I also realised that I have created my own versions of family networks around my different homes. It’s a version of that old adage that once you live north of the river in London, you can’t go south – I moved further out of the city because my friends were moving that way, to locations not on the doorsteps of tube stations, but on the edges of obscure train lines. We made new communities there. Buying somewhere affordable, as I wanted to do, also required us to move further out. Our first house had been on the market, unloved, for two years. It had no garden, broken iron blinds, dodgy electrics and damp in the walls, which we fixed. Six years later, we had six offers for it that were away above asking price and sold it for more than two-and-half times the price we had paid for it.

Maybe, maybe not. But Yates has me well beaten. By the age of 25, she’d lived in 20 different houses across the country. There’s the childhood flat in a car showroom that had floor-to-ceiling windows. Then there are housemate auditions in her 20s that enable tenants to discriminate on the basis of race, class, sexuality – reproducing some of the systemic disparities of our society. You’ve lived in a number of homes and places across the country, spending some of your childhood living above a car showroom in Wales. Do you feel the current conversations around the housing crisis focus too much on London?Jude, aged around 18 months, in the garden of her first home in Swansea. Now the garden has been sold and a new house built on it. Photograph: Jude Rogers Never could this book be more relevant than right now in 2023. Home should be that safe haven away from the madness of the world, a place that provides all our creature comforts, something that we’re not afraid of losing. Initially, the idea to move here was to break free, clear our heads – take all that light and space and silence into our own lives. And in many ways, that has happened, although things aren’t quite as Zen-like as that. Country roads at night in the fog aren’t exactly enchanting. LPG tanks cost a bloody fortune. And sheep can wake you up at 5am as much as police sirens.

When I was 15, my family moved to a flat above a car showroom in Wales named after an invisible owner: WR Davies. The flat was framed by huge, wall-sized windows that let in oceans of light and made us – a brown family in a small Welsh town (population: 5,948) – even more exposed. We lived on the top floor, with the active showroom downstairs, and our flat had a large living room, a small bathroom and a concrete stairwell leading up to the kitchen. It felt like an extension built for use by workers that the landlord had hastily made into a flat, and we shared it with exposed wires and copper pipes. Now and again, the smell of Turtle Wax and CarPlan Triplewax car shampoo would fill the living room from below.In prose that sparkles with humour and warmth, Yates charts the heartbreaks and joys of a life spent navigating the chaos of the housing system. And in that time, between a series of evictions, mouldy flats and bizarre house-share interviews, the reality of Britain’s housing crisis grew more and more difficult to ignore. Feeling unemotional while walking round the house felt odd, given how much emotion I’d felt in the past when thinking about the possibility of this experience. I was only jolted when tiny, creaky details of the house leapt out at me – a 70s door handle on a wardrobe, a patch of dated tiling in a bathroom. The idea that these inconsequential objects were here when I was here felt like I was pressing pause on my life, doing something remarkable, something that shouldn’t really be done. But home can be a complicated place. When Yates’ mother was effectively disowned by her family aged 19 after filing for divorce, she and Yates began their peripatetic journey to building a future that didn’t yet exist, away from Southall and into uncertainty. In each chapter, Yates skilfully combines memoir, case studies and histories of design with harrowing facts and figures