Leader – Streets less uncaring at vigil for Miro Glaza
Cities are commonly perceived as places of alienation, where souls are lost amid an atomised throng. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way.
In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs showed how urban neighbourhoods are often home to thriving communities and binding personal ties not immediately discernable to outsiders.
A vigil held in the Narrow Way last month also served to illustrate this more caring side to the city.
It was held to remember Miroslaw Glazy, a homeless Polish man who died in the Royal London Hospital six days after he was brutally beaten by assailants.
Prayers were said in memory of Mr Glazy, known as Miro Glaza, who arrived in London four years ago in the hope of finding work but ended up on the streets and drinking heavily.
He endured many cold nights sleeping on the steps of the Round Chapel in Lower Clapton Road.
“This was someone who came and ate at our kitchen,” said Sarah Magno, a member of London Catholic Worker who helps run a soup kitchen. “Of course we are going to take time to remember him.”
Miro was born in 1963 and leaves behind a wife and two children who have been informed about his death by the Metropolitan Police’s murder squad. Little else is known about his life, but it is surprising we know even this much.
He was part of a section of society in which poverty is extreme and untimely death so commonplace that it is rarely considered news.
In contrast, homeless Eastern Europeans as a whole – and particularly the Romanians living on the streets of the West End – are the scourge of many newspapers and the cause of debate about immigration. Their presence as a group is widely publicised, but their individual stories are almost never heard.
What was heartening about the vigil was how it showed people can unite to remember a person with whom they had little if any connection, a seemingly anonymous individual, but a fellow human being who suffered a sad, violent and untimely death.
On that damp evening in December, London seemed a little less lonely.
Related:
Homeless victim of fatal assault Miro Glaza remembered at vigil