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

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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.” 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?” As humans, we project who we are through our homes. When this connection becomes hard to locate, our identities drift away from their foundations. In The Making of Home, Flanders writes how “we believe instinctively that ‘home’ is a concrete thing, unchanging through time in its essentials”.

Kieran Yates: London has a large population plus a huge disparity of wealth and access to open space, so I can see how it is easily used as a framework to think about these things. But this is a conversation that is national – even global. I’m somebody who understands that because I’ve lived in lots of different places around the UK outside of the cities. There’s no way that you can talk about gentrification in our cities – whether that’s Manchester or Birmingham or London – without talking about rural gentrification too, and thinking about the impact of second homes or Airbnbs on smaller local economies. 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.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? Being in this flat made me realise, more than ever, that a home is not just about a house but about the networks that surround it. Dan, the young father of this family, was born and brought up in Dalston, his mother living in social housing nearby. Homelessness had happened suddenly to him, his partner and child, and the distance they experienced from support, in all senses, was tough.

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.All the Houses I've Ever Lived In is at once a rallying cry for change and a love letter to home in all its forms.