Search the hashtag “vanlife” on Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll be treated to a cornucopia of purple-hued sunsets and blood orange sunrises. Scroll a little further, and you’ll find people giving tours inside the vehicles they live in, showing how they’re able to fit dining and sleeping areas in neatly and, of course, aesthetically.
But at what point does living in a van, whether it’s an RV or a converted Mercedes Sprinter, transition from being a countercultural lifestyle into homelessness, albeit a very Instagrammable form?
37-year-old Ash is a self-employed delivery driver in Margate on the Kent coast. He lives in his office, his office being the Suzuki van he uses to deliver parcels full of online shopping.
Ash, who left school at 16 and has also worked on and off in hospitality, used to live in London, but the rent was too expensive, so he moved to Margate and decided to try living in his van. “I find living in a house stressful,” he says. “I prefer living like this. I get restless otherwise”.
The van is not very big, but Ash says he “likes it that way” because it has “everything” he needs. He has a gym membership and goes there to shower. “There’s a sofa in the back which folds out, and I sleep on that”.
“When I lived and rented in London, I could barely make enough money to live on every month,” Ash says, standing next to his van. “This is much better.”
It’s difficult to know exactly how many people, like Ash, in the UK live nomadically in their vans. However, the available data suggests that the number is rising. There is, of course, a long tradition of living nomadically amongst Britain’s Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. But what is unfolding in the growing van-dwelling community is a separate socio-economic phenomenon.
A “cautious” estimate, based on a survey conducted by the community publication VanLife, is that 30,000 to 60,000 people are living full-time in vehicles across the UK. In Bristol, where there is a big van-dwelling community, the number of people living this way had quadrupled since 2020, from 100-150 to 600-650 by 2024, according to a Bristol City Council report.
For some of these people, living in a vehicle is a lifestyle choice that allows them to wake up anywhere in the world. But for others, it is the result of the cost of housing and living in the UK today.
People aged 45 and under have been dealt a bad hand by successive governments over the last 30 years. From the failure to address runaway house prices to the decision to make student loans painfully expensive, it is not an easy time to achieve financial security, even for those on medium to high incomes. VanLife’s surveys put the average van dweller between the ages of 25 and 44.
Like the countless videos on TikTok about how to make a tiny bedroom in a shared house look chic, the aestheticisation of #vanlife is yet another way that younger people are trying to put a positive spin on the difficult realities of their lives.
For 37-year-old Ben Pollard, living in a van can be uncomfortable. He has to find somewhere to park every night, and his van is much smaller than the bedroom he had before. “I was looking at putting a shower in, but there isn’t really enough space,” Ben explains.
Ben, who is originally from Birmingham but now based in Sheffield, is currently doing up a second-hand Mercedes Sprinter van and converting it, while living in it full-time.
It was the cost of living that prompted Ben to move into a van just over a year ago. “I couldn’t afford to buy a place on my own, or really rent. I was living with my mother. I was trying to save a deposit for a house with a partner, it didn’t work out, and I have some debt, so I moved into the van.”
For Ben, the biggest pro to van life is that he’s saving on the cost of rent. He earns around £2,500 a month before tax and is now managing to save “almost half of that” after he has paid his debts.
“I’ve got an off-grid electrical set-up for electricity and water, so my costs are next to nothing, I don’t have to pay rent, and I can park up wherever. It’s a no-brainer when you consider the cost of renting, which is nearly £1,000 a month.”
But, there are many cons, too. Ben showers at work; he also uses the toilet and kitchen there. If he wants to shower in the evening, he goes to a service station.
“I really don’t know how I’d cope if I had to pay rent,” Ben says. “But the reality of living like this is very different to what you see on social media. I do have an Instagram account, but I don’t really post because I don’t feel comfortable presenting this way of life as something it’s not.”
Ben is currently working for a company called Coalition Vans, which is owned by 44-year-old Liam Seward. They renovate and convert vans for people to travel or live in.
Liam lived in a van for seven years for financial reasons, like Ben. “I moved into my van after a relationship breakdown,” Liam says. “I would have been completely homeless if it weren’t for the fact that I had a camper van. I didn’t have a rental deposit – I couldn’t afford to rent. It’s worse now, rents are crazy.”
The van Liam Seward lived in for seven years. At the time, he said he would have been homeless if not his camper van.“I had no alternative,” Liam adds. “Although I do consider my van a home, I was homeless.” As a result of blogging about his experiences on Instagram and YouTube, Liam has now been able to build a successful business and lives in a rented home. “I’ve gone from living off noodles and not being able to afford to get my own engine in my van fixed to having an established business with two premises, big warehouses and a team,” Liam says.
“My main customers are people who are selling their houses or people who can’t afford to rent and are going to live in a van instead. It went from doing a few repairs on the odd camper van to building vans for people four years ago, and I’ve now been fully booked up for nine months in advance since 2022.”
Things began shifting during Covid. From 2020, he was getting a lot of requests from people who had lost their jobs or who were struggling to pay their rising rents.
Liam says his customers are “selling houses because they can’t afford their mortgages”, as well as older people “who are trying to fund their retirement by selling their home – we get a lot of older couples.”
Today, Liam lives in a flat. He looks back on his period of nomadic van living as somewhere between “having a home and being homeless”. He found downsizing into a van hard and, in the end, decided it was not appropriate for him because his daughter, who would stay with him when she wasn’t with her mum, needed proper facilities – a toilet, a bathroom, a room of her own.
Living in a van may have upsides, but ultimately, those who do it long-term with no home to return to are homeless. That is not a choice, no matter how picturesque it looks in a social media post. A growing number of people are in that situation. And that should worry us all.
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