Landlordism on Trial: Rent Tribunals and Resistance in Post-War London, 1946–64

Abstract

Rent Tribunals were first established in England and Wales in 1946 as a means of regulating rents among furnished lets in the private rented sector, before their authority was extended to cover unfurnished dwellings in 1949. This article shows how rent tribunals created an informal space of justice that provided a forum for tenants’ voices. Tenants used rent tribunals to dramatize their everyday complaints, articulate their sense of entitlement to better housing, and organize collectively to exert pressure on landlords and administrative machinery. The tribunals in turn reconfigured the state’s relationship to the space of the home and echoed representational tropes circulating in popular culture. But in putting landlordism on trial, rent tribunals, and those who participated in them, also came up against the limits of traditional constructions of property ownership and the home. The expansion of homeownership intersected and in some cases fused with increasingly racialized notions of belonging, domesticity, and national identity. Through an examination of these novel regulatory forums, the article highlights both the centrality of working-class agency and the contradictory nature of the welfare state.