Eviction

An alternative history of housing in post-war Britain – a cautionary tale of rent, precarity, and working-class resistance

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.

Jessica Field is a historian and writer exploring power, marginality, and resistance across different contexts - from post-war British housing to contemporary forced migration. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester and has lectured at UCL, Brunel University, and O.P. Jindal Global University. In 2022, Jessica won Red Pepper magazine's Dawn Foster Memorial Essay Prize for her writing on tenant activism.