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

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Yates writes with clarity, warmth and passion and leaves the reader wanting to march on Whitehall immediately' Prospective housemates asked me if I liked Coldplay or Pedro Almodóvar films to decipher if I was a worthy candidate’ … Kieran Yates. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Jude and a roommate at Wadham College, Oxford, where a return visit yielded only blank walls. Photograph: Jude Rogers

I also realised that I have created my own versions of family networks around my different homes. It’s a version of that old adage that once you live north of the river in London, you can’t go south – I moved further out of the city because my friends were moving that way, to locations not on the doorsteps of tube stations, but on the edges of obscure train lines. We made new communities there. Buying somewhere affordable, as I wanted to do, also required us to move further out. Our first house had been on the market, unloved, for two years. It had no garden, broken iron blinds, dodgy electrics and damp in the walls, which we fixed. Six years later, we had six offers for it that were away above asking price and sold it for more than two-and-half times the price we had paid for it. 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 ” But home can be a complicated place. When Yates’ mother was effectively disowned by her family aged 19 after filing for divorce, she and Yates began their peripatetic journey to building a future that didn’t yet exist, away from Southall and into uncertainty.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. 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”. 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.

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. Weve all had our share of dodgy landlords, mould and awkward house shares. But journalist Kieran Yates has had more than most: by the age of twenty-five shed lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales. What successive governments have done over the last 50 years is make it their business for us to see ourselves as separate interest groups. Middle class homeowners and working class people, usually in social housing, see themselves as separate interest groups, for example. But homeowners need to see themselves as part of this crisis. It is their responsibility to advocate for better housing for everybody, to say, ‘I’m going to join a tenants’ union, I want to advocate for long-term, private rented accommodation for everybody to be affordable and to be good quality, I want to advocate for a rent cap’. And to say that ‘now I have gained a semblance of stability, I want that for everybody’. It’s not about, you know, inhabiting your castles and raising the drawbridge. It’s about saying ‘okay, I’ve got some of this, how do I make that accessible to everybody?’. Jude, aged around 18 months, in the garden of her first home in Swansea. Now the garden has been sold and a new house built on it. Photograph: Jude Rogers

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Not only does this highlight the urgency regarding the current housing market and what is needed in terms of the right of safe and secure housing - this book is also emotional, moving and incredibly important. It's when Yates contrasts estate agents’ gaudily photoshopped property pictures with social housing candidates having to bid based on photo-free ads, then accept sight unseen or be deemed actively homeless, that a woman in the crowd speaks out. “There’s no picture because it doesn’t matter,” she begins, in a rhythmic mantra of rising fury. “It doesn't matter if only one tap works. It doesn't matter if the bath and sink don’t match.” Council estates, she notes, have gone from normal homes for working people to emergency accommodation for society’s desperate. Mould comes as standard. “It doesn’t matter,” she spits. “This is a rich city, but a city of two halves.” This book tour stop at the private Brighton Girls School has suddenly become the sort of town-hall meeting actual, impoverished town halls now dodge, a Brighton Festivalgoers' forum on the state of their town.

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. All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived is a beautiful and fascinating memoir of what ‘home’ really means and a commentary of the current workings (and failings) of the housing system in Britain. From nostalgic tales of living in immigrant households which offer shelter in a hostile environment, to recalling her teenage years living in a car showroom in Wales, to the colonial history of our houseplants, Yates takes the reader on a journey into our homes in all their forms. In the book you touch upon how housing ownership has become an unattainable dream for most. Do you think we should put effort towards making it a possible reality, or invest in alternative modes of housing and living? Marginalised groups such as working-class immigrants, transgender people and single mothers must deal with discrimination. And landlords can outsource the labour of finding new tenants to existing tenants, in a process known as “churning”. I had to endure months of housemate auditions. Sometimes there were group interviews like a Lord of the Flies-style social experiment

Featured Reviews

While All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In is in many ways a nostalgic look at Yates’s past, it presents a vision for how things should be, for everyone living in Britain.

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.

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. Never could this book be more relevant than right now in 2023. Home should be that safe haven away from the madness of the world, a place that provides all our creature comforts, something that we’re not afraid of losing. 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. Nostalgia is simplistic and selective when we try to locate the past, so it’s no surprise that my memories also evaporated, strangely, when I walked through that front door.

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