It was certainly no toast to the sun: in June 2023, Prince William launched Homewards, an ambitious plan in collaboration with the Royal Foundation to help alleviate homelessness in the United Kingdom. Now, the heir to the British throne has completed the first phase of the project by announcing that he will build 24 social homes in Nansledan (Newquay), a small town in the southwest of England, on land owned by the royal family. Work will begin in September and will continue until autumn 2025 with an initial cost of 3.7 million euros.
The Duchy of Cornwall is a royal property created by Edward III for his son in the distant year of 1337 of an enormous area: 52,000 hectares spread across 20 counties. Most of them are concentrated in Devon as well as Herefordshire, Somerset, Wales and Cornwall itself, Cornway in English. In this project, Guillermo will work in collaboration with St Petrocs, a locally based charity that helps the homeless. Not only will he give up the land but the prince will also oversee the design and management of the development.
William’s philanthropy is due to the charitable nature of the longed-for Lady Di: when he was a child, the first wife of the current King Charles took him and his brother to visit shelters for the homeless and that had a profound impact on him. “I met so many extraordinary people and heard so many heartbreaking personal stories…” he said last June. Even in 2009 he even slept on the street in an experience organized by the NGO Centrepoint to empathize as much as possible with this drama: Guillermo lay down in a sleeping bag next to a group of rubbish containers near the Blackfriars Bridge. Today he is a patron of Centrepoint and The Passage, with similar purposes.
“For me it was a terrifying experience. Get out of my comfortable bed. Out in the open. On an extremely cold night, with temperatures of up to 4 degrees below zero. And the same thing happened to Prince William. But he was determined to do it to raise awareness of the problem and to be able to understand a little better what those who sleep on the streets go through night after night,” wrote Seyi Obakin, director of Centrepoint.
