The Spike

The Spike - slang for the causal ward (or short-term homeless shelter), where homeless men were taken in to be provided with a medical examination, a (poor quality) meal and a bed for the night. The casual ward was often part of a larger workhouse, where men lived on a more long term basis, but worked for their keep. In the workhouse, as we see from Orwell's brief work in the kitchen there, they are fed much better!

Orwell's account is wonderfully descriptive, both of the the spike and of the men with whom Orwell spends the weekend. There is not much to describe of the meals they share -

The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it... [with] ... a pint of so-called tea.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt. The room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike.

Down and Out in Paris and London