About this Event
Join us with Peter Apps, in conversation with Holly Smith, to discuss Homesick: The End of London
Tracing the impact of the last forty years of housing policy from Right to Buy to build-to-let, Peter Apps follows a diverse group of Londoners as their fortunes rise and fall across the decades along with the economic forces sweeping through the capital. With clear-eyed urgency, he reveals what will happen when a generation of older renters retires, and climate change brings new challenges to a city ill-prepared for its consequences.
He also gives us reason to hope, exploring the ways London can transform again: through pioneering housing projects, municipalisation and other reforms, from a market for private profit to a place that offers permanence, safety and opportunity for its citizens. A place to call home.
Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Contributing Editor at Inside Housing. He is the author of Show Me the Bodies which won the Orwell Prize for political writing which has sold over 21.5k copies and his coverage of the Grenfell public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London.
Holly Smith is a historian of architecture and protest, and the author of Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain. She is a Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Her research has been awarded the Duncan Tanner Prize by Oxford University Press and the Hawksmoor Medal by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. She holds a PhD from University College London.
Event venue & nearby stays
Waterstones, 82 Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
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