Written by daughter of ex-residents of the Oulton Estate, Eviction: A Social History of Rent charts the Save Our Homes LS26 campaign’s fight to preserve their rented homes and tenant community across 2017-2021.
Eviction weaves together personal story, national history, and a rallying call. It celebrates the women leading the Save Our Homes LS26 fight, situates their campaign within the longer history of housing insecurity and tenant activism, and looks at what must change for a tenant-centred future in housing.
Eviction: A Social History of Rent is out now.
Order: Click HERE or visit: www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3336-eviction.
Reviews:
I hope many people in the housing world will read this book and take its lessons to heart. Brilliantly written, and told through the eyes of a resident, it is doubly powerful. This gripping book also highlights the particularly active role of women in housing and community issues.
~ Anne Power, author of Cities For a Small Continent
Rooted in a deeply personal account of the residents’ fight to save one condemned estate, Jessica Field’s fine book charts wider, often women-led, renters’ struggles and provides a powerful critique of the broader iniquities and insecurities of both private and public rental sectors.
~ John Boughton, author of Municipal Dreams
Moving and enlightening. A compelling social history of rental housing in Britain, and a personal story of her family and community’s fight against generations of cynical landlords. It’s a lost history of decades of housing insecurity, made more powerful because it’s told largely through the working class women who fought to make these communities work, and to save them from destruction. Eviction is a book to open your eyes, to make you angry, and to inspire change.
~ John Grindrod, author of Concretopia and Outskirts
Heart-breaking and heart-warming in equal measure, Field’s devastating exposé of what happened to the tenants of former Coal Board housing bursts the myth of the post-war housing golden age. Combining painstaking archival research with working-class lived experience of housing insecurity and landlord exploitation, Eviction is a warning about a future of corporate Rachmanism should private equity investors get hold of social housing. Superbly written in a deeply personal way that manages to connect up one estate with so many different issues facing tenants today.
~ Dr Stuart Hodkinson, author of Safe as Houses
A compelling account of the precarious housing histories of the English working class, weaving together powerful stories of people and place. The eviction of tenants from so-called ‘Cardboard City’ and their efforts to resist remind us that the personal is indeed political. Drawing on firsthand on her own life, family, and activism, Fields presents a fresh perspective on temporary housing within the politics of public investment. Eviction indicates a path forward—emphasising the urgent need for secure, long-term public housing as a means to address the persistent legacies of classed, gendered, and intergenerational inequalities. A must-read.
~ Professor Sarah Marie Hall, author of Everyday Life in Austerity: Family, Friends and Intimate Relations
An excellent and often-hidden perspective on the history of social rent in the UK. Now is the time for politicians to heed the stories of history, learn from this book and create a better housing system that puts tenant well-being at its heart
~ Christa Maciver, Director of Campaigns and Social Change, Justlife
Jessica Field is the daughter of ex-residents Hazell and Mark Field, 8 Wordsworth Drive – and the editor of this website (hello!). Thanks so much for reading this far. My writing began here on saveourhomesLS26.org. Here’s an overview of the book’s key themes:
A personal journey
As you’ll now be familiar with from Our Story: in 2017, my parents, brother and over one hundred neighbours faced imminent eviction from their affordable privately rented community. The community’s landlord – investment company Pemberstone – sought to demolish the post-war estate to build new executive-style houses for the home-ownership market.
Yet, Mum and Dad’s tenant community, the last remnant of a 1950s National Coal Board estate, refused to budge. Two streets – Wordsworth Drive and Sugar Hill Close – soon became the site of a grassroots resistance campaign spearheaded by local women fighting to prevent displacement. I joined them in the fight!
From promise to precarity
We focused on preserving our community in the present, but we also celebrated the working class heritage of the estate dating back to its formation in 1953. My campaign research revealed that our post-war estate, supposedly built with council housing principles, soon fell victim to:
- Developers’ deliberate planned obsolescence
- The coal industry’s decline and disregard for their housing stock
- Aggressive privatisation that predated Thatcher’s Right to Buy council housing sell-off
The result was that countless low-income tenants were left vulnerable to property speculators, neglected housing conditions, and unaffordable rent increases.
Women at the forefront
My narrative places special focus on the crucial role of women in tenant resistance movements, examining their unique tactics and leadership approaches that offer valuable lessons for today’s housing advocates. I share examples from the Glasgow Rent Strikes in 1915, the Abercromby tenant protests in 1969, and the more recent Focus E15 and New Era tenant activists from the 2010s – and many more in between.
As well as examining the challenges these movements faced, I celebrate the victories that women leaders (including my mum Hazell Field, and neighbours Cindy Readman, and Mavis Abbey and many others from #SaveOurHomesLS26) have achieved against the odds.
A cautionary tale
More than just history, I want EVICTION to serve as a warning about the persistent vulnerability of housing security for low-income communities — and to offer insights for anyone concerned about affordable housing and social justice.
#SaveOurHomesLS26 