How Britain’s housing was broken

“My head’s a shed,” says sixtysomething Hazell Field – meaning, as her daughter Jessica explains, that she is “burnt and bitter”, overwhelmed, her capacity diminished to “deal with anything these days”. This is not just because she and her community have been forced to leave their homes: “Mum’s been evicted before, and managed.” Hazell was a leading figure in a five-year almost-successful campaign against the faceless company who wanted to push them out, before succumbing to what Jessica, a historian and award-winning writer, calls the “seeming inevitability of everyone losing their homes anyway”.

There is, as may you have heard or felt, a housing crisis, one that does not go away or diminish simply through its sheer longevity. It has, as two valuable new books make clear, many aspects, locations and victims. Jessica Field’s Eviction describes the disruption that comes from Britain’s landlord-friendly tenancy laws, told through the prism of the battles fought by her mother and her neighbours to stay in their old coal mining estate in Oulton, on the edge of Leeds. The other is Homesick, by the housing journalist Peter Apps, whose previous book, Show Me the Bodies, laid out the devastating story of the Grenfell Tower disaster. This one describes, through a mixture of personal stories and historical narrative of the last four decades, “how housing broke London”.

As their downbeat titles suggest, both are big on the human cost of the housing crisis and its seeming intractability and vastness. Yet it would be a counsel of despair to believe that nothing can be done – the current situation is too important and destructive in its effects to ignore. Inaction would also overlook the evidence that past efforts to improve housing have, however imperfectly, worked. How to Fix It is the promise Apps makes on his front cover. “Just as London lost its soul within one generation,” he says, “so it can be reclaimed within the next.”

Field’s story is of a huge but largely forgotten part of British housing history, the half a million people who lived in the 160,000 homes owned by the National Coal Board (NCB), once the biggest landlord in the country. Their purpose was to house the miners, without whom the industry could not exist, and their families. Some, built by private companies before nationalisation in 1947, ranged from decent to atrocious. Those built afterwards were similar to council houses – with comparable specifications, their rents pegged to the same levels, subject to the same political aspirations to create decent homes for all (a “housewives’ paradise” was one promise) and similar exigencies of budget and resources.

Many were built in the postwar boom of construction of workers’ housing in which shortages of materials and labour, combined with optimism about the effectiveness of modern industry – which had, after all, helped to win the war – led to experiments with building prefabricated homes, much like cars, in factories. The windows would come, went a joke, with windscreen wipers. Those on Oulton were built by the Leeds-based company William Airey & Son, using a system of concrete panels that they would roll out on thousands of units across the country. The Oulton estate, thanks to the flat, brownish appearance of its Airey houses, was nicknamed “Cardboard City”.

There were, though, crucial differences between the miners’ homes and council houses. For the NCB, the function of the properties was to accommodate their labour force, which meant that tenants could be evicted or face rent hikes when they stopped working. When the productivity and profitability of the coal board’s mines declined in the 1970s, they decided to sell off the homes they owned. Meanwhile, prefabricated structures like the Airey houses, even though they cost more to build than those traditionally constructed, proved prone to defects, made worse by poor maintenance, cold, damp, rot, the rusting of steel reinforcement, the cracking and spalling of concrete.

Although tenants were initially able to buy them, the condition of the homes soon made them unmortgageable. After 1986, the coal board stopped selling to residents, instead auctioning whole estates to private speculative companies, who proceeded to hike rents and – through what Field calls “organised negligence” – drive tenants out, so that their homes could be demolished and new ones built and sold for profit. Years later, in 2017, the eventual owners of what was left of the Oulton estate demanded that the rest of the tenants leave, which provoked Hazell Field and her neighbours to launch their long and, in the end, largely fruitless campaign. The clinching legal argument against them was, cruelly, that the condition of the estate meant that their removal and its demolition was the only option.

Around the tale of Cardboard City, Field weaves a larger history of renting, from the 19th century to the present. She tells of the exploitation of desperate tenants in the overcrowded slums of Victorian cities, of the tendency of seemingly well-meaning authorities to displace the most vulnerable “for your own good”. She describes outbreaks of resistance, such as the 1915 rent strikes led by the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association and the remedial or mollifying actions of governments terrified of social unrest: rent control; the building of social housing. Notably, though, Field is almost as scathing about the failures of public bodies as she is about extractive private companies.

By the middle of the last century, there was an idea that private landlords might fade away altogether, unable to compete with the affordability and security of social housing, until they were brought back by Margaret Thatcher’s policies – selling council homes, reducing investment in social housing, no-fault evictions. It was through the latter that the residents of Cardboard City were pushed out, and Field is eloquent on the damage that unprotected tenure does to families, communities and networks of support. “The insecurely housed,” she also says, “die younger than they should.”

Apps covers related themes by concentrating on London since 1980. Back then, he says, “with hard work and thrift young couples could work on building sites, behind post office counters, in hospitals or as secretaries, in creative industries, and find their space in the city to settle and raise a family.” They can’t now. For Apps, this change was willed through policies enacted under Thatcher and her successors that made it easier to borrow and more expensive to rent – turning London homes into “assets of incredible value”, no longer “simply places to live”. He illustrates the impact of such policies with tales of lives lived in council-owned squalor in the shadow of the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf, of those old enough and lucky enough to get on the escalator early, of creative drifters who never contemplated ownership, of priced-out Londoners getting a hostile reception when they move to Bristol.

What, then, to do? Both writers disclaim to know all the answers, and are rightly sceptical of the current government’s belief that the loosening of planning restrictions will allow the magic of the free market to solve the problem. But Field calls for a world in which renters get “the chance to make homes marked by genuine affordability, stability and social connection”. Apps refuses to accept “that no better alternative exists”. Instead, he proposes solutions drawn both from the pre-Thatcherite past and contemporary ideas already in place in Barcelona, Paris and Louisville, Kentucky.

Apps approves of rent control and a more secure tenure, and offers evidence that it would not (as is commonly believed) destroy the incentives for landlords to let properties. He admires French policies that have seen social housing units built at a rate of 100,000 a year. He finds inspiration in the British postwar new towns programme, while making the important point that such initiatives take years and decades to make a significant difference. Perhaps his most promising suggestion is a return to the pre-Thatcher policies whereby local authorities could buy existing homes on the open market, or from developers struggling to make their projects work, or from failing landlords. This removes the need to wait years to house people while new homes are being built.

Apps acknowledges the scale of the task, but points out that reform has succeeded in the past, often in unpromising circumstances. In 1915, a rent strike organised in protest at landlords raising rates led to new rent control legislation. If the women of Glasgow could, in the middle of a world war, effect a change in government policy, almost anything is possible.

Eviction: A Social History of Rent by Jessica Field (Verso, £20) and Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It by Peter Apps (Oneworld, £20) are available at a discounted rate from The Observer Shop. Delivery charges may apply

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Photograph depicts examples of the prefabricated Airey homes that were erected across the country in the postwar period. Courtesy of Corbis/Getty Images