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

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In each chapter, Yates skilfully combines memoir, case studies and histories of design with harrowing facts and figures 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. 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. All the Houses I've Ever Lived In is probably one of the best books to describe how perfectly the UK is failing many people and the many ways in which the housing system is designed to work against you and not for you. Kieran takes us through the different houses she has lived through in her life and how in turn each government/system has repeatedly failed her. This is a really good memoir not only does Keiran take us through her life and struggles with the housing system but she educates the reader on how it all works. From explaining laws to dealing with bailiffs and landlords and how to make home anywhere. She also highlights housing in regards to class, inequality and gentrification, racism and major negligence and explores Grenfell. This book is amazingly written and resonated with me deeply everyone should read this book.

I feel like I talk about wanting balance in these information based memoirs, of which I be read a few in the past few years. A number I’ve read feel like two separate books - one that is memoir and another that is a text book. All this to say that Yates strikes the balance perfectly here. 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. 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. 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. Yates deftly switches between unsentimental fondness about their rapidly multiplying temporary domestic set-ups (their first home on West Ealing’s Green Man Lane Estate is evoked with particular finesse and boldness) and clear-sighted rage at the degradation of a “safety net of social housing [that] is being frayed to nothing”.

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One of the most fervent topics of today is the state of housing. You can’t spend a day online without encountering one of the following: an image of a bathroom with a bed in it described as an “apartment”; a video of rats, mould or asbestos invading a property; the success story of a first-time buyer who benefited from the bank of mum and dad. With the discourse around home ownership, exploitative landlords and gentrification getting louder and louder, Kieran Yates’s All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In has arrived at precisely the right time. As the title suggests, the 36-year-old journalist and broadcaster, who covers culture, technology and politics for the likes of the BBC, the Guardian and Vice, chronicles all of the homes she’s occupied and how she came to leave them – whether because of dodgy landlords or regeneration. It’s part coming-of-age story, part reportage – or a “rally cry for change”, in the author’s words – and Yates includes interviews with tenants alongside intimate personal essays about her life, family and living conditions. The bunting marks Charles and Diana’s wedding as Jude, right, plays outside her first home. Photograph: Jude Rogers

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. 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. 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. 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 experimentIt'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. 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 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.

An investigation in the housing crisis in the U.K. through the author’s own experiences moving and living in more than 30 properties over the U.K.. A mix of memoir and facts. The book is about the communities that she’s part of, as a child of working class immigrants. The act of moving - deciding which items she has to bring along or leave behind. Each items holds a special memory. The golden tissue box in every south East Asian households allow her to trace the history (the Mughal Empire, the colonialism links) and the cultural significance in different homes. Some frightening facts are pointed out: UK house prices rose by 197% between 2000 and 2020; the rent in London rose by about 70% in the past few years. Londoners on average spend two thirds of their income on rent. The creatives can contribute to the gentrification process: 'making the place more "cool" to upper-middle-class investors while also pricing out long-term locals, and then, inevitably, ending up being priced out themselves.' 'Good taste' is dominated by the upper class - saturated with ideas of class and power. 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.A beautiful exposition of home and what it means. Yates infuses such gentle care and humanity into the exploration of race, the failings of society and government ... Stunning' -- Bolu Babalola, author of 'Love in Colour' 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”. 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. 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.

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. 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. A moving and urgent expose of the housing crisis' -- Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project 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.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. 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.