Defending the Undefendable: Mould, Home, and the Body in London's Private Rented Sector

This research aims to understand how Private Rented Sector (PRS) renters in London, UK, live with mould, exploring how boundaries of home, body, and identity are (re)shaped. Domestic moulds can be pathogenic, and evidence shows it can lead to serious, and sometimes fatal, health affects – outcomes which are variegated between and within tenures. However, there is little research exploring the everyday and tenurial relations of/with mould. Housing commodification and financialisation have perforated and destabilised the fabric of homes in the PRS - from speculative building, overcrowding, ‘no-fault’ evictions, and under-supply of affordable homes. As such, PRS renters are more likely to live in older, converted, and lower energy performance stock – exposing renters to moisture pressures that allow mould to creep in, such as extreme weather, fuel inflation, and changing domesticity. Lives with mould (re)surface these material and semiotic discontinuities. When domestic architectures are damaged, mould breaks down the barrier between the inside and the outside environments, generating new materials; blooms, spores, and gaseous compounds that re-materialise the home. These materials can also resurface the body by ‘getting under the skin’ and damaging the tissue. Living with mould may also break down and (re)generate domestic-urban identities, as renters affirm/resist conditions by tolerating, remedying, rule-breaking, complaining, campaigning, abandoning, and so on. The research will explore phenomena of living with mould in the PRS by focussing on a region of London with a large and extremely competitive PRS rental market; a place where the researcher lives in close encounter with moulds, people, and buildings. Employing ethnographic historical analysis, interviews and home-tours with PRS renters, and interviews with key informants over six months, the presentation will introduce the background and methodology and explore initial findings from this study.