A cautionary tale of rent, precarity, and poor-quality housing that upturns the triumphal narrative of the welfare state, from award-winning historian
In 2017, Jessica Field's parents and 69 of their neighbours received warning of imminent eviction. Their corporate landlord sought to demolish their affordable private rented homes and replace them with middle-class houses for sale. Together, the women of the estate set up an anti-eviction campaign to save their tenant community.
The neighbourhood was the last surviving part of a National Coal Board estate, originally built in the 1950s to house local mineworkers. It was dubbed 'Cardboard City' because of its poor quality, prefabricated construction; houses were put up by unskilled workers in less than two weeks apiece. They were costly to build, costly to maintain and, by the 1980s, rendered defective. When the pits closed and the Coal Board needed to get rid of its housing stock, whole estates were then auctioned off to speculators – heralding the financialisation of social housing and putting low-income tenants at the mercy of global investors. Renters were swindled every step of the way. But time and again tenant activists – especially women – have fought back.
In telling the history of Cardboard City and the wider history of housebuilding-for-rent, Eviction offers an alternative history of social housing as well as a celebration of women-led tenant activism fighting against profiteering landlords. Jessica Field has a modern history PhD and is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester. Following her parent's eviction notice in 2017 and the community formation of #SaveOurHomesLS26, she ran the saveourhomesLS26.org campaign website and wrote for The Guardian and Red Pepper. In 2022, she won the Dawn Foster Memorial Essay Prize. This is her first book.
