276°
Posted 20 hours ago

All The Houses I've Ever Lived In: Finding Home in a System that Fails Us

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

By knitting together her own personal experiences with those of others, Yates paints a picture of how Britain’s housing crisis is creating lives that are shunted from house to house, and the psychological ruptures and disruptions that relentless moving gives us. It is hard to extract tender memories from my estate, which faced so many years of neglect, and as I write is boarded up, sealed and prepped for demolition. The Green Man Lane estate was built in 1977 and was one of many postwar social housing experiments, representing a time when there was a push for increased social housing in Britain.

I feel like I talk about wanting balance in these information based memoirs, of which I be read a few in the past few years. A number I’ve read feel like two separate books - one that is memoir and another that is a text book. All this to say that Yates strikes the balance perfectly here.But we should also look for answers beyond government to how we dig ourselves out of this quagmire. The state might provide social housing, but it does not grant freedom from inequality. Policy may be a starting point for change, but it is a place rather than the place to focus our attention. We could focus on community solutions, such as joining tenants’ unions or simply teaching young people about housing admin. We should invite radical housing design solutions, through collectives such as Decolonise Architecture, the DisOrdinary Architecture Project, and initiatives ensuring our homes can commit to green targets as we face down the climate emergency.

Creative Access book club at Simon & Schuster office! The author Kieran Yates joined us for an interview and Q&A before our wider book club discussion! Still I was 21 and could just afford to rent in the heart of zone 1. Some context: 15 years later, with 10 years’ experience and earnings as a broadsheet journalist behind me – and with a husband who earned more than me – a house with a garden and a spare bedroom on the edges of zone 3 was out of our league. London in the 21st century made homes more distant fantasies, which maybe helped mythologise them more.When I was 15, my family moved to a flat above a car showroom in Wales named after an invisible owner: WR Davies. The flat was framed by huge, wall-sized windows that let in oceans of light and made us – a brown family in a small Welsh town (population: 5,948) – even more exposed. We lived on the top floor, with the active showroom downstairs, and our flat had a large living room, a small bathroom and a concrete stairwell leading up to the kitchen. It felt like an extension built for use by workers that the landlord had hastily made into a flat, and we shared it with exposed wires and copper pipes. Now and again, the smell of Turtle Wax and CarPlan Triplewax car shampoo would fill the living room from below. That’s not to say that rehousing people is just about giving them new sets of rooms, walls and utilities. Homes are also about memories and relationships, about fundamental human ties that can, with horrific speed, be lost overnight. They are also about the schools, jobs and amenities that bind us to the communities where we live our daily lives. One of the most fervent topics of today is the state of housing. You can’t spend a day online without encountering one of the following: an image of a bathroom with a bed in it described as an “apartment”; a video of rats, mould or asbestos invading a property; the success story of a first-time buyer who benefited from the bank of mum and dad. With the discourse around home ownership, exploitative landlords and gentrification getting louder and louder, Kieran Yates’s All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In has arrived at precisely the right time. As the title suggests, the 36-year-old journalist and broadcaster, who covers culture, technology and politics for the likes of the BBC, the Guardian and Vice, chronicles all of the homes she’s occupied and how she came to leave them – whether because of dodgy landlords or regeneration. It’s part coming-of-age story, part reportage – or a “rally cry for change”, in the author’s words – and Yates includes interviews with tenants alongside intimate personal essays about her life, family and living conditions. All the Houses I've Ever Lived In is probably one of the best books to describe how perfectly the UK is failing many people and the many ways in which the housing system is designed to work against you and not for you. Kieran takes us through the different houses she has lived through in her life and how in turn each government/system has repeatedly failed her. This is a really good memoir not only does Keiran take us through her life and struggles with the housing system but she educates the reader on how it all works. From explaining laws to dealing with bailiffs and landlords and how to make home anywhere. She also highlights housing in regards to class, inequality and gentrification, racism and major negligence and explores Grenfell. This book is amazingly written and resonated with me deeply everyone should read this book. There is a deep feeling of powerlessness at the heart of being a renter today, at the mercy of a system that often feels like landlords and letting agents hold each and every card. I recently had the experience of having my rent raised by 22 per cent, actually a negotiation down from a proposed 33 per cent hike. This forced me, heartbroken, to begin the search for home number 19, only to give up when faced with the scarcity of house share rooms available, and figure out a way to absorb this huge additional cost.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment