Park Benches at Sixteen, Then a Radio Career

Charlie Sloth, the DJ and broadcaster, grew up in Somers Town in Camden, London, where his mother was a cleaner and his father an electrician. He started DJing at Camden youth clubs at 13. In an interview with The Big Issue in August 2025, he said he was a very chaotic youth who struggled with rules and discipline, and that his parents did not want him at home.

At 16 he became homeless. For the first few weeks he stayed on sofas with friends and relatives, which he says can only last so long. Then, out of stubbornness, he refused to go home and began sleeping on park benches. He told no one. At night he climbed the fence into St Martin's Gardens in Camden, which closed to the public after dark.

The turning point came one morning after a night of drinking, when he slept on a bench until 11 a.m. and passers-by saw him. A woman who worked for the charity Centrepoint began talking to him. Centrepoint got involved, supported him and helped him move out of homelessness. Sloth says it only takes one person to put a bit of belief in you for you to realise that anything is possible, and that this belief changed how he carried himself.

By 19 he had pirate radio shows on seven stations, though it was not yet a paying career. At 22 he became a father, and the family lived in a garden shed without sanitation while he worked long hours as a video editor. He says his time as a homeless teenager motivated him to avoid returning to that situation.

He later worked for the hip-hop platform JumpOff, whose founder, Ara Bozadjian, told him he was too talented to stay an editor and offered to manage him. Sloth went on to host prime-time shows on BBC Radio 1, travelled the world as a DJ and later joined Apple.