I never planned to become a housing rights campaigner. I hoped to become an artist; I always loved to paint. But events put me on a different path. It feels as if I missed an exit on the motorway somewhere and now I can’t turn back.
It started when we moved into a housing association flat on the Eastfields estate in Mitcham, south London, in 2018: my father, my two sisters, aged 17 and 20, and 19-year-old me. Before that, we were in temporary accommodation: a half-converted garage that had mould and damp on the walls and a bathroom the size of a cupboard. We had been there since 2016, waiting to get a permanent council property, but the new place was no better. The carpets and wallpaper were decades old. There were cockroaches, flies and woodlice. The mouse infestation in the kitchen was so bad, we didn’t want to use it. The glass patio doors were broken, so the place was freezing. We had lights that filled with water whenever it rained, especially in the bathroom, which had no windows. It wasn’t just us; the whole Eastfields estate was dilapidated, but despite residents complaining to Clarion, the housing association, nothing seemed to get fixed.
