Two month Winter night shelter update

Glass Door Homeless Charity has been providing emergency winter night shelters for more than 20 years and operates the UK’s largest network of open-access winter night shelters for people experiencing homelessness. Our 2025/26 season of winter shelters opened on 10th November. 

Open access means that anyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, can come to us for support. We run three night shelter circuits across Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Wandsworth. 

For the third consecutive year, our shelters are organised into three circuits: mixed-gender, men’s, and women’s. In addition, we host a weekly women’s drop-in casework session to provide dedicated support for guests staying in our women’s shelters.

Each circuit offers up to 35 people a safe place to sleep every night, along with a hot evening meal, breakfast the following morning, and access to our Casework services. 

We're now two months into our 2025-26 night shelter season. These are the insights from the frontline: 

• 931 people have been referred to our shelters. 

• 313 guests have stayed in the shelters, of whom: 

• 62% were men, 37% women and 1% non binary or prefer to self describe. 

• 79% were previously sleeping rough. 

• The most common age categories were 21-35 (35% of guests), followed by 35-49 (34% of guests) then 50-69 (26%). 2% of our shelter guests were aged 70+.  

• 197 (63%) shelter guests have engaged with our caseworkers, of whom 26 have already been moved towards more permanent housing, 15 have received financial support and 10 have been connected to health services. 

Just over three weeks after the shelters opened in November, we had to temporarily close referrals for men because of the level of demand for shelter places. Our waiting list then got down to the point where we were able to re-open referrals for men. 

Most recently, on 2nd January, a freezing drop in temperature, -6 in some places, led to the Greater London Authority triggering its Severe Weather Emergency Protocol (SWEP) for the second time this winter. Once again, this led us to activate our own Emergency Cold Weather Policy (which means we increased our shelter capacity to up to 40 people each night for each circuit).