We are delighted to welcome Jessica Field to the bookshop, to celebrate the publication of her new, vital non-fiction book, Eviction: A Social History of Rent.
Join us on Wednesday 15 October at 7pm when Jessica will be in conversation with writer Lynsey Hanley, before answering questions from the audience and singing copies of her book.
Tickets are £6 standard admission or £20 including a copy of the book. Complimentary refreshements will be provided.
If you can't make the event and would like to reserve a signed/ dedicated copy of the book, please do get in touch and we'll be more than happy to help.
We look forward to seeing you there!
About Eviction:
An alternative history of housing in post-war Britain – a cautionary tale of rent, precarity, and working-class resistance
Grounded in personal experience, Eviction uncovers a hidden history of housing injustice and working-class resistance in what has become a perennial battleground for social conflict in modern Britain.
In 2017, Jessica Field’s parents and more than a hundred of their neighbours received warning of imminent eviction. Their corporate landlord intended to demolish their affordable, privately rented homes to replace them with middle-class houses for sale. Led by the women of the estate, tenants launched an anti-eviction campaign to save their close-knit community from destruction.
The neighbourhood was the last remnant of a 1950s National Coal Board estate constructed to house local miners. When the coal industry declined in the 1970s, whole estates were auctioned off to speculators. Low-income tenants were at the mercy of global investors. Houses were left to rot. Rents soared. Tenants were exploited every step of the way. Yet time and again, tenant activists – especially women – fought back.
Eviction is a history of the British housing crisis in microcosm.
About Jessica Field:
Jessica Field is a historian and writer exploring power, marginality, and resistance across different contexts - from post-war British housing to contemporary forced migration. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester and has lectured at UCL, Brunel University, and O.P. Jindal Global University. In 2022, Jessica won Red Pepper magazine's Dawn Foster Memorial Essay Prize for her writing on tenant activism.
