After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious. By Tom Lamont
Most nights, before bed, before it all went wrong, Dominic Van Allen whiled away the last of the evening hours in a pub called The Garden Gate. It was easy to fit in and feel smart there, chatting and drinking with a crowd who passed through in varied states of dishevelment. Dog-walkers brought in sodden dogs. Exhausted junior doctors shambled in after shifts with their sleeves pushed up. There were scarved and suited older men, frail as antique hatstands, and casually dressed professionals with jobs in finance or entertainment who owned expensive homes nearby. “And it’s you rich buggers,” Van Allen marvelled, genially enough, as he eyed the state of their trainers, “who can afford to look the scruffiest.” He wore durable boots, khaki trousers and a leather motorcycle jacket, and could have been mistaken for a bike courier, a builder, maybe a maintenance guy at the hospital next door, where he was known in the staff canteen as someone who would wander in at dawn to buy a discount coffee.
That winter of 2017, Van Allen was 44 years old – tall, with close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes and a faint Yorkshire accent. At the pub, his was an ale. As soon as he judged it was late enough, Van Allen drank up and said his goodnights, bearing north from the pub and walking up a tree-lined road that hugged one side of Hampstead Heath. A vast open space that sits as a sort of green beehive haircut on top of metropolitan central London, the heath is untamed in parts and otherwise mown and managed like any public park. Every day, people visit by the thousand: runners, outdoor swimmers, tourists, bird-lovers on the trail of whitethroats and blackcaps in the bushes or goldfinches and kestrels in the trees. Sometimes a travelling circus unfolds itself on the hard-packed sand of the heath’s carpark. Summer brings sunbathers, picnickers and sixth-formers sat in circles, while in winter, on those rare occasions it snows, people drag in toboggans. On this night, in December 2017, forecasters had predicted flurries overnight. Van Allen moved briskly, eager to get in.
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