In ‘The Great London Property Squeeze’, an article written for the Guardian in 2017, Anna Minton offers a trenchant examination of the origins and effects of London's present-day housing crisis, from descriptions of ‘beds in sheds’ and criminal levels of overcrowding in single rooms in districts such as Newham and Brent, to accounts of ‘middle-class poverty’ in West Norwood where tenants – despite earning well above the national average – are forced to choose between a functional heating system and a satisfactory school catchment area. While subjects such as slum landlordism, overcrowding, as well as the experiences of the ‘squeezed middle’ are those that characterise much writing on nineteenth-century housing, Minton’s use of language equally recalls a previous era. The article opens with the author's description of her meeting with Ian Dick, the head of private housing at Newham council in East London, and follows their sordid tour through the district's illegal forms of habitation, including garden sheds and ‘ramshackle outbuildings’. Making their way from back gardens through the piles of abandoned mattresses, they reach ‘the back of a large Victorian house, [where they] were met with a smell of leaking sewage, and the once-white walls were now filthy and soot-stained’. Peering through the bars of a ‘grimlooking security gate at the back door’, Minton glimpses a toddler and his mother and thinks:

Minton's writing recalls one of the most famous pieces of nineteenth- century journalism on housing, Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), in several significant ways. Both Minton and Mearns engage with forms of investigative journalism, specifically an author persona who explores an unfamiliar territory and acts as a conduit for such an experience to the reader. While Minton's article lacks the histrionic style of Mearns's pamphlet, which was designed to incite moral outrage about the forms of depravity that substandard housing might foster, both authors emphasise the sensory experience to underscore the need for improvement.