A Sense of Place: Staging Psychogeographies of the UK Housing Crisis

Abstract Contemporary Britain is experiencing an enduring and devastating housing crisis spearheaded in 1980 by Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of the “Right to Buy” social housing and sustained by an enduring neoliberal hegemony. This article contextualises the housing crisis through data and information drawn from journalism, charities, and government. It then explores how the crisis is conveyed in two recent plays. Sh!t Theatre’s 2016 Letters to Windsor House focusses on company members Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit’s overcrowded and unsafe North London flatshare. Home is a verbatim show set in a hostel for homeless young people in East London, produced by the National Theatre and co-researched and directed by Nadia Fall in 2013. As well as exploring the shows’ narration of the devastating social and material impacts of the housing crisis, the article draws on urban theory’s concept of psychogeography alongside video documentation of both plays to explore how they affectively convey the spatial and emotional consequences of the crisis. The article shows how the spatialisation of theatre – not just its textual elements – helps articulate both the spatiality of the housing crisis in contemporary urban life in neoliberal Britain and, especially, how that spatiality feels. It makes the case for thinking psychogeographically about theatre in order to focus on the ways it braids spatial and emotional understanding – crucial factors for properly comprehending, and potentially changing, the UK housing crisis.