The Former Rough Sleeper Who Founded The Big Issue

John Bird was born in 1946 in Notting Hill, London, to an Irish mother who had left Co Cork at 18 and an English father who worked in a bakery and drank heavily. The area, he told The Irish Times, was full of dirt and poverty before it became fashionable. The family was evicted for non-payment of rent and lived for a time in one room. His mother, unable to keep her four sons, placed John and his three brothers in an orphanage, where he spent less than two years.

As a boy and teenager he played truant and got into trouble, and he ran away from home several times. He said of that time that it was killing him. He slept rough and wrote poetry. He also appeared before a juvenile court and was held in detention, and it was in a detention centre that he developed an interest in art.

At 18, after his release, he won a place at the Chelsea School of Art. He worked selling advertising for a start-up magazine, moved to Edinburgh after marrying, and later returned to London and sold beads. He spent time in Paris, joined the Socialist Labour League in 1967, and later grew disillusioned with revolutionary politics. He taught himself printing, remarried and had two more children.

In the late 1980s his friend Gordon Roddick, husband of The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, urged him to start a street magazine for homeless people. Bird at first thought the idea was crazy. The magazine launched in London in 1991, sold by homeless vendors, and the model has since spread to Ireland, Australia, parts of Africa and across Europe. Its aim, he said, was to help vendors transcend their own deprivation. As he put it, all he did was survive. He now sits in the House of Lords.