Author: Flemming Falz

The UK is in the midst of a housing crisis that is causing hardship for millions of Britons. Over the past few years, the worsening situation has been reflected in the market for non-fiction books. In a small bookshop in north London, I counted more than half a dozen new titles dealing with the housing crisis —and a more systematic search brings the number up to at least fifteen published in the last five years. How do these books explain the crisis? In what follows, I would like to take a close look from a historian’s point of view. To what extent are these accounts informed by the contemporary history of housing and housing policy? I am not attempting a comprehensive collective review, but I would like to consider the following non-fiction books: Nick Gallent’s Whose Housing Crisis? and Liam Halligan’s Home Truths (both 2019), Bob Colenutt’s book on The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis (2020), the award-winning Tenants by Vicky Spratt (2022), A Home of One’s Own by Hashi Mohamed (2022), and All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In by Kieran Yates (2023). This selection takes in books from very different backgrounds, including those by journalists and social scientists, but also by activists and people affected by the situation, whose books resemble memoirs. This not only reveals the breadth of the debate and its broad political horizon. Since none of the books eschews a historical perspective, the selection also makes visible a widespread understanding of the neoliberal history of recent decades and its strengths and weaknesses in explaining the present.