The Associated Press
April 3, 2007
Neil Featherstone stuck his thumb onto the once-black shoe below him, softly massaging a cleansing creme to rub out the salt and grime.
A coat of polish and beeswax balsam creme, followed by a quick brush and buff with a ladies' stocking, produced a lustrous shine last seen when the shoe was fresh out of the box. For his trademark "Lord Sheridan" shine, Featherstone pocketed 4.25 pounds (US$8.50; €6.25).
Scraping dirt off shoes might seem a grubby way to make a living, but Featherstone doesn't mind. After being homeless on and off for 16 years, he sees nothing demeaning in cleaning the shoes of London bankers and businessmen to pay his rent.
"I don't want sympathy," he said. "I just want to be seen at eye level."
Featherstone, 34, works for StreetShine, which helps London's homeless by giving them a skill and a job. The company hires men and women who have been homeless, teaches them how to shine shoes and then dispatches them to businesses, who sign up for regular visits.
The shiner works at a single location for several hours each week, getting the chance to work on customer-building skills. People who might never talk get to know one another.
"On both sides, you're breaking down preconceptions," said Simon Fenton-Jones, the chief executive of StreetShine. "Normally you don't have that kind of interaction."
StreetShine has struck agreements with some of the city's largest firms — like KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Reuters. Customers get desk-to-desk personalized service, to say nothing of spiffier shoes. The shiners get a base salary of 200 pounds (US$400;€300) a week, plus tips and incentive payments.
But buffing the boots of Britain is harder than it sounds. Shoe shining is relatively uncommon here. All that rain makes people wonder why they should bother. Forget shiny — dry is enough.
So there's an element of salesmanship for energetic shiners like Featherstone, who on one gloomy Tuesday strode through the west London offices of LogicaCMG, a technology support company, with his gear swinging from his shoulder. The computer geeks had worn sneakers to the office — so they weren't interested. But as he moved to the desks of executives and salesmen, interest perked up.
Take accountant Patrick Lalor, who stared at his scuffed and salt-streaked shoes with the shame of a schoolboy called to the principal's office.
"I don't take very good care of them," he said. "It shows."
Featherstone assessed Lalor's trashed oxfords with enthusiasm. Did Lalor know that a good cleaning could not only make a statement of elegance when entering a room but also extend the life of his shoes?
Lalor seemed dubious, but shrugged. He had little to lose.
Featherstone set to work, propping Lalor's foot on a slanted plate attached to his box of gear. Out came the thumb and the massage, the beeswax balsam and the boot black. Luster returned in eight minutes flat.
"Wow," Lalor said. "That's really impressive."
"Never put your money against me," Featherstone said, brushing his cheek with the back of his hand.
The confident tone doesn't waver when Featherstone turns to personal subjects, like how he joined StreetShine in the first place.
He tells his story with so little emotion it sounds like it happened to someone else. He explains how he came to Britain from South Africa to look for his father — only to find his family here wasn't interested in being found. Alone and with nothing to fall back on, he quickly found himself on the streets.
He fell into cocaine and crack user. The turning point came when he was hospitalized with a perforated ulcer. A doctor told him that if he had arrived five minutes later, he would have died.
"It was only when I hit the ground really hard that I decided to change my life," he said.
He abandoned drugs without help, going through three days of withdrawal and sweats. Then he moved to Cumbria, in northwest England, and got a job as live-in kitchen help.
He eventually moved to London and applied for work at StreetShine.
"Since taking it on, I haven't looked back," he said.
Homelessness is not the same phenomenon in Britain as it is in America because the government provides more help to the poor. Fewer people end up "sleeping rough" as they say here, said Jeremy Swain, the chief executive of Thames Reach, the homeless organization that sponsored StreetShine's creation.
While on any given night in New York City some 3,800 people will sleep on the streets, in London the number will be about 300, Swain said.
Swain said some people who work with the homeless have been critical of StreetShine, calling the work degrading. But StreetShine is ignoring the naysayers, turning a profit and planning to expand its staff of shiners from 12 to 20 by year's end.
Featherstone, for his part, only sees opportunity. He wants to expand — maybe branch out into the Internet with sock sales or other related businesses that might make his customers' toes more content.
"The last thing a homeless person wants is charity," he said.