The New Dickensians

It is the new year (happy new year!) and I am feeling feisty… I am going to do battle about Generation Rent. It is an election year and housing should be a central issue in any manifesto you consider voting for… if the housing offer is not giving a glimmer of hope, then they don’t deserve your vote (I’ll be providing views on this before the election).

But on to the main pontification.

You will remember from school reading Dickens about the slums that poor little urchins like Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit lived in... I read with great interest that there is a new academic discipline emerging to examine it all among scholars more used to exploring how Victorian writers tackled squalor, overcrowding and precarity among 19th-century tenants. Oxford and Queen Mary’s London universities have established the ‘Rent Cultures Network’ to explore how - from Netflix to novels - a generation that has come of age renting is, a century and half after Charles Dickens, again making art from precarious living.

The reality is that there is a generation who are now in their 40s and early 50s who brought up their children in rented accommodation and their children (now in their 20s) are consigned to rented accommodation where they will bring up their children in rented accommodation. Three generations so far that has been failed by successive Governments…

The modern-day housing crisis is influencing popular culture. The new ‘For Rent’ version of The Sims (a very popular computer game) allows players to role play as tenants at the mercy of killer mushrooms, fungus sprouting from damp bathrooms, carpets and eventually the avatars’ heads, leading to a horror movie-style death. It is just one example of rent forming the backdrop to popular art and culture, a phenomenon that may spread wider in 2024. Sims users like to “play out some of the challenges they may be experiencing in the real world as a way to help them process their thoughts and feelings… some enjoy experimenting with the challenge”.

I also spotted a league table of London boroughs and how they have been performing in housing delivery. About a third of London Boroughs met their targets (and some exceeded them by quite some margin like Brent, Hammersmith & Fulham, Croydon and Hounslow, then another third didn’t quite get there but is approaching their targets. What was very worrying though was to see that the final third failed to get anywhere near the numbers with Bromley, Kensington & Chelsea, Lewisham and Redbridge all delivering only about half of what they need to contribute to make life better for Londoners.

Generation Rent need to become vocal YIMBYs that are going to make their political will felt. And they need to stand for election on YIMBY tickets and promises in their manifestos to deliver housing, not like so many councillors who are in office on NIMBY tickets.

My motto for 2024 is: “Out with the NIMBY and in with the YIMBY!”

Happy new year!

Henry