Living for Rent: Centre for Studies of Home Annual Lecture 2025
Join award-winning journalist and author Vicky Spratt and academic Matt Ingleby, co-director of the Rent Cultures Network, for an in-conversation on the range of issues related to rental domesticity.
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.
'Living for Rent' is a conversation about a range of issues relating to rental domesticity today between award-winning housing journalist and author of best-selling Tenants, Vicky Spratt, and the academic and co-director of Rent Cultures Network, Dr Matthew Ingleby (Queen Mary University of London).
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.
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Vicky’s second book, We Were Promised The Moon, will be published in 2026. It is an agenda-setting analysis of how the economic settlement of the last 30 years has fundamentally reshaped life for young adults today.
You’ll find Vicky regularly on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Newsnight, Radio 4, the Andrew Marr Show on LBC, and the Newsagents. Failing that, you’ll see her speaking at political festivals or interviewing household names such as Michael Gove, Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Rayner.
Vicky’s writing is also in demand from other publications such as ELLE and Refinery29 because of her ability to write about complex socio-political and economic problems engagingly.
Matt Ingleby is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London (QM). 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.
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With Ushashi Dasgupta (Oxford), he is a co-director of the Rent Cultures Network. This is his eleventh year at QM. Previously Matt taught at UCL, where he completed his doctorate, which contributed to the Leverhulme-funded ‘Bloomsbury Project’. His doctoral work explored the role of fiction in the social production of Bloomsbury, a neighbourhood that in the long nineteenth century was imaginatively transformed from social marginality to cultural and intellectual centrality. The politics of space is always at the centre of his thinking and teaching.
About the Centre for Studies of Home
The Centre for Studies of Home (CSH) is an interdisciplinary partnership between Queen Mary University of London and Museum of the Home, combining expertise and exchanging knowledge across the two institutions since 2011.
We develop new research that deepens and diversifies understandings of home for public and academic audiences.
Our research is collaborative and cross-disciplinary, encompassing work on home both within and beyond the domestic sphere. Alongside everyday life, domestic architecture, and material culture, we are interested in broader ideas about home, dwelling and belonging.
Visiting us for the first time? Plan your journey and find out about accessibility at Museum of the Home before your visit.
Date
Tuesday 29 April 2025
Time
6pm to 8.30pm
Cost
Free
Location
Museum of the Home - 136 Kingsland Road, London E2 8EA