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.” 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.

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. 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. 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”. Housing precarity is relentless disruption. But it has led me to new questions about home. I have lived somewhere and nowhere and everywhere. I have lived in places where I might have been turned away thanks to racist policy at other points in history. I have lived in unfit corners, places that taught me how to make, lose and love a bedroom. I have learned that as we advocate for something better, it is comforting to focus on the joys.Initially, the idea to move here was to break free, clear our heads – take all that light and space and silence into our own lives. And in many ways, that has happened, although things aren’t quite as Zen-like as that. Country roads at night in the fog aren’t exactly enchanting. LPG tanks cost a bloody fortune. And sheep can wake you up at 5am as much as police sirens. A moving and urgent expose of the housing crisis' -- Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project 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.

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. Kieran Yates: I think that we should be critical of the dreams that are sold to us. I think we are certainly a generation who’ve grown up wanting to own, but it has been sold to us increasingly – certainly over the last decade – as such a luxury that it makes it harder to advocate for housing for all because we see it as a prize to be won. When you see [home ownership] as something that the individual has worked really hard to achieve, it’s really hard to then be like ‘all of us have a right to this!’. The stories of ownership are either yoked in hard work, or they’re yoked in these exceptional circumstances. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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 ”

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?’.

Doormat Navigation

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. 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.” 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. I came up with the idea for Door Stepping when I was doing something that felt momentous last summer, although people do it all time – moving home. Maybe it felt especially significant as I was leaving the first house I’d ever bought, with my boyfriend, who was now my husband, and we were leaving it with our son, who had arrived when we’d lived there.

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. 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. The intimate stories of childhood and belonging hit deep into my own personal experiences of never truly finding a home, redefining what we know and perceive ‘home’ truly as. 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.

Summary

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 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. This is a book that explores how it feels to move and some of the reasons we feel a sense of nostalgia about our old homes. We inhabit the spaces we are in. They give something to us and we give something to them, too.' By knitting together her own personal experiences with those of others, Yates paints a picture of how Britain’s housing crisis is creating lives that are shunted from house to house, and the psychological ruptures and disruptions that relentless moving gives us.