For 18 years, Kate and Richard Johnson have lived in the same four-bedroom semi-detached house in the suburbs south of Manchester. The couple’s three daughters are grown up, with their youngest flying the nest for university in 2015. Two years after her departure, Kate chanced upon a Facebook post for Refugees at Home, a UK charity which connects those with a spare room to refugees and asylum seekers in need of somewhere to stay.

“We had been thinking about doing something like this for some time,” says Kate, 68, a postgraduate support tutor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. “We had quite an empty house, and we’d been thinking that we wanted to share our good fortune.”

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