Children walk in the snow to find a homeless shelter until their feet pucker. A father dying of cancer is bedbound in a house filled with mould and vermin. A tower block burns with 72 people inside. A family are too afraid to sleep at night for the cockroaches scuttling across the mattress. A man is forced to defecate in a plastic bag and throw it out the window in lieu of functioning plumbing. A baby dies from black mould.
This is not a Dickensian tale but the reality of social housing in Britain today. But rather than being a national shame at the top of the political agenda, it is greeted with a collective shrug. The shame in social housing is in all the wrong places, as housing activist Kwajo Tweneboa shows in his first book — Our Country in Crisis: Britain’s Housing Emergency and How We Rebuild. Equal parts memoir, reconnaissance, reflection and manifesto, it is a clarion call for urgent change in policy and perspective.
