After three decades of pebbledash, mould and evictions, a serial renter wonders what really makes a home and how we can dig ourselves out of the housing crisis
My earliest memories of home are of saying goodbye. They are of moving at someone else’s request, picking up, packing up and driving away. Sometimes it was because of “regeneration” projects, demolitions or old-fashioned evictions. When I got older, the precarity of early childhood moves stayed with me, as I found home between the cracks of the housing crisis.
I have lived in a lot of different places – more than 25 by the time I was 30. I’ve lived over a car showroom, in student halls and cramped rooms with my family in other people’s houses. I’ve made my home on floors, in temporary accommodation, in a cottage in the countryside and above a Snappy Snaps shop.
