Living for Rent: Centre for Studies of Home Annual Lecture 2025

When: Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Where: Museum of the Home - 136 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8EA

An award-winning journalist and author Vicky Spratt and academic Dr Matt Ingleby (QMUL), co-director of the Rent Cultures Network, conversation on the range of issues related to rental domesticity at the Centre for Studies of Home, a partnership between Queen Mary University of London and the Museum of the Home 

The rented home is at the forefront of political, economic and legal debate. Runaway rental inflation is one of the most unsustainable aspects of the current economy. Its human fallout, seen in preventable child deaths due to landlordly negligence, is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Significant changes to the legal frameworks surrounding rental homes are underway. Meanwhile, more radical responses to improving the quality of rental domesticity, such as rent control and mass housing re-socialisation, are more mainstream within policy think tank discourse than they were a decade ago.

The Speakers

Vicky Spratt is an award-winning journalist, author, and housing rights advocate. She has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize two years in a row (2023, 2024). Her first book, TENANTS, was a Financial Times book of the year in 2022.

Vicky is a correspondent and columnist at The i Paper. She writes about the housing crisis, inequality, society, economics and politics. Her work has seen her nominated for a British Journalism Award. In 2017, her writing about the plight of private renters got letting fees banned (the Tenant Fees Act 2019). She gives evidence in Parliament and her work is often referenced by politicians in both houses.

Matt Ingleby is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). He is currently writing a cultural history of landlord-tenant relations, thinking about how plays, novels and other cultural forms thought about rent culture as it evolves and changes from Victorian laissez-faire liberalism to mid twentieth-century social democracy, and beyond, to our present moment of housing crisis.

About the Event

Entry is free but you need to book a free ticket.

The event is organised by the HSS Research Centre for Studies of Home, in partnership with the Museum of the Home and supported by IHSS.