A fading memory of the homeless lands outside Waterloo station is remembered in a new exhibition that tells the story of the South Bank’s  “cardboard city”.

Although, as the exhibition explains, Cardboard City was rarely made of cardboard – it was a media invention from an often hostile tabloid press that saw homelessness less as a problem to solve than a moral crusade against decadent and lazy people.

The exhibition is mainly photographic, a record of life in the concrete underpass, taken mainly by street photographers Liza Hamlyn and Moyra Peralta. It’s both a record of the deprivation that people faced and how, in considerable hardship, friendships were formed.

Apart from the photos are the stories, telling the practicalities of life in the makeshift shelters, how basic functions such as toilets worked or newbies moving in for the first time were educated as to the informal rules of the system.

There’s also an amazing story of when Marianne Faithful offered to provide a free fundraising concert, and the organisers didn’t realise a local excentric had bought £1,500 worth of tickets and handed them out to the homeless as well — leading to pandemonium on the night.

Even the church at one point got fed up and banned the homeless from sleeping in the portico.

The exhibition ends with the end of the Bullring, when the local council cleared the site to make space for a cinema. Despite all the reports of a heavy police and council presence, the exhibition shows that, in fact, so much outreach work had been undertaken before the day, offering new homes to the homeless, that hardly anyone was left to evict.

This is sad because it reminds us that problems are fixable but are often left to fester for decades without intervention.

The exhibition, The Spirit of the Bullring lives on…, is in St John’s Waterloo church next to Waterloo station until 2nd March and is free to visit.

It has somewhat awkward opening hours – halfway down this page.