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

Creative Access book club at Simon & Schuster office! The author Kieran Yates joined us for an interview and Q&A before our wider book club discussion! Still I was 21 and could just afford to rent in the heart of zone 1. Some context: 15 years later, with 10 years’ experience and earnings as a broadsheet journalist behind me – and with a husband who earned more than me – a house with a garden and a spare bedroom on the edges of zone 3 was out of our league. London in the 21st century made homes more distant fantasies, which maybe helped mythologise them more. 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 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. A powerful, personal and intricate tour of our housing system ... exposing who it works for and who it doesn't' -- Bell Ribeiro-Addy MPBy 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. 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.

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. 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. When I was in my 20s going through housemate auditions and learning close up how the internet plays such a role in the optimised idea of what a housemate is, I felt that was completely normal,” she explains. 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. 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.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. All the Houses I've Ever Lived In is at once a rallying cry for change, a gorgeous coming-of-age story and a love letter to home in all its forms. 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?’. 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. 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.