‘Do you know who I am?” asks a young man, his smile nervy, teeth jagged as a city skyline. It’s 9.30am on a recent Thursday at the Social Bite sandwich shop in Rose Street, Edinburgh, and he’s holding a half-eaten bap and a takeaway tea that is equal parts liquid and sugar. I’ve no idea who he is, so he leads me to a framed newspaper clipping on the wall. It’s a December 2012 page from the Edinburgh Evening News and it shows a photograph of the man – Pete Hart, apparently – in a ninja-black chef’s uniform and blue hygienic gloves chopping some lettuce. I’d actually read the article earlier: Hart, then 22, used to sell the Big Issue outside Social Bite; staff would sometimes give him unsold sandwiches at the end of the day and after a few weeks, Hart asked for a job. Josh Littlejohn and Alice Thompson, who founded Social Bite, agreed, and took him on as a pot washer.
Hart looks for my reaction; there’s a whiff of booze on his breath and he’s aged faster than the five years between the photograph and now. He’s certainly had some tough times. He was taken into care at three and moved around the system until he was 16. He wound up in Southampton, did odd jobs and went to prison for possession of class A drugs. But Hart always wanted to work: during his 15 months’ incarceration he took classes in food hygiene, bricklaying, and painting and decorating.
Does he still work for Social Bite? “Nah, I’ve had some health problems.” This proves to be an understatement: he returned to work after a brain haemorrhage but had to stop last year when he had a lung removed. “I loved it here and I want to come back to work,” he goes on. “Josh is a great guy. I was desperate for a job and he had me stay with him and Alice in their flat because he couldn’t give a job to someone without an address.”
Pete Hart is a key figure in the Social Bite story. Littlejohn and Thompson were a couple in their mid-20s when they opened the Rose Street shop in August 2012. Inspired by the Bangladeshi micro-lender Muhammad Yunus, it would be a social business and donate all its profits to charity. But the arrival of Hart prompted a rethink: they asked him if he knew anyone else who wanted a job and Hart suggested his brother Joe. Eventually, after a handful of these peer-referenced hires worked out, Littlejohn and Thompson determined that a quarter of Social Bite employees would come from homeless backgrounds. They were also handing out free sandwiches and hot drinks in the morning for Edinburgh’s most needy, and giving away any food left over at the end of the day.
There are now five Social Bite shops: two each in Edinburgh and Glasgow, one in Aberdeen. Their mission became globally famous in November 2015 when George Clooney popped into the Rose Street branch and bought an avocado and pesto wrap. Last year Littlejohn went into partnership to open a fancier restaurant in Edinburgh called Home, also with a philanthropic brief, and enticed Leonardo DiCaprio to visit that. Social Bite won Outstanding Achievement at the 2016 Observer Food Monthly awards, and Jamie Oliver was at the head of a line of luminaries on the night to congratulate Littlejohn – he and Thompson have now split, but she remains on the board of Social Bite and is manager of their canteen in the Rockstar Games Edinburgh head office.
Littlejohn, though, has mixed feelings about that original article on Hart, which was rehashed the next morning by all the major newspapers in Scotland. “That was the first PR we ever got, so as a new business that’s exciting,” he says. “But now I look back and it’s telling. All that really happened was a young guy, an able person, went from selling a magazine to washing dishes. How on earth is that any kind of story, let alone one covered nationally? It goes to show that it never, ever happens. If you’re in that demographic, your chance of breaking into any kind of mainstream, even as a dishwasher, is very remote. We don’t think about that.”
Social Bite may have been a success, but it’s a far from straightforward one: the past five years are full of near-insurmountable complications and frustrations. When Littlejohn, now 30, opened the first shop, he dreamed he’d soon be going head-to-head with Pret a Manger and Starbucks. He wanted 500 branches in the UK. But the demands of managing a diverse and often unreliable workforce, and the personal attention that requires, means there are no current plans to expand. It’s not every employer who has to keep £500 cash in a safe for emergency medical care, or to get an employee’s electricity reconnected, or just to see them through until they are next paid. Littlejohn made an initial commitment that his salary would never exceed seven times the lowest-paid staff member, but this has proved wildly optimistic anyway. His wage is “nowhere near that”.
He laughs: “You need to relinquish the idea of getting rich personally. If anyone goes into this thinking, ‘This is a sweet earner!’, then just forget it, don’t even start.”
Littlejohn has certainly put in the hours. In the beginning, he and Thompson would wake at 4am to make the sandwiches and work all day in the shop. Hart was just one of a handful of homeless employees who lived with them in their one-bedroom flat while they found their feet. Their evenings would often be spent in the pub, offering informal counselling sessions.
But rather than being overwhelmed by what seemed an insurmountable challenge, Littlejohn started to think he was approaching the problem the wrong way. He was giving homeless people jobs, but what they needed was support, professional help to deal with their problems and, most of all, a settled place to live. He wondered if it would be possible to create a “village”, initially for 20 individuals who are currently living on the streets in Edinburgh. If the concept worked, it could be rolled out – first in Scotland then perhaps further afield.
“We had naively started at the end point,” he says. “We were young people who opened a sandwich shop and just started giving people jobs. But when we had built up to maybe six people, and cracks started appearing, we realised: ‘Shit, a job’s not good enough.’ The links from accommodation through to support through to employment are the dots that have never really been joined before. So the village is working our way to the final point, which is really back to the beginning.”
Back at Social Bite, I ask Hart if he’s heard about Littlejohn’s village plan. He nods. “Yeah, I think it’s a great idea.” Then, as if he’d just remembered an urgent appointment, he picks up his rucksack and heads for the door. “Right,” he says over his shoulder, “I’ve got to try to find some money to get more inebriated.”
Half an hour outside Edinburgh, in a tranquil spot in West Lothian, Jonathan Avery sits drinking tea in his prototype NestHouse. It is a dinky place but full of thoughtful touches. There’s a compact, Japanese-style deep-soak bath, a cute mezzanine bedroom with views through a porthole window, and a very hygge wood-burning stove – all within a building just 3.4 metres wide. The exterior is clad in thermo-treated Finnish spruce and the insulated front door clunks shut with the authority of a bank vault. Avery wears rimless spectacles, chunky work boots and a lime-green T-shirt that matches the kitchen chairs and the front door.
Is that on purpose? “No, it’s not deliberate,” says Avery. Then he whispers, “Yes it is, it’s deliberate. I’m a designer!”
When Littlejohn first imagined a village for the homeless, he saw the residents living in modified shipping containers. He admits that sounds “a bit shit”, but he’d seen an episode of Grand Designs where a young architect in Northern Ireland welded four together to create a luxury house. But the more Littlejohn investigated it, the more problems he came up against: cutting windows into containers quickly becomes expensive, and the buildings often fight a losing battle against condensation. “We could have done a glorified shed quite easily,” he says, “but it just would have failed because I think the living environment has to inspire change.”
A Social Bite employee found Avery’s website, Tiny House Scotland, and forwarded it to Littlejohn. Avery had been inspired to build his NestHouse after reading about the “tiny house” boom in the US. The movement was born as a response first to Hurricane Katrina and then to the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008: small (under 500 sq ft), cheap and cheerful accommodation that could be moved around if needs be.
Avery, 55, had personal experience of the economic downturn: he had been looking to expand his high-end kitchen design company, which had shops in Edinburgh and Glasgow, into London, but his bank suddenly declined to support him. He closed the business and decided to work on a smaller scale.
Then Littlejohn and Social Bite came along. “It’s funny,” says Avery, “because going back to my furniture business 15 years ago, I’d have been making these for rich Edinburgh clients as a playhouse in the garden. Now I’m not so keen on that. There are other ways to use architecture; it should have a reason and a purpose.”
With a house design found, Littlejohn’s village started to take shape. He would borrow land from Edinburgh city council that had been set aside for “meanwhile use”: this is a government-endorsed initiative that allows entrepreneurs, often with a social vision, to take over empty land or commercial spaces on a short-term basis. The money required for the village – an estimated £500,000 for the first 10 two-bedroom homes – would be raised privately. There would be no charge for the rent of the site, but Littlejohn found out that Edinburgh council spent an average of £47 per night accommodating each homeless person. So, for 20 people, this would be an annual saving to taxpayers of £343,100.
Efforts to raise money for the village have gone better than expected. In December, Littlejohn organised the Social Bite CEO Sleepout, which encouraged some of Scotland’s most influential business leaders to spend a night sleeping rough in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square. He hoped to sign up 100 CEOs but one of the first volunteers was cyclist Sir Chris Hoy, and it snowballed from there. After Nicola Sturgeon agreed to serve breakfast, the numbers topped 300, with some participants raising almost £20,000 for the village.
It turned out to be an unseasonably mild night, but Littlejohn proved that his initiative had some heavyweight support. “We should be aspiring to live in a country where nobody is homeless or sleeps rough,” said Sturgeon, as she handed out bacon rolls at 7am. Added to money raised from Social Bite’s annual Christmas appeal, Littlejohn found he has £750,000 pledged towards the new village.
With the funds in place, Littlejohn and Avery are now finalising the design of the houses. Although costs must be kept down, both feel the buildings should not be stripped of their charm. “Particularly the stove,” says Littlejohn. “I’ve had various meetings and I’m, like, ‘The stove’s important!’ People say it presents a risk, but I can’t imagine the house without a stove. It creates that homeliness.”
“You could have an infrared heater on the wall but it’s not really the same,” agrees Avery. “It’s not like giving people gold taps or luxury tiles. It’s just about creating something that is a peg above, which subconsciously the human mind recognises is something that’s a bit better than they are used to. Then people realise you are trusting them, and they say, ‘Ahhh, my life has really taken a turn here.’”
A 2015 Royal Mail survey found that Granton was one of the “most desirable” areas in Scotland. Some in Edinburgh were perplexed by the result: the district, north of the city on the Firth of Forth, has historically been an unloved industrial area and harbour. Regeneration is taking place, but slowly. Littlejohn, though, sees only potential: he likes the clean air and sea views; it’s close to amenities, such as a supermarket and bus links, but not too near to illicit temptations. It was, he felt, the most promising of the five “meanwhile use” sites he was offered. As we walk up a steep hill to the two-acre site beside an iconic blue gasholder, there are abandoned toys dumped in bushes, and sweet wrappers and discarded energy drink bottles strewn around. But by this autumn, Littlejohn insists, the land will be transformed into a verdant idyll, with a fire pit, chicken coop and community garden. Residents will work in industrial units across the road, perhaps making bread or furniture, or doing commercial laundry. Dinner each night will be cooked and eaten communally, and counsellors will be available whenever needed.
The village will require residents to work at least five days a week: this focus on keeping busy, as well as the idea that meals are taken together, came from a visit Littlejohn made to San Patrignano, a pioneering drug-rehabilitation facility near Bologna. “Do you know how it came about?” says Littlejohn. “At the Observer food awards last year, I met Jamie Oliver and he was telling me about this place. I was almost trying to change the subject: ‘San Patrignano, San Patrignano…’ He kept going on about it. I was like, ‘All right!’”
Littlejohn spent a day there shortly afterwards with a member of Oliver’s foundation. He found a small town of 2,000 former addicts working, with seemingly little supervision, on a range of projects: some made handbags for Prada and Chanel, others were in a graphic design studio; there was a farm, stables, a bakery, even a vineyard. “The entire thing was run by people who were previously addicted to heroin, crack cocaine – like proper chaotic people that I know through Social Bite, and I was amazed by how clean behind the eyes they were. It was one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever seen.”
Littlejohn is, in some ways, an unlikely philanthropist. His father, Simon Littlejohn, is an entrepreneur who built up a restaurant empire in Scotland from scratch. He’d grown up working class in England, and Josh’s mother came from a farming community; the family had a grand house in Blair Drummond, near Stirling. “We were quite affluent, relatively speaking, and I always kind of didn’t like that,” remembers Littlejohn. “I went to a state school and I’d be nervous to invite people round to the house, because it was big. And I’d never like to be dropped off at school in a fancy car and all that. I’d always be mortified by the thought of that.”
He certainly has an idealistic streak: one interview compared Littlejohn spiritually and physically (the piercing eyes, scraggly beard) to Che Guevara. On a recent trip to Thailand – for a month-long martial arts bootcamp – he got a tattoo of the tree of life down his right arm with the words: “There is no them and us. There is only us.”
“I just feel lucky,” he says. “I got nothing but love – on Christmas morning there were mountains of presents. I’m only in the privileged position to do what I’m doing and think the way I think by virtue of the cards dealt to me. These guys had opposite cards dealt to them. When you think about that, you have nothing but compassion for them. It could have been me or you, they just got different cards, different families, different upbringings.”
Littlejohn studied politics and economics at Edinburgh University, then applied to join the civil service. He imagined he’d work for the Department for International Development or somewhere similar. He did half a year of assessments, psychometric tests and leadership drills, reaching the final round of the application for a Fast Track apprenticeship. He then received a one-line email: You’ve not been successful. “After six months of jumping through hoops, I felt a bit degraded,” he says. “So I thought, I’m never going to do that again. Maybe I’ll set up my own business.”
Social Bite came along later, after Littlejohn and Thompson went to Bangladesh to meet Professor Yunus, but his initial schemes were classic Apprentice, Dragons’ Den money-making ventures: a catwalk fashion show at the Edinburgh festival, a Christmas fair in Glasgow and a ski and snowboard show. The most enduring idea was a ceremony for the Scottish Business awards. The first year, in February 2012, the guest speaker was Bob Geldof and the event sold out. Then, initially through the contact box on the Clinton Foundation website, he approached Bill Clinton. Littlejohn was told that if he could raise $300,000 for the foundation in advance then Clinton would come to Edinburgh to speak. He hit the phones, cajoling the Scottish business community to pay for their tables upfront.
“That was the biggest gamble of my life,” Littlejohn recalls. “But Clinton was the big one. Once you had him, we had the model established and we also had the credibility. So when you approach Richard Branson and you’ve had Bill Clinton, then it’s not an absurd prospect. And once you’ve had Richard Branson and Bill Clinton and Bob Geldof, then you approach George Clooney. Then Leonardo DiCaprio. Suddenly it’s a gang everyone wants to be in. Ha ha!”
As time went on, there became a fundraising and PR link between the Scottish Business awards and Social Bite: the visit of Clooney, in particular, made headlines around the world. When I first met Littlejohn last year, he said that Barack Obama was next on the hitlist. Perhaps he’s being coy, but he seems to have cooled on the idea. “The CEO Sleepout was an eye-opener for me in the sense that we raised almost double what we raised at the Scottish Business awards for Social Bite,” he says. “So as a fundraising mechanism, I think that’s actually got more potential.”
This year the sleepout will move to Princes Street Gardens in central Edinburgh, and Littlejohn would like 2,000, instead of 300, volunteers. One suggestion is that, to be involved, you have to fundraise £1,000 and offer at least one person from a homeless background an “employment opportunity” in your organisation.
Littlejohn has an ingrained, possibly inherited, entrepreneurial streak that marks him out in a sector full of good intentions but sometimes short on business acumen. He sees homelessness in Scotland as a problem that should not just be managed but can actually be solved. According to government statistics, 34,662 homeless applications were made in Scotland in 2015-2016. But, for Littlejohn, this number is a skewed, unnecessarily intimidating figure. Many of these people are in a short-time crisis, often a relationship breakdown, and only need help for a couple of nights to get back on their feet. He has learned that, in Edinburgh, on any one night, the figure is around 600, and estimates the number of “properly homeless” people in Scotland at no more than 2,500.
“I’m doing this because…” says Littlejohn, as we walk around the field in Granton. He leaves a long pause, perhaps unsure himself. “It’s good fun more than anything. People are like, ‘What’s your angle?’ But I’m building a bloody village. You’ve got an opportunity to start with a blank page and try to create a structure that works. In terms of exercising your creative juices, it’s pretty thrilling to be able to do that and try to make a community.”
Seagulls squawk overhead. “That’s what I hope we’ll build here… a little utopia.”
T he morning rush at Social Bite in Rose Street starts a little before 10am. Early on, Littlejohn and Thompson introduced a scheme where customers could “pay forward” something from the menu. The receipt would then be put in a jar and a homeless person would come in and redeem it. When it first started, the service was seated, but Littlejohn noticed a sharp fall in takings. Office workers, apparently, liked the charitable angle but didn’t want to eat their lunch in a hangout for the homeless. Some rules were imposed for handouts: takeaway only, and free food would not be given out at the shop’s peak times between midday and 2pm.
But Littlejohn, as his recent tattoo attests, dislikes the idea of “them” and “us”. So, on Monday afternoons, Home restaurant – which also offers a pay-it-forward option on its bills – is open to anyone who lives on the street for a free three-course dinner. Social Bite also serves a free evening meal on Tuesday, and there’s a women-only night on Wednesday. And now, rather than relying on receipts in the jar, the business has raised enough money to feed any homeless person who turns up. In the Rose Street shop, customers and the homeless mingle; it’s actually not always immediately apparent who is who. This might sound crass, but it’s true: at one point, everyone seems to be young, bearded and carrying a rucksack. An employee called Connor, who started working at Social Bite on a government work placement, stands behind the till: “If you ask anyone who works here, they’ve mistaken a homeless person for a paying customer and vice-versa.”
For some, it is a simple handout: they take their food and hot drink, and leave. I offer to help making teas and coffees. “Put a couple of sugars in all of them,” advises Bonnie, the longest-standing employee. “But some will have seven or eight.” A Romanian man, with what looks like his life’s possessions in a backpack, hovers at the counter, looking bewildered. When I go to serve him, he says: “Sandwich? Gratis?” I nod. “No beast,” he adds. I take this to mean vegetarian, so I bring him a fried egg sandwich. He grins broadly, seemingly unable to believe his good fortune.
For many of those Social Bite helps, there is a social aspect too. “They come in for a wee talk as much as the food and coffee,” says Mimi, the manager. “Many don’t have families, so we become almost like that.” Bonnie chips in with a story from her 25th wedding anniversary last summer, when she went with her husband and a bottle of champagne to Princes Street Gardens. “It was meant to be this romantic thing but I saw this guy I know from the shop and we ended up sharing the champagne with a group of them.” She smiles fondly, “Then a couple of them disappeared and they came back and gave us a bottle of prosecco to make up for having drunk ours.”
Trade is brisk; in the middle of the lunch rush, one customer asks if he can pay something forward and hands an employee a note. It’s only when he’s disappeared that she opens it to find it’s £50.
After lunch, Sonny Murray and Biffy Mackay pop in. Both have worked for Social Bite – though they are not currently doing so – and in many ways they have become the poster boy and girl for the company. In fact, there are literally posters of them on the wall of the Rose Street shop, along with their potted life stories. There’s one, too, of Joe, Pete Hart’s brother, who was Social Bite’s second homeless employee and now works in the central production kitchen, making sandwiches. Another shows 51-year-old Colin Childs, who was a drug addict and traveller for two decades before getting a job in the shop. He’s been with the business for four years and is one of their most reliable employees. One brilliant picture shows the whole gang mugging for the camera with George Clooney.
The stories of Murray and Mackay are typical, depressingly so: they grew up in the care system and ended up living on the streets as teenagers. Littlejohn had made that point that for most homeless people, drugs were not the cause of their desperate situation, but a product of it. “It’s just a coping mechanism,” agrees Mackay. “You’re on the street and it’s crap, so why not get drunk and take drugs? I’ve been homeless twice through relationship breakdowns. And it was through being homeless that I started drinking, then started taking drugs. I’d never took or even seen heroin till I moved to Edinburgh.”
Talk turns to the Social Bite village. Currently, most homeless people in Edinburgh are housed in either a shelter or a private B&B. These options are typically less homely than they sound: the “bed” is a grubby mattress on the floor and the “breakfast” can be a kettle to fill up a Pot Noodle. They were meant to provide a roof for a couple of nights, but now the average stay in these temporary accommodations in Edinburgh is between 18 and 24 months. “The B&Bs cost a fortune and they’re not worth the money,” says Murray. “You’ve got nobody to help you, you’re on your own. You’ve got a roof over your head, and that’s it.”
“Josh doesn’t just want to feed people, he wants to make a change,” adds Mackay. “I personally think Josh should be knighted!”
Littlejohn hopes the first residents will move into the village this autumn. As we stood on the site, looking out to sea, I asked if he felt any pressure. He shook his head: the status quo for homeless people in Edinburgh is so bad that the project would have to go extraordinarily wrong to make the situation worse. “It’s a shot to nothing,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, it’s not like we’ve taken taxpayer money and fucked it up. We’ve raised it entirely privately. And if it works, it will transform the way we deal with homeless people. So it’s a good risk-to-reward ratio. I’ve learned over the last five years that people want to work and strive to improve their situations. They don’t want to live in these shitholes. So they should grab it with open arms. Of course, they might set the whole thing ablaze with their wood-burning stoves.”
He waved his fist at the sky and railed at the gods: “‘Idiot! Why did you insist on the wood-burning stoves!’”
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