Glasgow rent strike
In 1915 in Govan, just south of the river Clyde in Glasgow, bands of women torpedoed flour bombs at creeping eviction enforcers from the towering windows of their tenements. Exasperated by increasingly predacious landlords and the rising rate of evictions for those that couldn’t make their rent, and armed with a sound understanding of the sticky power of flour in the UK’s rainiest city, the women organised. A carefully coordinated eight month rent strike followed, and working class women paved the way for the Rent Restrictions Act 1915, Britain’s first form of rent control.
Such regulation of private landlords survived throughout the majority of the 20th century, and maintained a delicate balance of power between them and renters. The costs facing private tenants grew roughly in line with those of buyers. Rents, on the whole, were affordable. Margaret Thatcher soon sorted this, however, when in 1988 she introduced the Housing Act which deregulated the private rental sector and effectively killed off rent control in the UK.
