially trained staff employed by Glasgow City Council. The drawback is that the women will have to wait at least three years for this building to be delivered as a site has yet to be identified. But even once a site is confirmed, final designs have to be drawn up, the tendering process undertaken, contracts agreed and then, finally, the residence built.

A spokesman for the council said the cost of the new build would not be released until the tendering process had been completed. The costs will be met from social work's existing capital budget.

In the corridor, a plain-clothed CID officer stands with Amy as a warrant has been issued for her arrest. He comes into the television room where we are doing the interviews and checks the window. "It's not that I don't trust you," he says peering outside to check she can't escape.

"What am I going to do when we're two floors up?" asks Amy.

Sipping from a Coke bottle she admits the cola is merely colouring the whisky she's filled the bottle with. Throughout the interview the policeman peers through the window in the door, throwing an already stressed Amy to the edge.

"I'm strung out," she says, wiping her forehead. "I'm sweating, you can see how upset I am. I'm going to jail without being squared up."

Amy has been working as a prostitute since she was 18 to fund her heroin and alcohol addiction.

"I was sexually abused but that's not why I took heroin. I took it because I tried it six or seven times and thought I liked it and kept doing it. I hear lassies using the fact they were raped as an excuse but you do things because you like doing them. If you really wanted to go out and drink you'd do it, no matter what anyone else said, and you wouldn't be doing it just because of something that happened to you as a kid."

Catching the eye of the policeman she shouts "He's staring at me," and waves in his direction. "Why does he keep looking at me?"

Amy says her depression has grown worse since being in Inglefield. "I've been in and out jail and when I'm in my bedroom it reminds me of Cornton Vale. The heat alone in here is so bad you struggle for air sometimes. It's too much.

"Do you know how depressed I am?" she asks, and pulls two razors from her pocket and starts to cry. "That's how depressed, f***ing walking about with razors in my pocket, I want to kill myself."

The CID officer is growing tetchy and it's time for Amy to go. She hugs a few girls in the corridor telling them, "that's me getting the jail" before disappearing out the front door into the awaiting police van.

This is the third time Louise, 33, has been at Inglefield Street since she was released from rehab six weeks ago. She was sexually abused by four members of her family in her teens and has been in care since she was 10.

Sitting on a blue couch in the television room, Louise describes what it's like to call Inglefield home.

"The showers in here are a nightmare," she says clutching a brown envelope. "They're always breaking down, or running really hot and then cold, but you need to stand in it, you have to keep clean. You can't use the baths here because the girls clean their tools (syringes, blades etc) in it or jag in the baths. I know some girls in here who don't wash for weeks."

The toilet facilities are woefully inadequate with just one shower, two baths and three toilets for more than 25 women. They will soon be renovated but at the expense of two bedrooms. Inglefield's capacity used to be 77 but rooms were swallowed up to accommodate medical services and interview rooms, leaving 69.

Louise first tried heroin 10 years ago and has been battling her addiction ever since. Now she's clean, she says it's hard returning to the hostel.

"I want to have pals but it's hard being around them when they're doing drugs, but I don't want to be sitting in my room on my own.

"My head feels like it's really alert, which is a good thing I suppose, but at other times I wish it wasn't so clear."

Now that she's clean Louise hopes to get a self-contained flat from the Mental Welfare Commission in Scotland.

"It's going to be hard but I've got to do this at some time," she says.

It's taken the Sunday Herald six months to be granted access to the hostel, possibly because the last time anyone with a camera stepped into the building it was for a BBC Crimewatch UK reconstruction of the disappearance of Emma Caldwell, a 27-year-old prostitute who went missing on April 4, 2005. Local and national media carried the grainy images of her entering the hostel's lift which captured her last moments before she vanished. Her body was found six weeks later in woodland in South Lanarkshire. Four men have since been charged in connection with her murder.

Caldwell, in many people's minds, fits their preconceptions about the kind of woman that ends up at Inglefield Street. Understandably, Lynch is protective of the women here and how they may be represented, but with more than 12,000 homeless applications being made by women in 2006-07 in Scotland, reasons for being homeless vary widely.

Kirsty is a grandmother of five and has lived in Inglefield Street for three years after escaping her abusive son. This was the first time the 48-year-old had ever been homeless and although she was frightened about coming to the hostel she also felt "relaxed" about it because it was "somewhere safe".

Kirsty's life took a turn for the worse when other women offered her heroin.

"I never used drugs until I came here. The girls kept asking me to take a line and I was like, a line of what? What do I do? They showed me and it went from there. I'd been on heroin about five months before I went to the drug addiction service."

With support Kirsty was put on the methadone programme but has suffered a setback. "I got frightened and went back to heroin and then back to methadone again."

Alice, a 70-year-old grandmother of 12, came to Inglefield five years ago because of "financial reasons".

"My family would have me out of here like a shot, but I don't want them to. I enjoy the company here and you can come and go as you like. I know what people think about the women in there but they don't know everyone's circumstances.

"I never thought I'd be here. I've never smoked or drank in my life and I'm here, and I've been here for years. I've been made to feel welcome here and I've no financial problems."

Alice quickly jumps up, grabs her handbag and heads off to babysit one of her grandchildren.

Although it's strange to hear Alice say she likes it here, there are others who are mortified at having to stay at Inglefield. May, 54, arrived six weeks ago and is struggling with her new surroundings. Her husband was jailed for drug offences and soon after she was given 28 days to leave her home. May found herself homeless for the first time in her life in September, along with her two teenage children and elderly father-in-law.

A lot of the women we interviewed, like May, want to remain anonymous. They are proud and feel terrible guilt for the situations they have found themselves in. May has seen her family split up as her daughter lives in the outskirts of the city with a family member, her son is in a hostel for young people in the city and her 84-year-old father-in-law is in a nursing home in East Kilbride.

"I'd never heard of the place" she said, hostels and homelessness were a world away.

"I walked into the reception and thought, this is all right, but when I first saw my room I said oh my god'. There was no telly, no double glazing, the curtains are horrible and someone had scribbled all over the walls. That's not me. I have to have things nice and clean."

May sits in her sparse room clutching a teddy bear her friend bought her.

"Some women would walk into a place like this and say, this is what I am, this is what I deserve'. Not me. I've went right against it. Some women say they couldn't cope being in their own flat, but I can't cope being in here. I've broke my heart in this room."

May hopes she will only have to wait a few months before she is moved on to her own accommodation.

"As long as I know there's light at the end of the tunnel I'll be fine. I just want my life back"

When Lynch first began working at Inglefield Street 15 years ago, most of the women were like May, Alice and Kirsty - their problems were financial or emotional, they were fleeing domestic violence or simply had a run of bad luck. Their needs fell within the confines of housing, but over the years as drugs swept into Glasgow the lines between housing and social work blurred. Now the majority of women at Inglefield Street are dependent on drugs and alcohol and have been the victims of "gender-based violence"such as prostitution, rape or domestic abuse.

In a bid to introduce a more holistic approach before the new building comes, Inglefield will start recruiting new staff members to replace agency workers from Gowrie Care, who leave the hostel at the end of the month. Base 75 Intervention Team for street prostitutes will also be introduced in the coming months. Inglefield offers drug addiction services, sexual health clinics, a visting nurse and GP, and housing support. Glasgow Housing Network has also developed a learning timetable this month on computer skills, creative writing, digital photography and health and beauty.

"We're going to tackle women's homelessness at the right end and develop new services in consultation with them," said Lynch. "We've got the ability to deliver these services we just need the building."

As the Sunday Herald leaves the hostel, a woman sits on the doorstep, surrounded by plastic bags with her belongings in it. She's crying and asking for someone to help her, and she's quickly ushered into the reception area.

Lynch was right, Inglefield Street women's hostel does stay with you.