Blackwell’s are delighted to welcome Jessica Field to the shop on the 16th of October to discuss her book Eviction: A Social History of Rent with Isaac Rose (author of Rentier City).

Doors: 6.30pm, starts: 6.45pm

Tickets are £4. Admission is free when purchasing a copy the book.

About the book:

In 2017, Jessica Field’s parents and 69 of their neighbours received warning of imminent eviction. Their corporate landlord sought to demolish their affordable private rented homes and replace them with middle-class houses for sale. Together, the women of the estate set up an anti-eviction campaign to save their tenant community.

The neighbourhood was the last surviving part of a National Coal Board estate, originally built in the 1950s to house local mineworkers. It was dubbed ‘Cardboard City’ because of its poor quality, prefabricated construction; houses were put up by unskilled workers in less than two weeks apiece. They were costly to build, costly to maintain and, by the 1980s, rendered defective. When the pits closed and the Coal Board needed to get rid of its housing stock, whole estates were then auctioned off to speculators – heralding the financialisation of social housing and putting low-income tenants at the mercy of global investors. Renters were swindled every step of the way. But time and again tenant activists – especially women – have fought back.

In telling the history of Cardboard City and the wider history of housebuilding-for-rent, Eviction offers an alternative history of social housing as well as a celebration of women-led tenant activism fighting against profiteering landlords.

About the author:

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.