This chapter explores recent documentary production on the housing crisis in the UK and sets it within the wider context of social and economic crisis at the European level and beyond. I argue that this output not only provides an in-depth representation of growing social and economic inequality in housing, but also (through different channels of distribution and in its interconnection with the world beyond the screen, housing activism in particular) increasingly shapes the debate on the home, opening a potential platform for discussion that goes well beyond the national level.

I chose the UK as the main case study because of its paradigmatic trajectory from the egalitarian project of mass housing provision in the postwar period to the increasing erosion of this same social housing stock from the end of the 1970s to the present, within a wider process of privatisation and the dismantling of the welfare state. The potentially tragic consequences of this process, which not only includes the demolition of council estates but also their systemic neglect, a process ‘captured by the phrase “managed decline”’ (Watt 2009: 236), became evident in the Grenfell Tower fire. On 14 June 2017 a malfunctioning fridge-freezer ignited a fire that engulfed the tower, a 24-storey block administered by Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation in West London, killing 72 people and injuring another 70. The fire at Grenfell not only ‘stood as an awful culmination to deeply damaging policies pursued towards council housing, and the public sector more widely, since 1979’ (Boughton 2018: 1) but, importantly, was also rooted in a ‘colonial politics of space’ in which ‘ideas of race and racial inferiority served to justify the practice of profit-induced exploitation’ (El-Enany 2017; 2019: 51).

While it clearly has its specificities, the housing crisis in the UK, and in London in particular, condenses a series of social and economic challenges that are part of wider transformations at the European and global level. It exists within a wider scenario of planetary gentrification (Lees et al. 2016), and is impacted by both austerity politics and a precarious labour market. Finally, it reflects wider class, gender and race inequalities under neoliberalism.