‘Seeing myself from another angle’: A conversation between reporter and source
I met Lizzie Skeaping in 2022, when she was fighting her eviction, and she became a core subject in my reporting. A year on, we talk about it
In the spring of 2022, I travelled across London to meet Lizzie Skeaping for the first time. She was being evicted from the home she shared with five other adults in Brockley, south-east London. For Lizzie, who moved there in 2017, it was a sanctuary. The household would pool its spending money on food items, taking turns to cook each other meals, and spend their evenings eating, talking and laughing. The kitchen was decorated with smiling Polaroids of Lizzie and her housemates.
But in 2022, Lizzie was issued with a Section 21 notice—giving the house two months to move out. I was going to interview her about this situation. But Lizzie knew what to do. She had got involved with the London Renters Union, a campaigning organization that offers tenants support and helps them resist evictions. In frustration over being treated like a vehicle for profit, Lizzie recalls telling the landlord's estate agency over the phone, ‘I am a person, not a tenant.’ After wrangling with the agency, Lizzie managed to persuade them to let the house remain—by accepting a rent hike, despite the creaking disrepair of the brick terrace house. But it proved a hollow victory. In the flurry of panic that came with the potential eviction, the spirit of the house was broken; housemates began seeking alternatives in the wild west of London’s rental market. And after limping on as a household, what had once been Lizzie’s sanctuary eventually ended, and she moved out.
After meeting Lizzie and interviewing her over the next nine months, she became one of three central subjects in one of the chapters I wrote for Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis, published by Biteback last March. I was curious what that experience was like for her. So I asked if she’d consider a Q&A for this newsletter, to talk about how it felt to see her experience—her eviction notice, her fight against it, and how it fit into the UK’s housing crisis—recorded in print. She agreed.
Ahead of our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, I was slightly nervous. Had I done justice to her reality? Did she feel the reporting had been sensitively undertaken and done for the right purposes? Did I make some grave error I’d overlooked? But it turned out to be an incredibly stimulating discussion, and reaffirmed my belief in the power of narrative nonfiction to help us see the world anew—the first step to changing it.
JB: When the narrative leaves you in Broke, at the end of 2022, you've just managed to avoid an eviction and remain in the house that you loved so much. But you had said that the spirit of the house had been broken. Can you give people an update on what's happened since then in your life?
LS: Yeah, we stayed on in the house, and that was a really special episode. But it felt like the final season, you know? That whole experience with the landlord meant we knew we’d clung on for one more time. And a combination of our lack of trust in the landlord, and the fact we’d been forced to think about next steps, meant it was very much a closing chapter. As a result we really tried to appreciate it. It didn’t kill it or dim it. It’s almost like you want the season to close with a really positive final note—making time to hang out in the garden, dinners together, we really made the most of that. But it was bittersweet. It was a big chapter coming to an end. For me, I’d been in that house since 2017, a substantial part of my life. In mid-May 2023 we finally moved out.
You’d never participated in something like this before. What was it like to see your experience on the page?
It was, I mean, extremely positive. It’s definitely surreal. But that’s a really tricky question to answer. I felt amazed that something that felt like just my ordinary life was considered worthy of a story to be told. I remember you framed it within the context of the other stories, and mine came as the slightly more positive—the fightback [against eviction], and what’s possible. It made me feel like our struggle had more meaning than just what it meant to our housemates. Like, it was a victory for us, but it helped me see that there’s a bigger victory out there to be fought by lots of people. And sharing your story can help people realize that, you know, there are ways you can resist these things. It helped me see it in a wider context.
I think it’s also about, I don’t know how to put it… Being seen. It’s not my habit to see myself as a particularly successful functioning adult. Even though objectively, factually, I have a job, blah blah blah. But just seeing myself from another angle, I guess. I hadn’t seen myself from that angle before. And that angle was a positive one—as a person who stood up to someone, and fought back, and won. That was nice to take stock of and appreciate from someone else’s eyes.
There are many forms of interviewing in journalism. For a longform piece like this, it’s not going to be the confrontational interview you might see on the evening news. And many people come away from this kind of interview feeling almost like they’ve had a therapy session. How was the process of being interviewed for you over those months?
Yeah, therapy session puts it quite well. Just to be clear, it was a really positive experience. But I was taken aback at how much detail you were interested in. I say that as in, I didn’t feel like I was being grilled for every last detail, but I was amazed how curious you were about the most incidental details—or what felt incidental to me—but what I saw later were important. So you asked me, what was my favorite meal that I liked to cook for my housemates? Or, you know, the ins-and-outs of how our cooking rota worked. It was nice that someone—in such an uncaring context like housing, where the landlord didn’t give a shit—that you cared about everything. It really felt like our experience in a house as tenants, and as more than tenants—as a community in a house that we loved and loved sharing—that that was important to you. And that was because of the depth of your questioning.
And I was amazed that within our first meeting, when you came around for only a few hours, that I felt comfortable to speak about, like, my childhood experiences, my relationship to my mum, how that affected my relationship to housing, and how she dealt with that, and so on. I went quite deep, quite quickly, and I was quite surprised that it didn’t feel invasive. I didn’t feel like, you know, I’d been tricked into saying too much. I felt like what I said, I was comfortable to share. I was just surprised how much I shared, and how much felt relevant to the story. And you made me think about things I hadn’t considered before. Like, well, where did my unease over housing come from? I hadn’t really taken stock of that until our conversation. So, yeah, it was really positive, and surprising.
Thank you for saying that, that’s really lovely to hear. So did the experience reveal parts of yourself or your experience that you hadn’t seen before?
Yeah, I think it was seeing myself as an activist. I hadn’t framed what I was as a form of activism. So that was definitely a new thing I saw in myself. And it helped me understand myself more—like, why was I so passionate about this particular issue? Those were the things that were definitely sharpened through our discussions.
You touched on something that you told me for the book, which was about how this spectre of the landlord had been haunting your mind since you were a child. Could elaborate on that idea, this ever-present insecurity, for people who may not have read the book?
For me, it’s the feeling that your home, the place that’s your security, is completely subject to the whim of someone else, who doesn’t know you or care about you. That’s the bottom line. In my childhood, the landlord just decided after a number of years that he wanted our family home back. I’d moved in about age six or seven, and when I moved out, I realized: It had never been our home. Afterwards, I lived with that sense all the time. And in our case, in Brockley, the landlord didn’t have the courtesy to let us forget it. He was very keen to assert, as often as possible, that on his whim we were out.
To zoom out, part of your journey in the book chapter is experiencing a political awakening and becoming involved in housing activism, stopping evictions and so on. We’ve got an election coming up in the UK and I wonder how you’re thinking about the prospect of change. Do you see it as something that is ever given from the top or does it always need to come from a groundswell from below?
So much of the housing battle is because the law protects landlords. There is a lot that people on the ground can do, but it feels like a constant battle where the odds are massively stacked against us. In my house, ours was a win that bought us another year. But it didn’t protect us against further rent rises. It didn’t give us the amount of time that we would have liked. That was as much of a win as we could get in that situation. So it’s really important to celebrate those small victories, like resisting an eviction, because they affect people’s lives. But I am looking to the next government to abolish section 21 evictions—as has been promised for years and not happened—to actually shore up tenants’ rights, so we can have those battles on a more level playing field.
My hopes are slim for substantial change. I imagine a new government will tinker with the worst effects of Conservative legislation, but I don’t hear from the likely new [Labour] government that they’re going to really do the work for tenants. It feels like the long, ongoing fight on the ground needs to keep happening—because we can’t rely on governments to do what should be done.
For work you teach history. How do you compare our current era of insecurity, poverty and inequality to other periods?
The most striking parallel is when I teach Irish politics in the nineteenth-century, where land and tenants’ rights were massive issues. I’m always inspired and impressed by the activism that happened around land in Ireland. Now, my caveat to that is some of the activism was really violent. And that’s not something I agree with. But other aspects—a sense of coming together, boycotting, enacting justice on a community level—lots of it was really impressive, the commitment and organizational capacity to do that in the 1880s. They managed to force the hand of the government and win a series of land acts in Ireland, from the 1870s to the early-1900s.
In some ways, I feel like we’ve lost that fight. Do you remember the planned energy bills strike [in October 2022]? I just knew that it wouldn’t happen. Because people are so set in an individualist mindset, which has become a political norm since the 1950s. What you see in history is a constant refuting of the idea that history is progress—that things get better and better—and we’re getting worse and more helpless to stand up against government inequality.
Finally, I wanted to ask you, people decide to speak to journalists and share their stories for a whole host of reasons. What were your expectations going into the process and how did that compare with the outcome of reading the book?
Very good question. I think the interview came about after my housemate, who you interviewed, brought up my name as someone who could address our eviction experience better. I felt strongly about housing, so when I heard a journalist was interested in our situation, I thought, ‘Great.’ It made me feel glad that there are aspects of the media interested in people’s stories that don’t get told enough.
So I was curious, vaguely hopeful, and all I thought was it would flesh out the wider issue. At the outset, I just thought, ‘A journalist wants to know what’s going on with housing, and I want stories like ours to be known to journalists.’ So I agreed to do it. I didn’t expect my story to be told, and I never envisaged it becoming a chapter in a book—but it was lovely that it did. It felt like, ‘Oh good, someone cares, someone’s curious, and I’m happy to tell my story.’ I didn’t really have any expectations beyond that, I just thought I’d go with the flow and see what happens. Looking back, it was one of the things that I’m really proud of in my life, that I contributed to that book—which I read and loved and absolutely supported the things that it was trying to flag and the changes it was campaigning for. It spoke to me in a much more complete sense [as a whole book] than just my story in my chapter, and I felt it positioned my experience within a whole set of issues that I really cared about, which was a really positive experience. 🗨️
In other news…
The paperback copy of Broke is out on 20 June, featuring a new chapter from Tom Clark on why falling inflation isn't easing people's difficulties. You can preorder yourself a copy here, and the publisher has reduced the price to £4.99 until the UK election on 4 July. All royalties are donated to Leeds Asylum Seekers’ Support Network.