When Prince William stood before a gathering at the Saatchi Gallery in the summer of 2024, he was not unveiling a royal vanity project. He was opening a front in a cultural war – one fought not with policy papers alone, but with sculpture, spoken word, and the fingerprints of people who had once slept rough on British streets. The occasion was Homelessness: Reframed, an exhibition curated in partnership between the prince’s Homewards programme, the Eleven Eleven Foundation, and the Saatchi Gallery itself. Running from 7 August to 20 September 2024, it was designed to do something no Whitehall green paper had managed: make a nation look.
Two months later, in October 2024, the two-part ITV documentary Prince William: We Can End Homelessness aired to considerable public attention. Produced by Mindhouse – the independent production company co-founded by Louis Theroux – and directed by BAFTA winner Leo Burley, the series followed the first year of the Homewards programme across six UK locations. It was subsequently released on Disney+ for international audiences. Taken together, the exhibition and the documentary represent one of the most ambitious attempts by a member of the royal family to wield cultural capital as a tool for social change since Diana, Princess of Wales, took her young sons to visit The Passage homeless centre in 1993.
The Architecture of Homewards
Homewards was launched in June 2023 by Prince William and The Royal Foundation as a five-year programme designed to demonstrate that homelessness can, in fact, be ended – not merely managed, reduced, or tolerated. The programme operates across six flagship locations: Aberdeen; Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole; the London Borough of Lambeth; Newport in Wales; Sheffield; and a site in Northern Ireland. Each location receives seed funding of up to £500,000 to support pioneering housing initiatives, with the ambition that successful models can be replicated nationally and internationally.
As of mid-2025, more than 100 initiatives were underway across the six locations, backed by a £50 million funding package from Lloyds Banking Group. In March 2025, the first residents moved into Aberdeen’s Innovative Housing Project – the programme’s first completed housing site. By the summer of that year, planning approval had been secured for a Lambeth project that would transform a Duchy of Cornwall property into 16 affordable flats for young adults aged 18 to 25, managed by the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint, where William has served as patron since 2005.
“I don’t believe we should be living with homelessness in the 21st century,” William said in the ITV documentary, a line that has since become the programme’s unofficial motto. The figure is stark: over 300,000 people in the United Kingdom are currently experiencing homelessness – sofa surfing, sleeping in cars, living in hostels or temporary accommodation, or on the streets. Nearly half of them are children.
A Gallery as a Classroom
The Saatchi Gallery exhibition was conceived as a bridge between data and empathy. Paul Foster, the gallery’s director, framed it in terms of art’s capacity to recalibrate perception: “Works by artists with lived experience, and by workshop participants with no art background, remind us that creativity is not dependent on any status in society and that art offers a means for us to understand the challenges facing so many fellow citizens.”
The works on display were neither decorative nor comfortable. David Tovey, an award-winning social justice artist who once used the services of The Passage, contributed Home 2013, a shed-shaped sculpture fabricated from scraps of metal and panels from a Peugeot 206 – the type of car that had been his home for six months. Painted in burgundy red to evoke a paratrooper’s beret, the piece was a direct testimony to his military background and subsequent period of rough sleeping.
Marc Quinn contributed a labyrinth painting using the fingerprint of Lorna Tucker – a writer and director who experienced homelessness for many years – on an oval canvas, exploring human identity and societal connections. Philip Colbert, best known for his cartoon lobster iconography, created Community, a piece inspired by conversations with people who have lived experience of homelessness, celebrating communal bonds as integral to the concept of home. Simone Brewster’s Pack Away Desire and Other Precious Things presented stylised wooden storage boxes representing the emotional and material baggage carried by those in precarious housing situations.
The exhibition also featured works from creative workshops held across the six Homewards locations, ensuring that the voices of children and young people were present alongside those of established artists. This democratisation of authorship was, in itself, a political act – an assertion that the stories of homelessness belong first to those who have lived them.
The Documentary: Behind the Access
The ITV series was notable for its access. Mindhouse Productions secured rare behind-the-scenes footage of the prince at work – visiting sites, meeting people facing homelessness, and recruiting his Homewards team. The first episode documented the programme’s launch and followed William across the UK; the second focused on youth homelessness, culminating in his announcement that Duchy of Cornwall land would be offered for supported housing.
Director Leo Burley described the scope of the project in a statement: “Over the past year we have spent time following Prince William and The Royal Foundation through the first year of the Homewards programme. We’ve heard some incredibly moving stories from people across the country facing homelessness. From street homelessness in Newport, to families living in temporary accommodation in Sheffield, and youth homelessness in Aberdeen, the documentary paints a picture of homelessness across the UK today.”
The series featured candid interviews in which William reflected on the influence of his mother. “I have taken some inspiration and guidance from what my mother did, particularly with homelessness,” he said, referencing Diana’s visits to The Passage – the same centre where, at the age of 11, the young prince had accompanied her. Archival photographs of those early visits were released for the first time alongside the documentary, creating a visual throughline across three decades.
Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, a former rough sleeper who is now chief fire officer for West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service, appeared prominently in the series. She told CNN she was “pragmatically optimist” about the programme’s potential: “He has real convening power. He’s able to get people around the table thinking about a perennial problem in a completely different way.”
The Critic’s Challenge
Homewards has not been without scepticism. When the programme launched, some commentators noted the irony of a prince with a personal property portfolio estimated at over £1 billion positioning himself as an advocate for the homeless. LBC presenter James O’Brien publicly dubbed him “the prince of homelessness.” William confronted the criticism directly in the documentary: “Why else would I be here if I’m not using this role properly to influence and help people where I can? I like a big challenge, I do like that, but I can’t do it on my own.”
Mick Clarke, CEO of The Passage, offered a counterpoint after attending a press screening: “We see him as the real person. When he comes he’s very relaxed, very chilled. I kind of get a feeling there’s a bit of a family relationship there, given the history back to when he was 11. He’s also very authentic, and people who have lived with homelessness are very good at sussing almost instantly whether someone is straightforward, whether they are authentic or not.”
The tension between privilege and advocacy is not easily resolved, nor should it be. What is measurable is the programme’s output: over 100 initiatives, three housing projects in development or completed within two years, a £50 million banking partnership, and a public conversation that has shifted from charity rhetoric to systemic critique.
Art as Advocacy, Culture as Catalyst
The decision to commission an art exhibition alongside a documentary series was strategic. The Royal Foundation’s research found that a third of the general public wrongly assume that those who are homeless have been homeless before, and that many people only recognise street homelessness or know very little about the realities of the issue in the UK. The Saatchi Gallery, with its minimalist King’s Road space and reputation for championing emerging contemporary art, provided both institutional credibility and a high-footfall London venue during a peak tourism month.
The pairing of documentary and exhibition also reflects a broader trend in royal philanthropy – one in which cultural institutions are enlisted not merely as venues but as collaborators in narrative construction. The Earthshot Prize, William’s environmental initiative, has followed a similar model, combining an annual awards ceremony with a BBC documentary series. The Guardians docuseries, launched in April 2025 to highlight the work of wildlife rangers, extended this approach further.
In each case, the formula is consistent: pair the prince’s personal investment with a respected cultural platform, embed stories of lived experience within a broader institutional frame, and use the documentary format to create emotional reach that policy announcements alone cannot achieve.
A Programme Still in Motion
As Homewards enters its third year, the programme is evolving beyond housing. In June 2026, William launched the Homelessness Data Lab at London Tech Week, announcing that anonymised data and artificial intelligence would be deployed to help frontline workers identify people at risk of homelessness earlier. Twenty-five organisations, including Salesforce, are involved in the initiative. The ambition is predictive rather than reactive – intervening before a family loses its home rather than responding after the fact.
“This is a problem that is solvable,” William said at the London Tech Week event, according to Reuters. “The Homewards initiative will use anonymised data and AI to help frontline workers spot risk earlier, with 25 organisations involved.”
The journey from the Saatchi Gallery’s hushed rooms to the algorithmic precision of a data lab may seem incongruous, but it traces the arc of a programme that has consistently refused to accept the boundaries of traditional royal philanthropy. Art opened the door. Documentary walked through it. Technology is now mapping the road ahead.
Whether Homewards ultimately proves that homelessness can be ended in the six pilot locations – and replicated across the United Kingdom – remains an open question. What is already evident is that the prince has, through cultural intervention as much as policy advocacy, forced a national reckoning with an issue too often relegated to the margins of public discourse. The Saatchi Gallery exhibition may have closed its doors in September 2024, but the conversation it initiated is still reverberating.
Prince William: We Can End Homelessness is available on ITVX and Disney+.
For information on the Homewards programme, visit homewards.org.uk. To learn more about the Royal Foundation’s work, visit royalfoundation.com.
