The Prince of Wales has recalled playing chess and chatting with people during his first visit to The Passage homelessness charity with his mother, more than 30 years ago, in a new documentary.
William said he was “a bit anxious as to what to expect” before his first visit, and remembered his mother – Diana, Princess of Wales – “making everyone feel relaxed and having a laugh and joking with everyone”.
He told the ITV1 and ITVX documentary – Prince William: We Can End Homelessness: “My mother took me to The Passage. She took Harry and I both there.
Diana, Princess of Wales during a visit to the homeless charity The Passage with her sons (The Passage/PA)
“I must have been about 11, I think probably at the time, maybe 10. I’d never been to anything like that before, and I was a bit anxious as to what to expect.
“My mother went about her usual part of making everyone feel relaxed and having a laugh and joking with everyone.
“I remember at the time kind of thinking, ‘well, if everyone’s not got a home, they’re all going to be really sad’. But it was incredible how happy an environment it was.
“I remember having some good conversations just playing chess and chatting. That’s when it dawned on me that there are other people out there who don’t have the same life as you do.
“When you’re quite small, you don’t really, you just think life is what you see in front of you and you don’t really have the concept to look elsewhere and it’s when you meet people, I did then, who put a different perspective in your head and say like, well, ‘I was a living on the street last night’, and you’re like ‘woah’, you know.”
The prince was followed for the programme during the first year of his Homewards initiative.
The Prince of Wales marking the first year of Homewards (Maja Smiejkowska/PA)
The campaign is a major long-term focus for William, who has told how visiting shelters with his late mother when he was a child left a deep and lasting impression and inspired his work.
Homewards aims to develop a blueprint for eradicating homelessness in all its forms, “making it rare, brief and unrepeated”.
Previously unseen pictures, used in the documentary, which show the prince on his first visits to The Passage with his mother in 1993, have also been released.
In one image, William wears a red polo shirt and is playing chess during a visit on June 14 1993 and in the others he is in a suit and tie with Diana on December 14 of the same year seen holding presents in one image, in the kitchen in another and sitting down in the last.
During the past year, the Homewards teams in six UK locations – Newport, Lambeth, Belfast, Aberdeen, Sheffield and three neighbouring Dorset towns, Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch – have been building collaborations between the public, private and third sectors.
The documentary will be broadcast on October 30 and 31 at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX, STV and STV Player.