Southsea is where England peters out into a languid seaside boredom. A place once built for convalescing naval officers and Victorian holidaymakers is now home to a churn characteristic of provincial England in the 2020s: pensioners, bored teenagers, the unemployed, and the largely male migrants who have arrived, both legally and illegally, since 2022.

In July, a man staying at the Royal Beach Hotel was charged with attempted rape and voyeurism in the Portsmouth town center. Since then, a weekly protest has become a regular Friday night fixture. Yet whether or not Courtney’s pursuer really was staying in the hotel is ultimately beside the point, mum and daughter both insist. In fact, the protests weren’t just about the attempted rape, or Courtney’s stalker, or even the resented owner who had “sold his soul” in a deal with Serco and the Home Office to cash in on Britain’s small boats crisis.

Instead, the protest was about the direction of the town itself. Since the hotel had converted in 2022 to house asylum seekers, something very strange has been happening across Portsmouth. In fact, something very strange has been happening across England.

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At the start of the summer, Westminster feared a repeat of last year’s violence, as the small boats kept coming and Keir Starmer seemed helpless in their wake. What has happened instead is one of the odder turns in the country’s decade-long populist experiment. As the days got warmer, anti-migrant protests involving tens of thousands, at over 70 sites, formalized grassroots and localized opposition into a national movement that, in the words of one Labour MP, transformed Britain’s asylum system into “moral and political matter”.

The sense of forever protest has been further been normalized by “flagging”, the unofficial regalia of Britain’s rising provincial malaise. This has since manifested itself in other ways, from vigilante patrols in parks to community litter picking. To quote the “Weoley Warriors”, the group that kickstarted the flagging trend in Birmingham, the idea is “to show… local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone”. It’s a sentimentality so amorphous that it could be courted by everyone from the Prime Minister to social media influencer Tom Skinner.

Britain’s political establishment, unable to assert any sense of control or direction in this emerging new England, has reacted with a mixture of opportunity and panic. In Epping, for instance, the council leant on the Town and Country Planning Act to close the now-infamous Bell Hotel. That could yet embroil the Home Office in legal disputes with dozens of other councils, notwithstanding yesterday’s judgment that, for the moment, the Epping migrants can stay.

With the Government’s policy now to move Britain’s tens of thousands of small boat migrants into private accommodation the only viable alternative — and one which has inspired this summer’s most successful protest in Waterlooville — a once-unthinkable precedent for localized extra-parliamentary action has therefore been established. “These protests are not interested in conventional party politics,” says 43-year-old Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots, the protestors’ unofficial compère and looking rather like a teacher who’s lost control of a rowdy school trip. “It’s gathering momentum on its own. It’s doing it all by itself.”

Yet it’s also clear that the grassroots howls on the English streets, and the spontaneous wave of flagging, has nervously upended Westminster’s old means for understanding the forces of populism. Nigel Farage’s inner circle, which once bulked at Rupert Lowe’s fondness for “mass deportations”, has now borrowed the phrase in an attempt to ride the new mood. Just this week, it unveiled a new policy of detain and deport, complete with a mocked-up airport departures board featuring Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia.

Even the Labour party, rhetorically at least, has conceded to this new reality, pivoting from the outrage of last summer and opting for the model of Starmer’s now-forgotten party 2024 conference speech, one which decried the violence before moving onto a Blue Labour pastoral about the sense of insecurity stalking small-town Britain.

Such language has come to quietly set the Government’s tone. Stephen Morgan, for instance, the Labour MP for Portsmouth, has tried to hedge: acknowledging that his constituents had joined “out of frustration” — before decrying their exploitation at the hands of the far Right. Birmingham Mayor Richard Parker, asked to wade into the war between the flaggers of a long forgotten Birmingham suburb and the local council, glibly described the bunting as “uplifting”.

This uneasy dance between rising provincial populism on the one hand, and Britain’s anemic political establishment on the other, comes with a sense of unpredictability: both for a Reform Party eager to harness the anger, and a waning establishment keen to both appease and soothe its outpouring. In a country increasingly lacking any common hearth for political mediation — either through its media or culture — the spectacle of protest and flag has unveiled a fearful and increasingly ambiguous new front.

In their 2021 book Technopopulism, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti argue that our populist era has created a new political logic, one which mixes the rhetoric of populism with technocratic fixes to ensure, amid the illusion of anti-establishment upheaval, ample opportunities for existing elites, and indeed even challengers, to preserve their authority while maintaining the basic contours of the status quo.

At the forefront of this new political logic is a cynical appeal to both technocratic competence and the idea of the “popular will” — an empty sop for political parties marooned between the chasm that now exists between politics and society. The outcome, Bickerton and Accetti argue, is a kind of confidence trick, a “permanent campaign” that, if dealing with particular policy problems, ultimately obscures the more existential issues that underpin them.

Certainly, this framing takes us closer to the unspoken dilemma at the heart of British politics as politicians vie to control the public mood: can Britain’s malaise be solved solely through tackling illegal migration via technocratic wheezes? From reforming the ECHR to reviving the Rwanda plan, it’s an approach increasingly embraced across Westminster. Yet as the protests and flags suggest, and Courtney and her mum do too, fights over hotels have morphed into something more existential: the anxious, fragmenting drift of life in 21st century England after two decades of a failed economic consensus driven by a policy of mass migration.

Portsmouth is the epitome of this new politics. A city transformed over the last two decades, its port and industry have been replaced by a Blairite emphasis on higher education, creativity and public service. All the while, a cadre of property developers have turned the city into a kind of halfway house, converting its dwindling housing stock of Victorian villas and former social housing into HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation). All told, Portsmouth today has roughly double the national average of such properties.

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This transformation of the city has turned the fading Blairite vision into an ironic receptacle for new residents, an increasingly insecure realm filled by downwardly mobile laborers, lower-middle class private sector workers; unemployed migrants; and now, via the hand of Whitehall, asylum seekers.

“The hotel has become a symbol of discontent with the government, over the level of migration and general unhappiness with how things are going,” says George Madgwick, Reform’s leader on Portsmouth Council. His response has been to ruthlessly exploit the city’s summer discontent, leaking a series of stories to the press over the council’s alleged attempts to “cover up” the identity of Royal Beach Hotel rapist.

“100% these protests will mark a seachange in driving out Labour,” Madgwick emphasizes. “I’m saying that because of what I see on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like this.” When I asked the council’s Labour leader if she agreed, she didn’t respond. Either way, Madgwick’s strategy feels especially fitting in Portsmouth. After all, the city is also at the forefront of moving asylum seekers into private accommodation, with the council describing it as a “sanctuary city” as far back as October last year.

And, sure enough, the most recent weekly protests moved on from the Royal Beach Hotel to the council offices. On the eve of this new demonstration, I again speak to Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots. “We don’t just want them to close hotels, we want them to stop using HMOs to house migrants,” he tells me. “The city has completely changed, it started a decade ago but since the pandemic it’s completely exploded.”

How will the group’s tactics change to reflect this new focus? “We have discussed protesting housing,” Barry says, “but we don’t want to do it down residential streets. But I am worried that if things don’t change soonish, people’s patience will start to run thin.” Other observers are also skeptical about Reform’s ability to control the discontent. “I can see a situation where individual houses start being protested against and it could turn nasty,” says Mark Zimmer, a former Reform candidate and now a member of Ben Habib’s Advance UK. “Reform and the other actors jumping on it don’t understand the fire they’re playing with.”

To prove his point, Zimmer takes me to a quiet residential road of terraced houses, where an HMO has upended this erstwhile suburban retreat. The sight of visitors investigating a rumored “illegal HMOs” draws out an interested group of neighbors. “This used to be a nice road,” says Diane. But, now she continues, no one has any idea who lives there, with the house in question occupied by Deliveroo drivers and other itinerant workers.

One night, Gary, who has lived in the street since 2019, was threatened by a man from the house who thought he was spying on him. The residents are supportive of the ongoing protests in Portsmouth, but now have their eye on a bigger prize. On 13 September, they say, they will travel to London to join a Tommy Robinson rally for the first time.

That South Coast suburbanites are openly aligning themselves with someone like Robinson is telling. As Bickerton and Accetti warn, in time technopopulism only heightens the conflict between the popular will and mainstream politicians: until both are hollowed out of all meaning. It seems clear, anyway, that the flags and protests will test the logic of Westminster’s political confidence trick. Even for Reform, courting the unrest may only serve to accelerate the system’s unraveling.

The day after this latest protest, I ask Courtney’s mom Sarah what she hoped to achieve from the ongoing protest in her city — now set to continue amid the Government’s use of HMOs to house migrants. “It’s not about victory,” she tells me, “it’s about having no faith in politics or government to keep girls on the street safe. Everyone needs to actually vote Reform to see if [Farage] is going to do what [he says].” When I ask what would happen if Reform failed to restore the Portsmouth she once knew, Sarah paused. “I don’t think I’m ready to answer that.”

Now, however, the town may become the latest flashpoint in the anti-migrant protests sweeping Britain. Last week, Ahmad Mulakhil, an Afghan asylum seeker, was charged with raping a 12-year-old girl on one of its suburban roads. Mohammad Kabir, also an Afghan asylum seeker, has been charged with aiding and abetting rape, strangulation and kidnap. Both men had entered Britain by crossing the Channel.

According to sources who spoke to the Mail on Sunday, local authorities fear that violent disorder might follow. Warwickshire Police, they claim, advised local councillors and officials not to reveal that the rape suspects were asylum seekers for fear of “inflaming community tensions”. “They’re hushing it up because they don’t want an Epping situation on their hands,” one local is reported to have said. A protest has already been planned for next Saturday.

Heightening the stakes is the fact that Nuneaton’s asylum seekers — including Mulakhil and Kabir until their arrests — are not housed in hotels but HMOs in residential areas. While the former have provided a focal point for demonstrations, they are also easily defended by lines of riot police. When spread out in residential streets, it is harder for the state to control or to protect small boat migrants.

Steven Elliot has lived on Cheverel Street, where the rape is alleged to have been committed, for the past 40 years. Taking a break from pulling up weeds from the curb outside his home, he pointed down the road to show me the house a few doors away that is set to become another HMO, and then the other properties further away that have already been converted.

Thanks to the transient population moving in, he now feels that the area is becoming increasingly unsafe. Several months ago, eight young men were moved into the compact terraced house next to his. “I’m not happy,” he said. “I have a 12-year-old granddaughter myself.”

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His wife, Nuala, told me she has looked inside the nearby house that is being converted and thinks it is a bodge job thrown together by a rogue landlord. “Living in between two [HMOs] is not fair. A lot of strange ones are about. I think there are unofficial, illegal ones as well.”

Following the alleged rape, she feels that anxiety is rising among the area’s settled population. “Tensions were uneasy for a while, but now they’re through the roof,” she said. “We’re only at the first stages. It was a lovely quiet area before.” At one point, Nuala considered putting up a sign that simply read: “No.” The Elliots also said, however, that they had not experienced any trouble from their new neighbors. We keep ourselves to ourselves, Steven added.

The decision to ramp up the use of HMOs to house asylum seekers was taken by Labour after entering office last year. Mass accommodation sites in former military barracks and on the Bibby Stockholm barge had proven expensive and inhumane. In what was dubbed “Operation Scatter” the government planned to distribute migrants more evenly across Britain. Speaking last June, Angela Rayner said every borough had “an obligation to take their fair share”.

Alongside former care homes and student accommodation, HMOs, or houses in multiple occupation, provide a cheap solution. Typically converted from what was previously a single-family dwelling, they allow several people who do not know each other to live in separate bedrooms but with a shared bathroom, kitchen and living space. While this can provide a convenient setup for students and young professionals, they are also used to house those freshly released from prison and drug addicts. For many people living in areas like Cheverel Street they herald the imposition of disorder and the disruption of a tight-knit community.

With more than 25,000 migrants having crossed the Channel via small boat in 2025 so far, the state has rushed to keep up with demand. Earlier this year, Serco — which houses asylum seekers in the North West, the Midlands and the east of England — invited landlords to an event at a hotel in the Malvern Hills. The firm was looking, it said, for properties that could be leased for five years. “We are confident that our lease provision offers an attractive and competitive proposition within the industry,” the invitation added. On its website, Serco claims that it currently houses 30,000 asylum seekers in an “ever growing” portfolio of more than 7,000 properties. (Serco did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

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In Nuneaton, both Mulakhil and Kabir were housed in HMOs leased by the company. It was a scenario those living on Cheverel Street had resisted. One British-Asian man living on the road, who declined to give his name, told me dozens of local residents had written to Nuneaton and Bedworth District Council to oppose the introduction of eight-bed HMOs to the area. While a property can typically be converted into a six-bed HMO without planning permission, those housing more people must be signed off by the local authority.

“The council doesn’t give a shit monkey,” he said. He worried for his twin daughters, one of whom now lives next door to an HMO with the other just meters away. The asylum seekers he had seen seemed okay, though. “They have a lovely life,” he laughed. “The Government pays for everything.” For him, the imposition of migrants upon his community was just the latest sign of the area’s decline. Leading me around the corner, he pointed out a fly-tipped mattress and sofa. The council will come and take away rubbish, he said, but they could not seem to stop people from dumping more in its place.

Though he wished the HMOs would leave, he added, he was now also worried about demonstrators travelling to Nuneaton because of the alleged assault. “People from outside will come in and see me and see my daughters with dark skin,” he said. “Protesters don’t care that we contribute to society — my daughter is a nurse, she looks after everyone, whether they’re white, brown, black or green. White extremists won’t see that and put us all in the same barrel.”

Clare Golby, a Conservative former deputy leader of Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council who herself lives close to Cheverel Street, said she was sure locals would turn out to protest next weekend. It worries her, however, that her town will become a magnet for trouble makers on both sides of the debate.

In office, Golby claimed, she had always tried to prevent asylum seekers from being housed in the area. “The fact is Serco can and does do exactly what they want. They could come in and rent or buy up entire streets if they choose to and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. I would not facilitate them in this. My argument was always that I had families in temporary accommodation and 3,000 people on a housing waiting list and I refused to prioritize non-UK nationals beyond that.”

Many residents of Nuneaton are furious at the degradation of their community, she added. “Our rental market is out of control, Serco are certainly having an impact on this by hoovering up tenancies, leading to more homelessness and extra financial pressure on local councils, who then pass this on to the council tax payer.”

Inside the Coton Sports and Social Club at the end of Cheverel Street, several punters had not yet heard about the alleged rape. They were united in their disdain for the Government, however. Duncan Clark, standing at the bar in a purple polo shirt, insisted that the prime minister had been soft on crimes committed by Muslims. “Starmer and Reeves are the biggest wankers ever to run this country,” he said with a grin.

His friend, wearing a pink polo shirt, agreed. “This fucking country is on it’s arse,” he said. “If the Government was run properly people like that wouldn’t be here. If I had my way we’d hang, draw and quarter them. They’ll get a slap on the wrist, six months.” Asked if he would attend the protest, Clark said he was too old. “But,” he added: “I’ve got a feeling that this country will go ballistic.”

When I knocked at the door of one of the HMOs on Cheverel Street, one asylum seeker from Guinea and another from Kuwait answered. Unable to speak English, they knocked in turn for Ali, an Iranian, who they hoped might be able to translate for them. After he emerged blinking and groggy from his bedroom, all three said they had crossed the Channel on small boats in the last few months.

The young men were polite, and seemingly eager to chat to a visitor, even if our conversation was stilted and conducted entirely through Google Translate. They had not heard that anyone had allegedly been raped on their street, they said. They liked the HMO, though, and thought Nuneaton seemed nice. They were glad to be in England. Had they had issues with their neighbors? No, they agreed. There had been no issues at all.

Each room, says Oliver, is occupied by at least one individual, though they usually won’t know or get to know the tenant living down the corridor. Most are young professionals, sometimes lifelong Portsmouthians, sometimes born outside the UK, but usually without any other means to clamber onto the housing ladder in a city where flats and houses are in short supply. But this isn’t a bad life, insists Oliver, himself a landlord. Though they usually stay for just 14 months, he says, HMO tenants benefit from an affordable, bills-included rental package and contribute to their local community — just like the six foreign-born tenants in the building, who all work either in the care industry or the local hospital.

It’s an image at odds with that of HMOs in countless local newspapers, Facebook forums and planning objections. From Bolton to Bognor, Durham to Dover, residents are up in arms, deriding HMOs as slum housing that brings only bored and boisterous tenants, each bringing anti-social behavior to the street, all while piling untold pressure on local services bled dry by austerity. In Derby, HMOs have already been blamed for causing a “spiral of decline” across the city, while in Oldham and Wigan, Spelthorne and Worcester, local campaigners have mounted protests against a “deluge” of these new tenements arriving in their neighborhoods.

Nowhere, however, have tensions escalated so sharply as in Portsmouth. Home to just over 210,000 people, most of them crammed onto 9.5 square kilometers of Portsea Island, competition for accommodation is fierce, with rents shooting up by 29% in recent years. Most properties on offer are flats, though while these command a much higher median rent than a place in an HMO (£1,125pcm versus £695pcm), the ability to charge slightly more per room often means that the ROI is generally higher. The result? Builders’ vans scurrying hither and thither under the screech of seagulls and the low burr of ships’ horns to plaster together new HMOs, while angry residents write increasingly terse objections to new developments.

Even getting an idea of how many HMOs exist is difficult. Officially, there were 4,326 such properties as of April 2024, according to Portsmouth City Council (PCC), though only 28% definitively possess a license to operate from the local authority (the absence of which, ironically, doesn’t automatically lead to the HMO’s closure). This confusion is reflected nationally. The most authoritative number for the total number of HMOs in England and Wales is 182,554 — figures that derive from the 2021 census and, judging from the leap in HMO developments reported in cities across the UK since (79 in Barrow-in-Furness; 141 in Filton, South Gloucestershire; 550 in Bolton), wildly unreliable.

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Data on who’s living in these properties is also sparse or outdated. Often marketed to single, “young professionals”, anecdotal evidence suggests that this means just about anyone who can’t afford to put down a deposit on a flat or a house. That was the position Mike found himself in. Like many people living in HMOs, he was at the start of his career when he rented his room in North End, Portsmouth, bills included, for just £550pcm.

“People come and go,” says Mike, who had his room for three years and broadly enjoyed his experience. “It’s not a lie to say that some people are a bit dodgy. The vast majority of people aren’t. They’re just people looking for somewhere to stay, not permanently, for a good price.”

Eventually, Mike saved enough money for a deposit on a house 10 minutes walk away from his old room. He doesn’t believe HMOs bring anti-social behavior, recalling how he was too busy treading on eggshells around his housemates to even think about throwing parties or being noisy. But what they do bring, he concedes, are cars. “There’s an HMO in my street,” says Mike. “A normal house might have one or two cars, but in an HMO, you might have five adults living there [and] they could have five cars.”

That problem should have been mitigated by Portsmouth City Council’s (PCC’s) decree that no HMO should be officially sanctioned if more than 10% of the homes within 100 meters are the same property type. “We, as a group, are fighting for 5%”, argues Russell Simpson, a councillor for the Portsmouth Independents Party (PIP) and one of the most anti-HMO voices in PCC. Simpson’s constituents are aghast at their streets being choked off by traffic, but they’re also echoing concerns similar to those in Derby, Durham and Dover about anti-social behavior and the erosion of community spirit. Undergirding all this is a growing sense of bewilderment at how the planning system consistently favors HMO developers.

“If they don’t get planning permission, they can still build it,” says Simpson, referring to how landlords use “permitted development” rights to renovate their properties into de facto HMOs without having to consult the council — before obtaining a license to operate as a fait accompli. The resulting tidal wave in the north of Portsmouth, argues Simpson, has led to a breakdown in community feeling amid the churn of new residents, with at least one couple approaching him to say that their row no longer feels like a “family road” but “broken.”

But where, then, do you put those people who need affordable housing? HMOs are the only answer right now, argues Martin Silman — but that’s not something the council wants to hear, says the chair of the Portsmouth & District Private Landlords Association (PDPLA). Instead, says Silman, the PCC has increased the regulatory burden for landlords, pushing what he estimates to be 1,500 rooms off the city’s rental market and the most vulnerable residents into emergency accommodation. Worse, certain councillors have actively whipped up animosity against both tenants and landlords by encouraging anti-HMO protests in the public gallery during planning meetings, and even going as far as to tell one developer in the same forum that she should “hang her head in shame.”

The atmosphere grew so feverish last year, says Silman, that the PDPLA chairman warned that a “potential HMO Kristallnacht” against landlords was in the offing. After facing down calls to resign for the comment, Silman says the rhetoric on HMOs from the council has cooled. Even so, he says, residents and councilors still “talk about mixed and balanced communities, and what they mean is, ‘We don’t want anyone not the same as the rest of us,’ which isn’t ‘mixed and balanced.’ It’s just the label gets hidden behind.”

Silman’s concern stems from his claim that a disproportionate number of HMO tenants in Portsmouth are foreign-born. Just how far such hostility might go can be seen in the apoplectic protests against some of the estimated 6,000 council-run HMOs for asylum seekers. Angry opposition to one such property in Millom, Cumbria, led to a ban on new licenses, but not before “NOT WELCOME SCUM” was daubed on one of the properties being converted, with a builder’s tires slashed too. In Wigan, meanwhile, locals complained that a surge in HMO development by companies contracted by the government to house migrants was making it a “dumping ground” — a sentiment seized upon by Reform’s Nigel Farage who, ever-eager to personify the threat he sees in the massive rise in net migration in recent years, echoed accounts from residents in Dover about bedsit-dwelling foreign men loitering in their streets and stalking their children to school.

Similar levels of hostility to privately-run HMOs seem to be percolating in Portsmouth, says Alwin Oliver, himself a landlord. “I haven’t seen anyone directly concerned about the color of somebody’s skin,” he says. “I think it’s a lot more subtle. It may even be unintentional… but, for example, we’re seeing people write objections to [an] HMO at planning stages because they believe that the people are going to be pedophiles, or what have you. And that kind of labeling, and stigmatizing, of HMO tenants, is at its most insidious when most of the people living in HMOs are born outside the UK.”

For his part, Simpson thinks these insinuations from Oliver and Silman are nonsense, a “made-up narrative” crafted to “dismiss and dilute [the] real concerns of residents” (a planning consultant for developers I spoke to also disagreed with the premise that most HMO tenants in Portsmouth were foreign-born). Such arguments certainly appear to be a leap when sifting through planning objections on PCC’s website. While many do mention safeguarding concerns about HMOs near schools and the demise of “mixed and balanced” communities, those points seem more inspired by the petitioner’s general gut feeling about the HMO tenants as itinerant wrong’uns, usually found at the bottom of a long list of complaints about unwanted pressure on local services.

For his part, Darren Sanders hasn’t heard any xenophobic comments against HMO residents. Meeting me in another small back room in the council’s oversized offices, the PCC’s Lib Dem cabinet member for housing, and an HMO tenant himself, carries all the garrulous charisma of an old pol, sympathizing with all sides of the debate while committing fully to none. Case in point: on the one hand, the role of HMOs in Portsmouth’s housing stock is “significant”, Sanders says, with many people unable to afford anything else. On the other, council inspections of licensed HMOs between 2018 and 2020 found that 32% of HMOs surveyed had “Category One” hazards — fire risks, black mold, structural defects and the like — compared to 12% in the broader rental market.

The problem, says Sanders, is that there’s little alternative to HMOs for affordable housing in Portsmouth. Not only did the government recently turn down an 850-home development in Tipner West: the site is, apparently, an irreplaceable haven for black-tailed godwits. Whitehall also raised the council’s housing target — an impossible diktat because, given the lack of space to build on Portsea Island, “we frankly don’t know where to put them.”

So, the council has tried to mend and make do, spending £100 million last year to buy back 570 council houses and convert them into council-run flats. It’s also trying to use its mandatory licensing framework for HMOs to favor good landlords and punish bad ones. But those efforts tend to be lost in public outrage at the planning system’s apparent sympathy with developers over and above residents. Sanders also claims that pushback on proposals by councillors is also discouraged by council bureaucrats. “I left the planning committee,” he says, “because I was told by the planning inspector that I didn’t know planning law, and if we carried on as the committee doing this, we’d get fined — even though, sometimes, you look at an application and imagine, ‘This isn’t a good place to live in.’”

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Jen, who speaks to UnHerd using a pseudonym, has heard it all before. A resident of North End since 2017, she lives with her son and his partner on a street with five HMOs, one next door to their own house. As we chat in a near-empty Costa, Jen laments how one bedsit after another have been built in anticipation of guaranteed planning approval, and how her row is now so choked with cars that she’s afraid to drive to see friends and family outside the city for fear of returning to a parking space three streets away and a long, painful walk home on her arthritic knee.

“They seem to be able to do stuff for people to buy, but not cheap enough to help people get on that ladder if they’re in these rooms,” Jen says. She also worries about her son and his partner, who can’t afford a flat of their own, while the value of her home is declining. In the meantime, things keep getting more tatty, more expensive, more cramped. And Jen’s getting angry.

“My issue is the way people are treated in them,” she says of HMOs, though she’s afraid that the conversation about them could easily get hijacked by residents with bigoted agendas if action isn’t taken. “I have said to the Labour [MPs] office that, very soon, I will look at a city-wide thing, to try and bring everyone together and fight it that way. But, I am concerned that [there] would be people that are fighting for the wrong reason.”

The trouble is, nobody seems interested in actually building the kind of homes HMO tenants can afford, let alone want to live in, with successive governments seemingly incapable of setting targets for affordable housing and housing in general that actually satisfy demand. Absent new houses, the money to build them, the transport infrastructure to knit them all together, and the bloody-minded will to slash through a planning system that rewards NIMBYism over necessary development, the rental market will adapt by reaping ever-greater profits on ever-smaller spaces — and leave residents, councillors and landlords continuing to blame each other for the squeeze.

As I turn onto the slip road to the M27 and switch the radio on to another asinine panel show, I think about what Jen says about not being able to see a dentist anymore, or her GP, or if there are children in the rooms next door now that she’s seen a couple of toys for sale in the front garden. I think of frogs swimming in a saucepan. My reverie slips when I spy a broken-down SUV on the hard shoulder. Metres away, a woman in a traffic warden’s uniform sits with her head in her hands.