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

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I explored the archives a lot looking at these stories, but this is always happening: when I was writing about bailiff resistance, I read about what is happening now with Migrants Organise and groups who are resisting bailiffs and resisting the Home Office. So at every corner of the crisis that I talk about, there is some kind of resistance, and this has been a persistent historical undercurrent. What I learned is that policy is not the place to solve our problems, and actually, it’s those community networks and grassroots resistances which are going to save us. 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 something I haven’t experienced, as a white person, is how “racism is embedded in the industrial housing complex”. In her book, Yates covers the ground from the violent racism in majority white estates to her experience of living in a house share as the only person of colour and the microaggressions that can bring. 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?”

A powerful, personal and intricate tour of our housing system ... exposing who it works for and who it doesn't' -- Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP 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. 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. But our new house works, so far, essentially, because other home networks, and comforts, are here. My mum lives a lot closer. The rural wifi can cope with streaming Netflix. My old friends surround me all the time on social media (and I genuinely don’t think I could have done this without that). There are also lots of young families in our area, so my son has people to play with. We live near a castle, which I hope will become his own “roundabout”.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. 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. 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. 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.

And the sad reality is that experiences like hers (and mine and quite probably yours) are becoming increasingly normalised. This is because “we don’t have good long-term solutions to think about how we live today,” says Yates. 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. It’s important not to be blind to the “community and looking after each other that we have had to do because the government has not done it for us”, she explains. This could have been just another piece of investigative journalism, citing the many ways in which the housing system here in the UK fails, but in fact Kieran Yates gives us a fascinating insight into her own personal experience of the system that let her, and her family down on numerous occasions. Yates not only explores social housing, the rental market, gentrification and class inequality - but also the little overlooked parts of home; garden, pillows, wallpapers, the feeling of somewhere that is truly yours.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. 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. 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! Yates writes with clarity, warmth and passion and leaves the reader wanting to march on Whitehall immediately'