“Housing Problems: Britain’s Housing Crisis and Documentary.”

This chapter provides a unique exploration of documentary and the contemporary housing crisis in Britain and situates it within the wider context of the ongoing European Crisis. It considers on the one hand, network television docudramas like Channel 4 How to Get a Council House and on the other, independent documentaries and their ties with the communities and housing activist movements they represent. It argues that the UK and, in particular, London, historically represents a unique paradigm of radical transformation of the housing sector, from the post-war emphasis on reconstruction as a welfare state project to private-led regeneration began in the Thatcher era and culminated in the present deregulation of the real estate market in the neo-liberal city. I argue that while the housing crisis in Britain has been represented in British film and television in a wide range of formats, from feature film to TV series, documentary has emerged as the privileged instrument for this enquiry, with a massive increase in production in recent years. I look at the way in which selected documentaries portray the housing sector as testing ground for a growing social inequality along class, ethnic and gender divides, where vulnerable subjects are not only marginalised but scapegoated. One of the two editors of the edited collection, Thomas Austin, is a well-known documentary film expert and the volume contains chapters from world-leading film studies scholars, such as Rosalind Galt and Dina Iordanova.