I explored the archives a lot looking at these stories, but this is always happening: when I was writing about bailiff resistance, I read about what is happening now with Migrants Organise and groups who are resisting bailiffs and resisting the Home Office. So at every corner of the crisis that I talk about, there is some kind of resistance, and this has been a persistent historical undercurrent. What I learned is that policy is not the place to solve our problems, and actually, it’s those community networks and grassroots resistances which are going to save us.

By the age of twenty-five journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales. A moving and urgent expose of the housing crisis' -- Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project I loved hearing about Yates' life, I especially loved hearing about her mum. Although, I know this was not the point of this book, I would have loved to hear more about her mum and the relationship they created. We definitely got a feel for their relationship but I would've liked to know how creating a home differs when you are a mother, the pressure to create a home for others even when you do not want too. Maybe a potential idea for a sequel? 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. 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'I came up with the idea for Door Stepping when I was doing something that felt momentous last summer, although people do it all time – moving home. Maybe it felt especially significant as I was leaving the first house I’d ever bought, with my boyfriend, who was now my husband, and we were leaving it with our son, who had arrived when we’d lived there.

By the age of twenty-five journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales. And in that time, between a series of evictions, mouldy flats and bizarre house-share interviews, the reality of Britain's housing crisis grew more and more difficult to ignore. 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. But our new house works, so far, essentially, because other home networks, and comforts, are here. My mum lives a lot closer. The rural wifi can cope with streaming Netflix. My old friends surround me all the time on social media (and I genuinely don’t think I could have done this without that). There are also lots of young families in our area, so my son has people to play with. We live near a castle, which I hope will become his own “roundabout”. 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.It’s important not to be blind to the “community and looking after each other that we have had to do because the government has not done it for us”, she explains. But something I haven’t experienced, as a white person, is how “racism is embedded in the industrial housing complex”. In her book, Yates covers the ground from the violent racism in majority white estates to her experience of living in a house share as the only person of colour and the microaggressions that can bring. 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. And in that time, between a series of evictions, mouldy flats and bizarre house-share interviews, the reality of Britain’s housing crisis grew more and more difficult to ignore. Yates deftly switches between unsentimental fondness about their rapidly multiplying temporary domestic set-ups (their first home on West Ealing’s Green Man Lane Estate is evoked with particular finesse and boldness) and clear-sighted rage at the degradation of a “safety net of social housing [that] is being frayed to nothing”.

There is a deep feeling of powerlessness at the heart of being a renter today, at the mercy of a system that often feels like landlords and letting agents hold each and every card. I recently had the experience of having my rent raised by 22 per cent, actually a negotiation down from a proposed 33 per cent hike. This forced me, heartbroken, to begin the search for home number 19, only to give up when faced with the scarcity of house share rooms available, and figure out a way to absorb this huge additional cost. But home can be a complicated place. When Yates’ mother was effectively disowned by her family aged 19 after filing for divorce, she and Yates began their peripatetic journey to building a future that didn’t yet exist, away from Southall and into uncertainty.You’ve lived in a number of homes and places across the country, spending some of your childhood living above a car showroom in Wales. Do you feel the current conversations around the housing crisis focus too much on London?