From 2020, the UK Home Office increasingly began relying on “contingency hotels” to house asylum seekers.

With the term “hotel” suggesting notions of luxury - and inflammatory portraits drawn by British tabloids depicting asylum seekers housed in “palatial” settings - the increasing reliance on this form of asylum accommodation has become hugely controversial.

Despite the enormous costs to the taxpayer however, the quality of accommodation and support is extremely poor. 

The accommodation and food provided in these hotels is provided by private companies via contracts worth billions of pounds.

Private companies can generate hundreds of millions of pounds in profit while failing to comply with basic standards of provision.

Over 12 months, Dr Charlotte Sanders, Senior Lecturer at SOAS, conducted interviews with asylum seekers housed in “contingency hotels”.

Food came up again and again in these conversations: a thread tying together ways in which the carceral conditions of life in these hotels impacted on the physical and mental wellbeing of those housed.

Produced for the HoMH Lab, this animation project brings their testimonies to life. It explores the specific realities of life within these asylum hotels, through the universalising lens of food.