05/10/2026
The iron man
The Life of Miley Porritt
Prologue From Nothing to Something
Some people spend their lives trying to forget where they came from.
Miley Porritt decided to tell the story.
It isn't a story about a perfect childhood, a perfect family or a life that always went according to plan.
It is a story about adoption, family breakdown, abuse, homelessness, prison, loss, fatherhood, heartbreak and rebuilding.
But it is also a story about friendship.
About kindness.
About finding something when you thought you had nothing left.
And about turning rubbish into something that could help save another person's life.
This is the story of Miley Porritt.
The man behind The Iron Man Survival blankets
The man who spent years searching for somewhere to belong.
The man who lost everything more than once.
And the man who kept finding a reason to start again.
Chapter One
The Boy Who Was Adopted
Miley's story begins with adoption.
He was adopted at around 4 and a half years old and grew up in a Catholic family.
From an early age, Miley remembers feeling as though people were watching him.
He felt that there were expectations placed upon him expectations to perform, to behave, and to prove that he was worthy of being loved.
He describes it almost as though he had been given a ticket to a life he was supposed to be grateful for.
And because he had been given that chance, he felt he had to prove himself.
He became an altar boy.
He was brought up through the church.
There were rules.
He wasn't allowed to swear. He wasn't allowed to drink. There were things he simply wasn't permitted to do.
On the surface, there were holidays, Christmases and the appearance of a family life.
But underneath that surface, Miley carried feelings he struggled to understand.
Christmas became particularly significant.
He remembers looking at how perfect everything seemed and wondering whether it could really be real.
If everything was so perfect, why didn't he feel loved enough?
That question would stay with him.
Chapter Two
When the Family Fell Apart
Miley had also been born into an Irish Traveller family before his adoption.
His family story became increasingly complicated as he grew older.
There were relationships within the family that shifted dramatically.
His biological and adopted family became intertwined in ways that were difficult for a child to understand.
Eventually, his father left his mother for her long-lost adopted sister.
The woman who had been Miley's aunt became his stepmother.
A cousin became a stepsister.
The family structure that Miley had known was changing around him.
Then came something even more devastating.
Miley has spoken about experiencing sexual abuse within the family.
The family eventually disintegrated.
By the time he was around thirteen, the family had effectively collapsed and the children were placed into care.
For Miley, childhood was no longer simply about growing up.
It was about surviving what had happened around him.
There were losses that could not easily be explained.
There were relationships that disappeared.
And there were wounds that would follow him long after childhood ended.
Chapter Three
The Festival That Changed Everything
One of the strangest chapters of Miley's family story began at a festival.
Miley remembers being the first person to meet his aunt and cousin there.
They apparently bumped into one another and ended up camping together.
But Miley later came to believe that the meeting had actually been planned by his father and aunt.
That discovery changed the way he viewed the situation.
He felt caught in something that had been happening around him without his knowledge.
The consequences were enormous.
Miley says his relationship with his mother deteriorated completely.
He describes being slapped around the face by her and recalls the death of his hamster.
His relationship with members of his adopted family eventually broke down too.
Years later, some of those people would still not speak to him.
For a child who had already experienced adoption and family instability, another family breaking apart was another piece of belonging disappearing.
Chapter Four
Prison, Homelessness and Survival
Miley's adult life would take him through places he never expected to go.
He has spent years in prison and has been incarcerated four times.
Among the prisons he remembers are HMP Wi******er, HMP Portland and HMP Bristol, with Wi******er being part of his story on two occasions.
But prison was only one part of the instability.
Miley has never had what he describes as a consistently stable home.
He has experienced homelessness.
He has known what it means to have almost nothing.
And yet, somewhere inside all of that, another side of Miley began to emerge.
The side that wanted to help other people.
The side that wanted to build something.
The side that refused to believe that his past had to determine his future.
Chapter Five
The Birth of Iron Man
The idea that would become Iron Man Survival Blankets came from one of the most unlikely places imaginable.
A bath.
It was Christmas.
Miley had recently moved into his first flat that he had managed to obtain for himself.
For perhaps the first time, he had a place he could genuinely call his own.
But money was tight.
There wasn't much to spend.
Miley was making Christmas decorations from discarded crisp packets.
He used the heat of an iron to bind the packets together, creating strips of homemade tinsel to hang from the ceiling.
Then the pieces fell into a shape that looked different.
They looked like a survival blanket.
Miley saw it.
And instead of throwing the idea away, he experimented.
He ironed the crisp packets together.
He strengthened them.
He began working out how the material could be made into something useful.
Something durable.
Something that could potentially help someone sleeping rough.
That moment became the beginning of Iron Man Survival Blankets.
It was an extraordinary idea born from an ordinary piece of rubbish.
A crisp packet that somebody else had finished with became the starting point for something designed to help somebody who had nowhere warm to sleep.
Miley had experienced homelessness himself.
He understood the cold.
He understood having nothing.
So perhaps it was fitting that the idea came from somebody who knew exactly why it mattered
Chapter Six
From One Blanket to a Movement
Iron Man did not remain one man's experiment for long.
People began collecting crisp packets.
Schools got involved.
Businesses got involved.
Communities got involved.
The idea spread.
Thousands of discarded packets could be transformed into something with another purpose.
The project began attracting media attention, including BBC coverage, and Miley's story reached people far beyond his own community.
The numbers grew.
The attention grew.
But the purpose remained remarkably simple:
Take something unwanted and use it to help somebody who needs it.
Miley's own philosophy became closely connected with giving.
He has expressed the idea that he learned to give not because he had lots, but because he knew what it was like to have nothing.
That became one of the central ideas behind Iron Man.
You didn't need to be rich to help somebody.
You didn't need a huge organisation.
You could start with something as small as a crisp packet.
And one person could inspire another.
Chapter Seven
The People Behind the Mission
As Iron Man grew, Miley began helping people in ways that went beyond survival blankets.
His home became a place where people experiencing homelessness could find somewhere to stay.
He tried to give people the opportunity that he himself had desperately needed at different points in his life.
It wasn't always easy.
People moved into his home.
Neighbours became involved.
Arguments and drama followed.
Eventually, the situation became so difficult that Miley lost the home.
But something beautiful came out of that period too.
While living there, Miley helped bring people together.
He remembers helping Aaron Arron Millington and Bray Brayonie Millington , who became two of his closest friends.
Their relationship developed in his home, and together they eventually created a family with three daughters: Ashlyne, Aria and Arabella.
For Miley, that became something to be proud of.
Even when his own life was falling apart, he had helped create something that lasted.
Three children.
A family.
A friendship.
A reminder that not everything born from chaos has to end in destruction.
Chapter Eight
Losing Everything
Then came another devastating loss.
Miley lost his home.
Not just the building.
Everything inside it.
His possessions.
His bed.
His belongings.
Even his pets, including his turtles and cats.
He describes it as losing everything.
Once again, Miley was starting from almost nothing.
And once again, somebody stepped in.
A man named Tom Russett helped him.
Miley remembers Tom as somebody who saved him during one of the darkest periods of his life.
It became something Miley never forgot.
He has always felt that he owes Tom for what he did.
Because when you've experienced having nothing, you remember the people who gave you something when they didn't have to.
Chapter Nine
A Daughter
Somewhere along the journey came one of the most important relationships of Miley's life:
His daughter.
Miley speaks about his daughter with enormous love.
But loving somebody does not always mean being able to remain close to them.
Miley lost that connection.
And losing his daughter became one of the deepest forms of grief he has experienced.
It is a different kind of loss.
A person can lose a house and rebuild it.
A person can lose possessions and replace them.
A person can lose money and earn it again.
But losing time with your child leaves a different kind of emptiness.
For Miley, his daughter became part of the story of everything he was fighting to rebuild.
Chapter Ten
Chloe
Then Miley met Chloe.
Their relationship became one of the most significant chapters of his adult life.
There was love.
There was the hope of building a family.
There was a pregnancy.
And eventually, a daughter was born.
For Miley, becoming a father was something enormous.
After everything that had happened during his own childhood, the idea of creating a family of his own carried enormous emotional weight.
But the relationship eventually ended.
And once again, Miley found himself dealing with a level of loss that was almost impossible to put into words.
The relationship broke down.
His access to his daughter became painfully complicated.
And alongside the heartbreak came another period of homelessness and instability.
The pattern seemed to be repeating itself.
Lose everything.
Start again.
Lose everything.
Start again.
Chapter Eleven
Clear Horizons
But Miley wasn't only surviving.
For the past couple of years, he had also been building something of his own.
Clear Horizons Oven & Cleaning Services.
What started as work became a business.
Miley cleaning ovens, homes and properties, working with Lisa and building a reputation through practical, hands-on work.
It was another example of something that runs through his entire life:
If there isn't a door open, build one.
Clear Horizons became another piece of Miley's independence.
It gave him work.
It gave him purpose.
And it gave him something he could point to and say:
I built that.
Chapter Twelve
Nine Months
Then came one of the hardest periods of Miley's life.
Over roughly nine months, he describes losing everything.
His home.
His stability.
His relationship.
His connection with his daughter.
His belongings.
His sense of security.
There were periods of homelessness.
There were periods of serious emotional struggle.
There were moments when it would have been very easy to give up.
But Miley didn't.
He rebuilt.
Slowly.
Sometimes with help from friends.
Sometimes through work.
Sometimes simply by getting through one day and reaching the next.
The person who had once turned discarded crisp packets into survival blankets was now doing something similar with his own life.
Taking the pieces.
Working with what remained.
And trying to build something from them.
Chapter Thirteen
The Iron Man Inside
Perhaps that is what Iron Man really became.
Not just a project.
Not just a blanket.
Not just a collection of crisp packets.
A philosophy.
Miley had spent much of his life being told, directly or indirectly, that he needed to prove his worth.
But Iron Man gave him a different answer.
You don't prove your worth by being perfect.
You prove it by what you do with what you've been given.
Miley had been given hardship.
He turned some of it into compassion.
He had known homelessness.
He tried to give other homeless people shelter.
He had known what it was like to have nothing.
He learned to give.
He had lost homes.
He learned how to rebuild.
He had experienced rejection.
He continued searching for connection.
And he had been knocked down more times than most people could imagine.
Yet he kept standing up.
Chapter Fourteen
The Story Isn't Finished
Today, the Iron Man idea is still part of Miley's life.
So is Clear Horizons.
So is music.
So is the ambition to create something meaningful.
The story isn't neatly finished.
There is no perfect ending yet.
Because this isn't a story about somebody who struggled once, overcame everything and lived happily ever after.
It's a story about somebody who keeps rebuilding.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Miley Porritt's life has contained prison, homelessness, family breakdown, abuse, heartbreak and profound loss.
But it has also contained friendship, fatherhood, creativity, entrepreneurship, compassion and the determination to help people who are going through the same kind of darkness he once knew himself.
The Iron Man began with discarded crisp packets.
But perhaps the deeper story was never really about the packets.
It was about seeing value where other people saw rubbish.
And maybe that is the simplest way to understand Miley's story.
Because after everything life had thrown away...
Miley Porritt refused to throw himself away.
The story continues.
