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

Product Information

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. 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.

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.

Join our email club...

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.

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?’. 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. 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.' Yates writes with clarity, warmth and passion and leaves the reader wanting to march on Whitehall immediately' 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.

Complete this captcha to connect to Foyles

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. 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. 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.

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 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’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 ” Warm and funny. A powerful call to action against bad landlords, gentrification and class inequality in Britain' -- Symeon Brown, author of 'Get Rich or Lie Trying'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.