By the time she was 25, the journalist and broadcaster Kieran Yates had lived in almost as many houses. Having rented for more than a decade, I feel her pain. I’ve lived in flats that made me physically unwell (mould has a lot to answer for) and survived housemates whose approach to kitchen hygiene made every day a salmonella minefield. I would visit a former boyfriend whose bedroom was, essentially, a glorified crawl space in a cold artists’ warehouse. He was 6ft 6in and couldn’t even kneel up in it, but, aged 24, I thought it was cool. Now I see it for what it was: an indictment of London’s rental market, embodied in grey concrete and exposed piping.

All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In is an exposé of the sorry state of housing in Britain and a journey through the author’s life, year by year, brick by brick. Yates started off in Southall, west London, after her grand-parents – nanaji and naniji – moved to the UK from Bahowal, a village in India, to ‘build to something’. It was there that she learned what it meant to live in a community under threat: their road was at the centre of the Southall riots in the 1970s. Her mother, as a 12-year-old, was tasked with ‘stacking frozen onions for future meals’ while racial violence raged outside.

Not long after Yates was born, her parents, set up in an arranged marriage, split, and her mother was ostracised from her community. It was then that the moves started. With wonderful clarity, Yates charts the ups and downs of nomadic life: sharing accommodation with ‘a Somali refugee and Jehovah’s Witness with an addiction to burnt toast and halal haribos’; renting a flat above a car showroom (‘downstairs, people were selling cars for thousands of pounds while we hopped over wires to avoid electrocution’); and finally finding space to dream in Peckham Rye.

Many of the places Yates has lived in – including a flat alone when she was just 18 – were provided by the state. With honesty and righteous anger she details the systematic decline of social housing stock: ‘In 2021, just 6,644 social homes were built across the whole of England, but in the same period we lost 28,796 social homes to sales and demolitions.’ This erosion, which had been exacerbated by Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy initiative in 1980, helped to create an itinerant generation. As Yates notes: ‘As much as I am a product of architectural decisions, I am also a product of policy.’

One case she describes is that of a woman, Amanda, who, after the Grenfell fire, was moved when falling debris from the tower block destroyed her neighbouring flat. She was offered housing in Harrow, but this meant uprooting from her familiar life in North Kensington. Recent government figures show that 101,300 householders are living in temporary accommodation, including 127,220 children. Such statistics haven’t been seen for decades.

Although this book isn’t a polemic, it’s seething with rage. Yates evidently honed her writing skills in the angry letters she sent landlords from a very early age – something no child should have to do. It is also immensely readable, and at times even funny – something I wouldn’t have thought possible – but perhaps that’s because the idea that a ‘home’ should be so precarious is absurd in the first place. Yates asks us to question the very notion of home. Is it a feeling, a place for your prized possessions, even a personality? At best, it’s a combination of these things. At worst, just somewhere to keep afloat in.

In a happy irony, the advance Yates received for this book helped to go towards a deposit on a flat (combined with her husband’s generational wealth, she is at pains to add). She has now come full circle to find what her nanaji moved to the UK in search of – a better life:

Finally I have somewhere to plant a root system so deep it carves its way into the earth, tangled and strong – finding water in the dirt, growing deeper and deeper until no trampling can kill it.