Social housing

The Boys, the entertaining debut novel by the literary critic Leo Robson, is set in Swiss Cottage during the 2012 London Olympics. Johnny Voghel is ‘methodically lying about’, home on leave from an admin job in the West Midlands and grieving both for his mother, who died the previous year, and – by extension – his father, who died when he was a child. A typical day is spent ‘smoking badly rolled cigarettes, watching the ring-fenced patches of grass suffer in the heat, nodding at passers-by, tweezing grey hairs from my nostrils and popping the spots on my chin’, before walking into the centre to gaze at the BT Tower

By the time she was 25, the journalist and broadcaster Kieran Yates had lived in almost as many houses. Having rented for more than a decade, I feel her pain. I’ve lived in flats that made me physically unwell (mould has a lot to answer for) and survived housemates whose approach to kitchen hygiene made every day a salmonella minefield. I would visit a former boyfriend whose bedroom was, essentially, a glorified crawl space in a cold artists’ warehouse. He was 6ft 6in and couldn’t even kneel up in it, but, aged 24, I thought it was cool. Now I see it for what it was: an indictment of London’s