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

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There should be no “acquiring castles and raising the drawbridge”, she says. “As a homeowner, it’s important that I use that privilege to go and advocate for people in temporary accommodation, to go and advocate for a landlord register to help private renters who are dealing with disrepair claims that do not get seen.” The housing crisis we find ourselves in hollows out many communities like the Green Man Lane estate. After we left the estate, those early lessons in negligence and housing precarity followed me. I would have to memorise a postcode many, many more times in my life. Yates is a tenacious reporter and covers a great deal of ground, from the politics of interior design and soul-crushing “housemate interviews” to the discriminatory practices of landlords up and down the country. One of the strongest sections hinges on the still unfurling tragedy of Grenfell. A powerful, personal and intricate tour of our housing system ... exposing who it works for and who it doesn't' -- Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP

By the age of twenty-five journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales. Rent strikes are controversial but guess what, people win,” she says. “And bailiff resistance is controversial, but guess what, people win. And confronting an estate agent or a racist landlord is very precarious work, but guess what, people win.” At its core, this is a book about home and “the stories”, she writes, “that make us who we are”. Yates comes from a “family of dreamers”. Her grandparents were 60s arrivals from a tiny village in Punjab, who found themselves in Southall, west London. Their deceptively anonymous terrace house was the family lodestar: a self-contained and brilliantly decorated private universe of safety and rootedness. It’s here Yates relates the story of Amanda Fernandez, who was placed in a double room in a west London Holiday Inn Express for a year with her elderly mother, following the destruction of their home on 14 June, 2017. We’re presented with a snapshot of life lived in apparently never-ending limbo, without a washing machine or functioning window. Prospective housemates asked me whether I liked Coldplay or Pedro Almodóvar films to decipher whether I was a worthy candidate. At one viewing at a housing co-op, I was told that everyone did one big shop on a Sunday, group dinners were mandatory, and there had to be a liberal approach to drug use – gesturing to the fluorescent green bong in the living room and (numerous) copies of Mr Nice on the shelf. Sure enough, after I looked at the (admittedly spacious) room, I was asked one last, hopeful question: “So, do you take acid?”

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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. 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. As a result, I’d expected cooler-than-thou tenants to be occupying our old rooms and, indeed, they were two interesting musicians, living with their three-year-old son. Six months earlier, however, they’d all been made homeless, only relocated here after a spell 10 miles further away, in Ilford, far away from their family and friends. Six years later we sold our first house for more than two-and-half times what we paid There’s no way that you can talk about gentrification in our cities [...] without talking about rural gentrification too, and thinking about the impact of second homes or Airbnbs on smaller local economies ”

Our old garden had been sold, too, and another house built on the land. Kids didn’t play on the roundabout any more, either, the owner told me; she had a six-year-old daughter and she wouldn’t let her outside with all the speeding cars. Neither did people pop in and out of each other’s houses and we speculated about why this was. She suggested that they keep themselves to themselves because of needing to rest after long hours at work. I also thought about the easy comforts of TVs and technology that turn our homes into coops in which we hide away from the world. We were also moving from the busy clamour of London, where I’d lived for the previous 17 years, to the rolling greens and yellows of the Welsh countryside. We were part of the exodus of 93,300 people leaving the city last year to seek cheaper housing, as a report by estate agent Savills revealed last week. This was an 80% rise on net outward migration from 2012; London rents had also soared by a third over the past decade. A moving and urgent expose of the housing crisis' -- Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project Perhaps it’s my own familiarity with some of the homes she finds herself in, but her personal stories are told so intimately, with the data peppered in so well that it feels completely natural.

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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!

All the Houses I've Ever Lived In" is my favourite form of non-fiction, part memoir, part investigative journalism, Yates takes us through all the houses she has ever lived in. Recounting the memories she has had in these homes, relationships she has created and the struggles she has faced in finding a permanent home in the UK. Yates' homes act as a starting point for her to investigate the problems in the UK housing market, which at the moment, is basically everything. She discusses social housing, Grenfell, landlords, mould and the effects on our health - so much is covered but it never felt like too much. Sometimes, I do think the memoir and the investigative journalism could have been better blended for example, Yates speaks about doors which moves onto 'creating the perfect secure door' which somehow segues into surveillance and for me, it was difficult to connect all these things together. However, when it worked, it worked and the majority of the time it really did. When I was in my 20s going through housemate auditions and learning close up how the internet plays such a role in the optimised idea of what a housemate is, I felt that was completely normal,” she explains. Feeling unemotional while walking round the house felt odd, given how much emotion I’d felt in the past when thinking about the possibility of this experience. I was only jolted when tiny, creaky details of the house leapt out at me – a 70s door handle on a wardrobe, a patch of dated tiling in a bathroom. The idea that these inconsequential objects were here when I was here felt like I was pressing pause on my life, doing something remarkable, something that shouldn’t really be done. In each chapter, Yates skilfully combines memoir, case studies and histories of design with harrowing facts and figuresYates deftly switches between unsentimental fondness about their rapidly multiplying temporary domestic set-ups (their first home on West Ealing’s Green Man Lane Estate is evoked with particular finesse and boldness) and clear-sighted rage at the degradation of a “safety net of social housing [that] is being frayed to nothing”. Warm and funny. A powerful call to action against bad landlords, gentrification and class inequality in Britain' -- Symeon Brown, author of 'Get Rich or Lie Trying'