A Long History of Control Through Land

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In order to understand the current crisis in the private rented sector, we must first look back — not just a few decades, but centuries. The story of housing in Britain is, at its core, a story of land, power, and the enduring struggle over who gets to occupy space, under what terms, and at what cost. The present collapse of the PRS — and the rise of corporate landlordism — is the latest chapter in a long saga that begins with the feudal system.

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The Origins of Housing as Power

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In medieval England, the concept of land ownership bore little resemblance to today’s ideas of private property. Land belonged ultimately to the Crown, and its use was granted down a strict hierarchy: from monarch to noble, from noble to vassal, and finally to peasant tenant farmers. These peasants — villeins, serfs, cottars — worked the land in return for subsistence and protection, but they owned nothing. Their security of tenure was informal, their rights contingent, and their lives governed by the needs and whims of their landlords.

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Housing, such as it was, existed not as a commodity but as a by-product of service and status within this system. A thatched cottage on the lord’s land was not a home in the modern sense, but a dependency — and eviction, while rare, was ruinous.

This dynamic — power and dependency rooted in land control — is strikingly relevant today. In an era of rising rents, corporate consolidation, and vanishing security, we see echoes of feudalism re-emerge, albeit in new forms: legal contracts instead of oaths, algorithms instead of heralds, eviction notices in place of banishment.

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Enclosure, Urbanisation, and Displacement

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The Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries were a turning point. Common lands, once accessible to peasants for subsistence farming, were fenced off and privatised. This displacement catalysed the rural-to-urban migration that would feed the Industrial Revolution, and with it, the growth of urban slums.

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In the crowded cities of Victorian England & Wales, landlords again wielded enormous power — this time in the form of tenement housing. The working class rented rooms in crumbling buildings owned by absentee landlords, while letting agents (or “house stewards”) collected rents and enforced discipline. The housing itself was overcrowded, unsanitary, and perilous — but again, those without property had few alternatives.

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The earliest housing reforms, including the Public Health Acts and building codes, emerged not out of moral concern, but economic and political pressure: unhealthy housing led to diseased workforces and social unrest. Even as reformers improved standards, the central dynamic remained: tenants depended on landlords, and landlords profited from scarcity.

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The Rise of Owner-Occupation and the Decline of the PRS

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The 20th century saw the first real shift away from the dominance of the private rented sector. Following the World Wars, a political consensus formed around the need for mass public housing. The rise of council housing offered working people an alternative to private landlords for the first time in history. Security, affordability, and decent living conditions were now seen as rights — not luxuries.

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At the same time, policies such as mortgage subsidies and the post-war boom in construction fuelled a growing middle-class dream of owner-occupation. For a few decades, Britain led Europe in homeownership rates, and the PRS withered.

But this reprieve was temporary.

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The Seeds of the Present Crisis

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The neoliberal turn of the 1980s — epitomised by Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy — transformed housing once again. Millions of council homes were sold off, often not replaced, and re-entered the private market. The birth of the buy-to-let mortgage in 1996 signalled a return to the commodification of housing, and a new era of amateur landlords renting to increasingly insecure tenants.

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Though the surface of the system changed — legal contracts replaced informal ties, and letting agents replaced stewards — the deeper logic remained: access to housing depends on wealth, and the ability to extract value from land is reserved for those who already have it.

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Today’s PRS is built on that foundation. The language has changed, the mechanisms have evolved, but the relationships of power remain startlingly familiar.

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Echoes of Feudalism in the Modern PRS

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The modern tenant may not toil on the land, but they often find themselves bound by financial obligations and systemic constraints just as rigid. The small landlord, once cast as a nimble entrepreneur, now struggles against regulation, tax, and corporate encroachment — much like a minor noble squeezed by court politics.

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Letting agents, historically intermediaries, increasingly find themselves caught between incompatible expectations: agents of service to landlords, caretakers to tenants, and now compliance officers for the state. Their role mirrors that of the medieval steward — caught between the estate owner’s interests and the villagers’ needs.

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In this light, the PRS resembles a neo-feudal ecosystem, where access to shelter — one of the most basic human needs — remains dependent on a layered and often extractive hierarchy.

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In the next chapter, we’ll examine how this historic logic played out in the post-war era and how the ideological shift of the late 20th century — particularly the rise of buy-to-let — laid the groundwork for today's increasingly unstable system.