The 34-year-old has given free haircuts on the street since 2015, and has put the stories of some of those he has helped in a book
One evening in spring 2015, Joshua Coombes did something that changed his life for ever. He was walking to a friend’s house after finishing work at a hairdressing salon when he stopped to talk to a homeless man he’d seen many times in the same spot. In the past, he had bought the man something to eat or given him some spare change, but this time a thought occurred to Coombes: how about I offer him a haircut? He had his gear in his backpack and he cut the man’s hair right there on the street. As he worked, the pair of them fell into the chatty intimacies of barber and client, opening up to each other. The next time they met, the man introduced Coombes to a couple of his friends and he got his clippers and scissors out for them too.
Soon, he says, he was out on the streets of London as often as he could be, enjoying the chance to change often desperate lives in a small, surprising way. “A haircut is not the first thing on your list of things you’ve thought you were going to do that day, if you’re sat there on the street,” he told me when we met for a coffee near his home in Peckham, south London, last week. “You’re thinking of where you’re getting your next meal or where you might be staying that night. So me walking up and offering a haircut was unexpected and most of the time people were really receptive. And if they’re not, that’s totally fine too. I’ll just have a chat with someone and see where that goes.”