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

Product Information

That voice from the floor reminds us all where we’re living. Brighton and Hove differs only in degree in a nation where, as Grenfell made obscenely clear, property policy can be criminally callous.

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 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.Millennials are half as likely to own a home at the age of 30 as baby boomers were, thanks to higher prices and low earnings growth. In the 1980s, it would have taken a typical couple in their late 20s about three years to save for an average-sized deposit. Today, it would take 19. Renters are getting older, too, with a 239% increase in 55- to 64-year-olds looking for house shares between 2011 and 2022. 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. The idea of a “home” as we know it – as a place of settlement and sanctuary – is tied to the ancient basics of who we are, says Michael Allen Fox, author of the recently published Oxford University Press philosophy primer, Home: A Very Short Introduction. “Much of the activity that is of particular significance to various cultures occurs in what might be described as buildings of one kind or another: eating, sleeping, sexual activity, rituals, births and deaths, work and so on,” he observes. “Humans, like other animals, leave marks of use on their nesting places, which give these places identity and meaning. For humans, this also creates environments of attachment to which they have reasons to return.” 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 our imaginations, our house sale also offered us a new kind of life. It let us move to a part of the world we’d always loved and allowed my husband the chance to give up a demanding job. Our neighbours aren’t night-time tube workers whom we never properly met, but a farmer in his 80s, half a mile away, and an orchard occasionally occupied by sheep.

Part memoir, part manifesto, All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In delves into the difficult realities of navigating a dysfunctional housing system. Drawing on her experiences of living in 20 different houses by the age of 25, journalist Kieran Yates reveals how her personal journey taught her about the wider housing crisis that the UK is facing.And when I lived in a mouldy room, I thought that was completely normal to be demonised and to be told that you should just open a window. As a serial renter, I had to endure months of housemate auditions, sitting in strangers’ kitchens and expected to perform an optimised version of myself. Sometimes there were group interviews, all of us shuffling in together like a Lord of the Flies-style social experiment, where the most brazen among us made loud jokes. Some candidates had the genius sales gene and discussed things that were mainstream enough to elicit positive reaction: usually The Wire. You’ve lived in a number of homes and places across the country, spending some of your childhood living above a car showroom in Wales. Do you feel the current conversations around the housing crisis focus too much on London? 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.

A powerful, personal and intricate tour of our housing system ... exposing who it works for and who it doesn't' -- Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP 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.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. 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. 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. 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. 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.”

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. 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. Two weeks after my visit, less than two miles away from this flat, Grenfell Tower was destroyed, catastrophically, and 168 households were left homeless. The idea of a building I’d once lived in being so close to the disaster but being left empty felt reprehensible. We've 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 she'd lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales. 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.Maybe, maybe not. But Yates has me well beaten. By the age of 25, she’d lived in 20 different houses across the country. There’s the childhood flat in a car showroom that had floor-to-ceiling windows. Then there are housemate auditions in her 20s that enable tenants to discriminate on the basis of race, class, sexuality – reproducing some of the systemic disparities of our society. 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. I loved hearing about Yates' life, I especially loved hearing about her mum. Although, I know this was not the point of this book, I would have loved to hear more about her mum and the relationship they created. We definitely got a feel for their relationship but I would've liked to know how creating a home differs when you are a mother, the pressure to create a home for others even when you do not want too. Maybe a potential idea for a sequel? In prose that sparkles with humour and warmth, Yates charts the heartbreaks and joys of a life spent navigating the chaos of the housing system. And in that time, between a series of evictions, mouldy flats and bizarre house-share interviews, the reality of Britain’s housing crisis grew more and more difficult to ignore.