Squalor

by Daniel Renwick, Robbie Shilliam

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788213882
Publisher:	Agenda Publishing
Publication date:	12/27/2022
Series:	Five Giants
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction 1

2 A moral history of squalor 11

3 Housing policy and national reform 29

4 A postwar consensus? 45

5 Demolishing slums, building up 61

6 The struggle for the city 77

7 The right to buy 93

8 Organized negligence 109

9 Twenty-first century squalor 127

10 Social murder 145

References 157

Index 164

Editorial Reviews

Squalor is a beautifully-written collaboration unified by the authors’ clear commitment to acknowledging, documenting and detailing the organised and in many cases, purposeful negligence of Britain’s working classes. But its key achievement is its engagement with a particular aspect of political education that focuses on the evolution of regulations, which plainly demonstrate that housing, or the right to a dignified life in one’s home, should be the ultimate unifier of the polity. This is a book which illuminates exactly why everyone should be paying attention to the politics of housing.

Chantelle Jessica Lewis

This brilliant work treads the trajectory of spatial arrangement in granular detail, and skillfully dispels several key myths along the journey. It concretizes the macro decisions, taken at the highest levels of political office, that have continually reordered the nitty-gritty micro level of day-to-day life across the century. This is an indispensable resource in the attritional war for the human right to safe and secure housing.

hip hop artist and journalist Lowkey

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

A gripping read, Squalor powerfully describes the long-term historical processes that have shaped deprivation in our time. Left me feeling madly angry.

Arun Kundnani

A thought-provoking, foundational history of housing policy and development within the United Kingdom... a must in the academic arsenal of an undergraduate or postgraduate student.

Capital & Class

A gripping read, Squalor powerfully describes the long-term historical processes that have shaped deprivation in our time. Left me feeling madly angry.--Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror

A thought-provoking, foundational history of housing policy and development within the United Kingdom... a must in the academic arsenal of an undergraduate or postgraduate student.--Capital & Class

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

Squalor is a beautifully-written collaboration unified by the authors' clear commitment to acknowledging, documenting and detailing the organised and in many cases, purposeful negligence of Britain's working classes. But its key achievement is its engagement with a particular aspect of political education that focuses on the evolution of regulations, which plainly demonstrate that housing, or the right to a dignified life in one's home, should be the ultimate unifier of the polity. This is a book which illuminates exactly why everyone should be paying attention to the politics of housing.--Chantelle Jessica Lewis, Pembroke College, University of Oxford

This brilliant work treads the trajectory of spatial arrangement in granular detail, and skillfully dispels several key myths along the journey. It concretizes the macro decisions, taken at the highest levels of political office, that have continually reordered the nitty-gritty micro level of day-to-day life across the century. This is an indispensable resource in the attritional war for the human right to safe and secure housing.--Lowkey, hip hop artist and journalist

From the Publisher

Praise for The Five Giants series: Importantly, the authors of this new Beveridge Report, do not look backward, but seek to find solutions for what might otherwise seem by their longevity to be intractable problems.

Discover Society: New Series 2 (3) - John Holmwood