Wooden sleeping pods for homeless people in London

Modular sleeping pods made from easy-to-assemble wooden panels are providing temporary accommodation for homeless people in London. Ten of the prefabricated pods, designed by London-based architecture studio Reed Watts, have been installed inside the 999 Club night shelter in Deptford. They offer secure, temporary accommodation to people who might otherwise be sleeping on the streets. Reed Watts is also making the design available online through a Creative Commons license, so that anyone with the facilities can reproduce additional pods and make them available to people in need. Architect and Reed Watts co-founder Matt Watts hopes that other companies across the capital will offer up vacant spaces. "By releasing the design as a royalty-free Creative Commons license, we hope to give as many organisations as possible an opportunity to use the pods where there is a need for short-term shelter," he said. The project was initiated by a competition in 2017 hosted by the charity Commonweal Housing, which called for ideas to help Romanian migrant workers who were being forced to set up camp in public parks or underpasses. These migrants are among an estimated 170,000 homeless people in the UK capital – equivalent to 1 in 52 people.