Eviction: A Social History of Rent (Verso, 16 September 2025)

In 2017, my parents, brother and their 70-household estate full of pensioners and low-income families were faced with losing their homes as private landlord Pemberstone sought to redevelop the estate.

Residents fought it, and the campaign gained national attention. I supported my parents and joined the fight, setting up and running our campaign website – https://saveourhomesls26.org. As well as marching alongside mum and dad and their neighbours, I blogged and researched the history of the estate for the campaign in the hope that community and working class heritage might win out. They didn’t.

When my parents were finally evicted in 2022, I turned my research and campaign writing into a book – Eviction: A Social History of Rent – that threaded their fight into the wider history of tenant insecurity. Read Eviction to learn more about:

  • The hidden history of the National Coal Board as a landlord. For many years it was one of the biggest in the country (163,000 tenanted houses!), operating a ‘tied’ system of easy evictions.
  • Building sector scandals in post-war Britain. Price-fixing and “quick fix” contracts which left the state (and the taxpayer) on the hook for costly council housebuilding across the 1940s and 1950s.
  • Lived experiences of renting, told through archive accounts and oral history interviews. These narratives show that little has changed for low income renters for more than a century: poor quality housing, high rents, absent or faceless landlords, and easy evictions.
  • The development of housing law from the late 19th century to the present. I show how law and policy have long failed to address poor quality housing and cycles of evictions of low income renting families.

**Eviction: A Social History of Rent will be published by Verso on 16 September 2025. See my Events page for a list of forthcoming events and talks**

Order now: Click HERE or visit: www.versobooks.com

Reviews:

I hope many people in the housing world will read this book and take its lessons to heart. Brilliantly written, and told through the eyes of a resident, it is doubly powerful. This gripping book also highlights the particularly active role of women in housing and community issues. 

~ Professor Anne Power MBE, CBE, author of Beyond Bricks and Mortar and Cities For a Small Continent

Rooted in a deeply personal account of the residents’ fight to save one condemned estate, Jessica Field’s fine book charts wider, often women-led, renters’ struggles and provides a powerful critique of the broader iniquities and insecurities of both private and public rental sectors. 

~ John Boughton, author of Municipal Dreams

Moving and enlightening. A compelling social history of rental housing in Britain, and a personal story of her family and community’s fight against generations of cynical landlords. It’s a lost history of decades of housing insecurity, made more powerful because it’s told largely through the working class women who fought to make these communities work, and to save them from destruction. Eviction is a book to open your eyes, to make you angry, and to inspire change.

~ John Grindrod, author of Concretopia and Outskirts

Heart-breaking and heart-warming in equal measure, Field’s devastating exposé of what happened to the tenants of former Coal Board housing bursts the myth of the post-war housing golden age. Combining painstaking archival research with working-class lived experience of housing insecurity and landlord exploitation, Eviction is a warning about a future of corporate Rachmanism should private equity investors get hold of social housing. Superbly written in a deeply personal way that manages to connect up one estate with so many different issues facing tenants today.

~ Dr Stuart Hodkinson, author of Safe as Houses

A compelling account of the precarious housing histories of the English working class, weaving together powerful stories of people and place. The eviction of tenants from so-called ‘Cardboard City’ and their efforts to resist remind us that the personal is indeed political. Drawing on firsthand on her own life, family, and activism, Fields presents a fresh perspective on temporary housing within the politics of public investment. Eviction indicates a path forward—emphasising the urgent need for secure, long-term public housing as a means to address the persistent legacies of classed, gendered, and intergenerational inequalities. A must-read.

~ Professor Sarah Marie Hall, author of Everyday Life in Austerity: Family, Friends and Intimate Relations

An excellent and often-hidden perspective on the history of social rent in the UK. Now is the time for politicians to heed the stories of history, learn from this book and create a better housing system that puts tenant well-being at its heart

~ Christa Maciver, Director of Campaigns and Social Change, Justlife