Mary worked for 25 years at the World Health Organization in Cairo before retiring in 2011. We meet her in a foodbank for refugees and asylum seekers in Brighton (14 June 2019). The 68-year-old grandmother is immaculately turned out (smart trouser suit and gold hoop earrings matched by gold-rimmed glasses), as though it was another day at the office.

She tells us that the only money she has to live on is a weekly £20 handout from the Red Cross. That she has a roof over her head at all is thanks to a grassroots campaigning group called Brighton Migrant Solidarity and, in particular, the generosity of one of its supporters who lets her stay rent free in a room in her house in Hove. “She a widow, such a nice lady,” she says.

Mary was refused asylum at the beginning of 2018 and since then she has had to take the train to Croydon to attend the Home Office's Lunar House every month. She now has to check in only every eight weeks, on account of her failing health. She is diabetic, takes medication for depression and anxiety and suffers chronic knee pain. She tells us that she's on 18 tablets a day. “I suffer so much,” she says.

Mary strikes us as a proud woman not given to self-pity. When we mention her age, she quickly says with a smile, pointing at our notepad: “I think I said 21.” When she takes the train from Brighton to Croydon she is accompanied by a volunteer from another Brighton charity called Voices in Exile which supports refugees, asylum seekers and vulnerable migrants with no recourse to public funds in the area. We meet at its busy Friday destitution service and foodbank situated at Brighton's old table-tennis club in Kemp Town.

City of Sanctuary

Voices in Exile was set up in Brighton in 2005. “Brighton was a dispersal town then but it had no infrastructure and not everybody was getting the help they needed,” the group's director, Mel Steel, tells us. The charity began as a volunteer-led destitution project and set up the first independent foodbank. “Predating the Trussell Trust; it provided a safe social place for people to meet, although nobody involved at that time was accredited to give advice,” she continues.