The most famous was the area covered by Hungerford Bridge by Embankment Station, where charity 'soup runs' handed out food and blankets, medical assistance and other forms of social support including offers of a bed for the night - a 'kip'.
Rising property values turned run-down Victorian terraced family housing, whose owners had been making ends meet by renting rooms to low-skilled migrant labourers, into marketable assets.
News coverage of the rising street population became a part of the mood music to the Tory government's unravelling social and economic policy agenda.
In 1989 St Mungo's, a homelessness charity, organised National Sleep Out Week to highlight the problem and give a focus to the mood of concern.
Mrs Thatcher's fall from grace with her parliamentary party is dated to a speech by her Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe, whose wife Elspeth took a leading role in publicising the homelessness campaign and is widely credited with writing the speech that her husband delivered in Parliament leading to his boss's political demise.
It helped to widen the rift that led first to Sir Geoffrey's resignation (it was said that Lady Howe wrote his speech) and thence to Mrs Thatcher's removal from office."
Once Mrs Thatcher had gone, Sir George Young bt, a Tory 'wet' with a long-standing interest in homelessness and a solid reputation amongst campaigners, was appointed housing minister with 200 million GBP to spend on getting people off the streets.
The level of street homelessness (rough sleeping) has declined steadily in England since the late 1980s following a number of successful government-funded programmes introduced from 1990 onwards by both Conservative and Labour governments.
Many rough sleepers were assisted to find permanent accommodation (self-contained council and housing association flats) through the resettlement work that was undertaken prior to the site being closed.
On each occasion some parts of the voluntary sector engaged with the relevant local authority to support the clearance of rough sleepers from the area.
The increase in rough sleeping arose for a variety of reasons including: The three phases of the RSI ran from 1990 until 1999 costing the government in total over £200 million.
The HMII was modest in size compared to the RSI but led to the creation of a range of high quality temporary and permanent self-contained accommodation for rough sleepers with mental health problems and included the funding of linked mental health teams to support and complement the work of the generic housing teams providing residential support.
Additionally, housing associations, health care providers, the police and local businesses were also engaged within what became labelled a multi-agency approach.
Central government took the unusual step of funding directly as it had little confidence in local authorities to address the problem of rough sleeping.
In South Australia, the State Government of Premier Mike Rann (2002 to 2011) committed substantial funding to a series of initiatives designed to combat homelessness.
The new direction from 2002 on centred on the following priorities: Considerable progress has been made in reducing rough sleeping in England with the voluntary sector playing a lead role.