Author · Social Entrepreneur · Road Warrior
GARY
STANIFORTH
Writing from the streets. Speaking for those written off.
Author · Social Entrepreneur · Road Warrior
Writing from the streets. Speaking for those written off.
The Man Behind the Page
In 2008, Gary Staniforth walked out of a Salvation Army hostel in Bradford — homeless, battling addiction — and stood outside Bradford Council offices with a cardboard sign: "We are the hidden homeless. We are in every town and city. The government and councils can't hide us anymore. Give us equal housing rights." Not for a day. For six weeks. Nine in the morning until six at night. Every day. In all weathers. He didn't march. He didn't chant. He just refused to be invisible.
That stubborn, quiet act of presence became the foundation of Hidden Voices — the social enterprise that went on to transform the lives of more than 600 people across Bradford. Partnering with over 50 organisations, Gary built a movement rooted in a deceptively simple idea: people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and poverty aren't problems to be managed. They are people with stories worth telling.
Hidden Voices launched creative writing workshops, rap sessions, photography projects, and peer-led storytelling in hostels, day centres, and women's projects across Bradford. Participants wrote raw poetry, shared personal testimony, and saw their words become a magazine, a book — Forgotten, highly commended at the 2010 National Charity Awards — a short film, and bold billboard campaigns that asked uncomfortable questions of Bradford's commuters. By 2018, more than 600 individuals had passed through the programme.
Gary's lived experience — the Bradford hostels, the estates, the system that writes people off — was always going to find its way onto the page. His debut novel, Asphalt Saints, is set in the streets of Sheffield and follows Jack Lee: a man who arrives early when the system arrives late, who protects the vulnerable with a quiet, fierce tenacity drawn directly from Gary's own years on the front line. The sequel, The Grey Man, deepens that world — carrying the same gritty, street-level solidarity into territory where justice is personal and loyalty is everything.
Away from the page, Gary earns his living behind the wheel of an HGV out of Bradford and rides Harley-Davidson motorcycles — not as a hobby, but as an extension of a worldview. Self-reliance. The open road. The knowledge that the work is real and the load is yours to carry.
The Asphalt Saints Series
Asphalt Saints · Book 1
Jack Lee doesn't wait for the system to save people — he's been burned by it too many times. When children start disappearing from the Sheffield estates he knows too well, Jack moves through the shadows with a quiet, fierce tenacity that authority can't touch and paperwork can't slow down. Raw, street-level, and uncompromising.
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Asphalt Saints · Book 2
The world Jack Lee moves through doesn't forgive easily, and it doesn't forget. In The Grey Man, the same gritty, street-level solidarity that powered Book One deepens into territory where justice is personal, loyalty is everything, and the line between protector and predator is razor thin.
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An absolutely gripping read. All emotions rolled into one. From the heartbreaking tears, to the smiles of joy. Gary has used his memories, knowledge and fictional facts to show the world that people do care and how brotherhood isn't a bad thing. Can't wait for book 2.
Story Moments
BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM
Children routed through council databases using codes nobody questioned. Selected. Transferred. Delivered to country houses owned by trusts that led to a government committee. The people protecting children were supplying them.
MANAGED IT ALL
Hargreaves. Thirty-five years in the shadows. He didn't touch the children — he moved the paperwork. Made witnesses disappear. Kept the machine running. A man who visited his dead wife's grave and felt nothing. Almost nothing.
347 CHILDREN. 31 CODES.
Handwritten. Leather-bound. Eleven years of entries. Every child's name. Every client's code. Hidden in a safe in a house in Derbyshire. The Saints rode through the dark and took it.
THEY FOUND SOMETHING WORSE
An altar with chains. An operating theatre. Vials of blood. Organs in fridges. They weren't just exploiting children. They were harvesting them. Eight unnamed clients. The ones nobody could touch.
IN BLOOD
Gary Fenton. Thirty-one. A daughter called Sophie. He helped the Saints and they killed him for it. Made it look like suicide. 112 bikes lined the streets for his funeral. A six-year-old held a toy motorcycle and said: Daddy's friends.
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