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British society is increasingly divided into the haves and the have-nots. Housing epitomizes this division with spiralling rents, exorbitant prices, lack of council provision, poorly maintained stock, and polluted cities with ever decreasing green space. Daniel Renwick and Robbie Shilliam provide a recent history of squalor culminating in the Grenfell Tower fire. In doing so they reveal a profound political failure to provide fair and just solutions to shelter – the most basic of human needs. Renwick and Shilliam argue that agents of change exist within those populations presently damned by a racist and class-riven system of housing provision.
In this compelling history of squalor’s political and racial construction, Renwick and Shilliam debunk right-wing attempts to cast today’s squalid living conditions forced on many across the UK as a matter of morality and show them to be one of mortality. This is perhaps most poignantly exposed in their discussion of the Grenfell Fire, a touchpoint throughout the book. A truly significant contribution to the contemporary rethinking of one of Beveridge’s five impediments to social progress.
— Gurminder Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex
Daniel Renwick is a writer, youth-worker and videographer. He lives in London.
Robbie Shilliam is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He was previously Professor of International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
Introduction
1. A moral history of squalor
2. Housing policy and national reform
3. A postwar consensus?
4. Demolishing slums, building up
5. The struggle for the city
6. The right to buy
7. Organized negligence
8. Twenty-first-century squalor
9. Social murder