Eviction : A Social History of Rent

Description

by Field, Jessica | United Kingdom, Great Britain
Published 16/09/2025 by Verso Books in the United Kingdom
Hardback | 288 pages, B/W images throughout

Grounded in personal experience, Eviction uncovers a hidden history of housing injustice and working-class resistance in what has become a perennial battleground for social conflict in modern Britain. In 2017, Jessica Field’s parents and more than a hundred of their neighbours received warning of imminent eviction. Their corporate landlord intended to demolish their affordable, privately rented homes to replace them with middle-class houses for sale.

Led by the women of the estate, tenants launched an anti-eviction campaign to save their close-knit community from destruction. The neighbourhood was the last remnant of a 1950s National Coal Board estate constructed to house local miners. When the coal industry declined in the 1970s, whole estates were auctioned off to speculators.

Low-income tenants were at the mercy of global investors. Houses were left to rot. Rents soared.

Tenants were exploited every step of the way. Yet time and again, tenant activists – especially women – fought back. Eviction is a history of the British housing crisis in microcosm.