Property

A powerful examination of how property shaped the modern world - and why it now threatens the freedoms and stability it was meant to sustain.

Property carries a great promise: that it will make you rich and set you free. But it is also a weapon, an agent of displacement and exploitation, the currency of kleptocrats and oligarchs. In Britain, it has led to a new class division between those who own and those who don't.

Property is a vivid, far-reaching analysis of our concept of property ownership, from 16th-century enclosures to the present day. It tells powerful stories - of life in the developer-led boomtown of Gurgaon in India, of the struggles to form Black communities in Missouri and Georgia, of a giant experiment in co-operative living in the Bronx, of the impacts of Margaret Thatcher's "property-owning democracy."

Above all, Property asks how we have come to view our homes as investments - and it offers hope for how things could be better, with reform that might enable the social wealth of property to be returned to society.

Wherever you are on property's wheel of chance, you are likely to be powerfully affected by it. Perhaps you have changed your life in search of a place you can afford. Or maybe you are a homeowner who worries about a crash in prices. Or perhaps you have found you are shut out of the magic kingdom of ownership and forced into paying high rents to indifferent landlords. This is a powerful examination of how property came to shape the modern world - and why it now threatens the freedom and stability it was meant to sustain.

'A rallying cry for a deep rethink of how we build, buy and manage homes.' ARCHITECTS' JOURNAL
'A calm analysis of the concept of property ownership, its promises, successes and betrayals.' THE SPECTATOR
'Moore situates property where it belongs - in the centre of virtually every aspect of our lives.' SUNDAY TIMES