Introduction
In February 2024, Rachel Hall published a piece in The Guardian on the changes Notting Hill had undergone 25 years after the film, exploring what had changed and what remained. Despite still retaining some of the landmarks that characterised the neighbourhood and featured in the film, the article echoed concerns about gentrification and the housing crisis that had fundamentally erased the area’s identity: “As with much of inner London, as it becomes more gentrified, the artistic community gets pushed further out because of affordability issues” (np). In the last decade, London, like many other cities, has rapidly shifted and neoliberal global phenomena such as gentrification or the housing crisis have accelerated. With rising rents and barely any social housing, many working-class residents have been forced to relocate. In the words of Peter Marcuse and David Madden: “The symptoms of housing crisis are everywhere in evidence today. Households are being squeezed by the cost of living … Evictions and foreclosures are commonplace. Segregation and poverty, along with displacement and unaffordability, have become the hallmarks of today’s cities” (1). As Marcuse and Madden note, UK tenants face acute exploitation as “public housing is being dismantled, and, as a result, tenants must turn to private landlords” (41). Oisín McKenna wrote Evenings and Weekends in this climate of precarity and what could be termed class diaspora outside the metropolis, reflecting how the dismantlement of housing becomes a form of classed violence that mediates all spheres.
The novel, like other contemporary works such as Holly Pester’s The Lodgers, Ella Frears’ Goodlord or Guy Ware’s The Peckham Experiment, explores the preoccupation with the housing crisis and its impact on the experiences and identity of the working class. It highlights how the relationship to property influences our own subjectivities, experiences, and aspirations. The story unfolds over a single June weekend, during which a heatwave suffocates London. McKenna highlights the contradictions of living in the English capital: young, working-class individuals feel drawn to the city to pursue their personal and cultural aspirations, but often find themselves excluded for material reasons. The protagonists, most of whom are in their late twenties or early thirties, struggle to find their place in a city that both captivates and rejects them.
This article examines McKenna’s portrayal of working-class youth in London, exploring the relationship between the housing crisis, precarity, and the classed experience of the city. To do so, this work proceeds in three sections: the first one analyses job precarity and gig work, where instability and housing embody the neoliberal liquid modernity; the second one examines sexuality and space via the characters’ flat shares and traumas; and the third traces the impossibility of the future through the characters’ expulsion to Basildon, linking the housing crisis to foreclosed aspirations and neoliberal logics. Rather than merely reflecting classed violence, the novel intervenes in urban debates on precarity. Despite the love letter to London, McKenna presents the city as an engulfing agent that allows the protagonists to explore and develop their own potential, only to deny them the same potential later.
Job Precarity
In his book Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, Loïc Wacquant identifies neoliberal violence in “1. Mass unemployment, both chronic and persistent, amounting, for entire segments of the working class, to deproletarianization and the diffusion of labour precariousness, bringing in their wake a whole train of material deprivation, family hardship, temporal uncertainty and personal anxiety” (24; emphasis in original). Ed Seymour’s opening scene in Evenings and Weekends brings to life that structural account of violence. He is a courier on the verge of a panic attack with a baby imminent:
It’s only 10 a.m., and he’s already lost out on earnings: he would normally have completed two or three orders by this time. He’ll take on more jobs today. No more scenic routes or toilet breaks. He’s got a baby on the way, and he can’t sleep at night for fear of how they’re going to pay for the nappies and the food, and God knows what else (McKenna 5)
McKenna’s narration reproduces Ed’s internal monologue through free indirect discourse, a device that remains constant throughout the novel. Popularised by Jane Austen, among others, it is a very classical device that, in this case, allows class anxiety to be rendered through consciousness itself. Ed’s courier gig epitomises the neoliberal project, what Zygmunt Bauman calls neoliberalism’s ‘flexibility slogan’: “‘Flexibility’ is the slogan of the day, and when applied to the labour market it augurs an end to the ‘job as we know it’ … Working life is saturated with uncertainty” (Bauman 147). The uncertainties Bauman mentions take their toll on Ed, making him riddled with anxiety and anguish. Despite other factors influencing his anxious state, the novel reinforces the link between such a paralysing mood and the perpetual insecurity all of the characters are more or less forced to endure:
Ed Seymour finishes work at 6 P.M. and cycles home through the Docklands and the City. Before this, he worked in a call centre for six years, then was made redundant, then was on Universal Credit, then they threatened to cut his benefits and he became too anxious to sleep or eat or even talk, so now he does this (McKenna 27).
The main reason for Ed’s mood is the precariousness of his job and, hence, of his life. Imogen Tyler attributes neoliberal “deproletarianization of labour (the liquification—or, indeed, the liquidation—of job security” to “widespread social insecurity”, naming this insecurity “an essential component of neoliberal governmentality” (191). Ed embodies the exact process described by Tyler, showing how class is both assigned to and experienced. Class is not merely an economic or social postulate, but also an affective one. Ed’s sense of temporality is deeply shaped by the precariousness of his class. Consequently, the daily routine becomes a grinder that crushes his aspirations for more, for something different: “His day never recovered from the morning’s panic attack. The feeling of near-death lodged in his lungs and all afternoon he carried the sense that there’s not enough time left. He wants more from his weekend than this. He wants more from this life” (McKenna 29). Ed’s state of permanent anxiousness is inseparable from the structural conditions of living in contemporary London. Tyler’s abstract reading of governmentality becomes, in the novel, concrete temporal violence:
Every day, he cycles from Hackney to White Chapel, from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf. Every day, he runs red lights, cycles on pavements, darts in front of traffic to deliver an order on time. Every day, he nearly dies; every day, a passing driver calls him a cunt; every day someone tries to fight him. Every day, he thinks of the vast amount of money needed to make this baby possible and every day, he pushes through his breathlessness to the point of choking (McKenna 28–29)
The writing reflects the character’s state; the stuttered syntax and repetitions evoke Ed’s breathless cycling, turning his exhaustion into a sensorial experience. He has not yet turned thirty, and he already appears to be exhausted, revealing class to be a lived affective infrastructure. Worn out by a job that offers him no protection whatsoever, he is very acutely aware of the difficult conditions he already experiences and how much harsher they will become if he and his girlfriend are to raise a baby.
In his book The Precariat: A New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing argues that a new class has emerged due to neoliberal policies and global economies. Standing calls this class in the making ‘precariat’, a product of the market deregulations, whose members are defined by temporality, instability, low wages, or the difficulty of planning a stable future, just as it happens to Ed. Standing illustrates how the precariat is linked to youth: “A feature of the restructuring of social income and wage flexibility has been the fall in wages and incomes of young people relative to their elders. Not only are more youth in precarious jobs, where wages are lower anyhow, but their bargaining position is weakened in accessing all jobs” (113). Standing’s precariat network perfectly matches Ed’s experience in London: his class defines not only social position and rent but also job access and a repressed sexuality. Beverley Skeggs argues that “[c]lass relations are dynamic forces that underwrite all social encounters. Capitalism is the inequality generator shaping how people live” (Skeggs, “Feeling Class” 283). As the sociologist points out, class relations form an assemblage that shapes our existence, operating as a form of inscription “that shapes bodies in the making of strata and behaviour” (Class, Self, Culture 12). Therefore, class is not something given but something in continual production (Class, Self, Culture 3), displacing working-class subjects into precarious jobs and unstable spaces.
In Evenings and Weekends, this inscription materialises through the characters’ housing conditions: Ed and Maggie’s damp flat becomes the source where “Ed’s childhood asthma has erupted again after two dormant decades, and a resignation to the landlord’s refusal to do anything about it” (McKenna 33), stratifying Ed and Maggie’s bodies into neoliberal precarity. The protagonists epitomise the structural fusion of class precarity and the housing crisis. Their accommodation is not accidental but structural, as Alva Gotby observes: “The people who are regarded as superfluous to the capitalist workforce are typically abandoned in squalid housing conditions, because whether they live or die is of little concern to the capitalist class” (65). The same market that has made low-paying jobs proliferate and wages stagnant, also inflates London’s rental market beyond reach, forcing working-class tenants into unhealthy accommodation that literally makes them sick, as happens with Ed’s revived childhood asthma.
Sexuality and Space
Life, especially for Ed, has become exhausting. The conditions he experiences in everyday life, especially his precarious job and his unhealthy flat, have a direct impact on his health; structural inequality becomes chronically felt. Laurent Berlant’s ‘slow death’ names this mechanism: “The physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence” (754). Berlant explains how that depletion shapes the biopolitical conditions of people: “The overwhelming present is less well symbolized by energizing images of sustainable life, less guaranteed than ever by the glorious promise of bodily longevity and social security, than it is expressed in regimes of exhausted practical sovereignty” (780). One of the examples Berlant mentions is sex. As members of the precariat, Ed and Maggie’s biopolitical conditions are affected by the slow death, and that also influences their sex life. Both are continuously exhausted by the all-consuming conditions of their jobs, and their lack of a healthy space to have sex in also affects intimacy and desire: “And why can’t they have sex now? What’s changed? Yes, they are stressed about money, yes, they are moving to Basildon” (McKenna 228; emphasis in original). Ed and Maggie have been subsumed by an exhausting routine that crushes their desire and hinders their intimacy; coupled with the lack of a proper space, they reduce their life to mere existence: “The damp in their bedroom has affected his breathing, his work, his sex life. The carpet has rotted, and Ed’s breathlessness has become chronic” (McKenna 10). Ed is paradigmatic of the slow death; his body is deteriorating through the structural conditions of the current capitalism. McKenna concretises Gotby and Berlant’s ideas through housing as neoliberalism’s most visceral mechanism: job precarity and domestic rot merge to produce bodily erosion, sexual dysfunction, and existential exhaustion. This structural violence extends beyond labour and beyond Maggie and Ed’s story. It also appears in Phil’s, another central character, where the desire for sexual freedom in the metropolis collides with how housing constrains queer spatial belonging and intimacy.
Housing forms the material basis of precarity in the novel, actively shaping the emotional world and social life of the protagonists. Beyond Ed and Maggie’s precarious jobs and damp Dalston flat, the novel’s second major housing narrative centres on Phil, Maggie’s best friend from their Basildon days, and also Ed’s acquaintance. Like his mates, Phil is also in his late twenties, having fled small-town bullying for being gay to seek the metropolis promise of queer visibility and belonging. However, the novel depicts how Phil’s aspirations of sexual freedom are crushed by London’s housing crisis.
London’s metropolitan freedom proves illusory, as it means entering into the depleting world of flatshares: “When Phil left Basildon at eighteen, he lived in a series of overpriced shitholes, sinks invariably filled with unwashed dishes and stagnant water, bits of mouldy bread and raw chicken floating on top, damp hovels on London’s outskirts” (McKenna 89). McKenna narrates how all the spaces Phil has been forced to inhabit in order to live in London are defined by instability, contingency, and poor conditions, the structural underside of queer, working-class urban migration. The spaces the protagonists inhabit are deeply shaped by class and defined by the social relationships embedded within them, making Doreen Massey’s relational spatial theory an ideal framework for understanding these environments. Space, Massey argues, is classed and relational, defined by openness and a multiplicity of elements, where ‘“places’ are criss-crossings in the wider power-geometries that constitute both themselves and ‘the global’” (Massey 101). Therefore, the spaces mentioned in the novel are both defined by and define the global. They are the result of an intersection of relationships in which those in the lower classes receive the worst outcomes. Ed and Maggie’s negligent landlord is not an isolated villain but a node that results from a network of relations. Similarly, Phil having to endure terrible conditions is the consequence of these same elements. It shows that neoliberal London is a contested space where the protagonists’ class and identity are shaped by their position in the weave of social and economic relationships.
Phil’s flatshares are also defined by commodification and standardisation. Houses lost their use value and are now defined by their exchange value in the housing market. Platform capitalism, as Nick Srnicek argues, makes lean platforms like Uber or Airbnb “operate through a hyper-outsourced model, whereby workers are outsourced, fixed capital is outsourced, maintenance costs are outsourced, and training is outsourced. All that remains is a bare extractive minimum—control over the platform that enables a monopoly rent to be gained” (43). This accelerates the standardisation, transforming domestic space into homogenous, interchangeable Airbnb spaces: “He lived in places that looked like office canteens or Airbnbs; a bowl of plastic fruit on a white plastic table, a canvas print of a New York yellow taxi, a London Underground logo painted on every door” (McKenna 89). Drawing on Frederic Jameson and David Harvey, Michael O’Regan and Jayeon Choe diagnose this process:
As the walls between intimate lives, social relations, community, and the market become permeable, what was once thought unthinkable to buy or sell has changed. While one’s intimate or private life will never be ruled by the absolute logic of market, Airbnb is driving a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, leading to the “reductionism of all beings and all cultural differences to a common commodified form” (6)
In the novel, McKenna highlights the fact that Philip has never been completely comfortable with his sexuality and identity, linking it to how, until now, he has never been comfortable with the spaces he has had to inhabit in London. Sara Ahmed theorises how sexuality is always spatial: “Sexuality itself can be considered a spatial formation not only in the sense that bodies inhabit sexual spaces, but also in the sense that bodies are sexualized through how they inhabit space” (67). In the novel, all the spaces Phil inhabits influence how his sexuality is oriented. In Basildon, in his parents’ place during his teenage years, his sexuality is oriented through secrecy and shame. When he moves to London, the places he lives in produce a sense of disassociation in him. The novel’s most harrowing spatial inscription occurs when Phil is raped, and even during the rape, he wonders about his rapist’s whereabouts: “Phil wondered if this man was originally from North London, maybe West London, and had moved to Camberwell in an early wave of gentrification” (McKenna 232). Amid trauma, Phil remains hyperaware of spatial politics, as the novel seems to suggest that identity cannot be disentangled from space. Identity is produced through space, and, as Ahmed underscores, so is queerness; it is shaped through the spaces we inhabit, it is an orientation. Throughout the novel, the fact that Phil can never feel at home with himself is tethered to the fact that he can never feel completely at home in London.
Phil’s discomfort and deferral start to change in his last accommodation, where he meets his flatmate and occasional sexual partner, Keith. The building is a commercial warehouse occupied by ten people near Elephant & Castle: “Most buildings in the area have been turned into luxury lofts … Sometimes, when older friends come to visit, they get a wistful look in their eyes and say they haven’t seen a place like this since the eighties” (McKenna 88). John Boughton dates this shift precisely: “The year that Thatcher became Prime Minister, 1979, represents a watershed in British social and political history in many respects but nowhere so than in the field of public housing” (Boughton 169). As Boughton explains, Thatcher was dedicated to rolling back the frontiers of the state and privatising property under the Right to Buy (169). Phil loves the idea that his house is an anomaly, a shared living accommodation that reminds people of the old days, with a sense of shared companionship. All of these factors make him feel, for the first time, at home: “The idea of living in a place which felt like an actual home was such an abstract concept that he didn’t even consider it to be possible within his lifetime. Now, Phil often goes into the kitchen to get a glass of water and ends up staying to talk for hours” (McKenna 89).
In the same manner that Phil can feel at home in a space for the first time, the spatial stability enables his sexual breakthrough. This is due to Keith, his flatmate. Post-rape trauma has often led Phil to feel dissociated from his body during the act: “When anyone has tried to fuck him in the past nine years, his body has entered a state of alert, in pain before even being touched. After sex, he becomes sad and ashamed” (McKenna 43). However, Keith breaks this pattern: “But with Keith, things are different. Keith has yanked Phil’s consciousness out of his mind and has placed it back in his shuddering body. Keith, in short, makes Phil feel real” (McKenna 43). McKenna seems to continuously link the notions of identity and selfhood with housing, also reinforcing the lack of stability most characters, as working-class individuals, experience. Phil’s romantic and sexual life mirrors the instability of his living situation. Keith shows Phil another side of sex, one of intimacy and care, yet this idyll remains frail and precarious. Keith is in an open relationship with another man, Louis, and that renders intimacy temporary and fleeting for Phil: “He’s jealous, and ashamed to resent someone so generally nice. It suggests a pettiness, a small mind, a far cry from the comradely goodwill and easy affection with which a truly radical queer would treat their partner’s other partners” (McKenna 83). Despite feeling guilty for not reaching the ideal radical queer ethics, Phil is jealous because his relationship with Keith is precarious: “Keith is a nightmare boy. It’s not that he isn’t kind, or caring, or a good lover, but he is unreliable” (McKenna 97; emphasis in original). Phil’s resentment is a reflection of the instability he faces daily; just as it is with Ed, intimacy is constrained by precarity. Phil has a job he hates, a guy he is in love with that he can only be with in stolen moments and a house he adores but is always on the verge of being evicted from: “It’s registered as a commercial address and although the landlord leases it for residential use, the tenants have no rights, no legal contract and they could be evicted in a moment’s notice” (McKenna 87). Therefore, Phil has no rights as a tenant; his job is temporary and so seems to be his sexual partner; as a result, all three basic domains of his life remain provisional. Against celebratory narratives of queer urban freedom, McKenna depicts how precarious housing materialises the instability that cancels the realisation of that promise.
Phil and Ed’s housing precarity produces what Peter Marcuse and David Madden call ‘residential alienation’: “The experience of residential alienation in contemporary society, therefore, is precarity, insecurity, and disempowerment. It is fostered by commodification, displacement, and dispossession, and exacerbated by inequality” (34). This structural diagnosis reveals Ed’s and Phil’s parallel struggles: Ed’s damp flat breeds chronic asthma, sexual dysfunction, and chronic anxiety; Phil’s warehouse enables Keith’s intimacy only through illegal tenancy, making queer stability and belonging perpetually provisional. Housing precarity can weaken emotional stability, the pursuit of identity and the experience of sexuality, as Marcuse and Madden highlight: “In these conditions, households cannot shape their domestic environment as they wish. They do not find expression and satisfaction in their housing. They struggle to fulfil their individuality and freedom in it” (34). McKenna makes this alienation and its affective toll explicit. Ed’s permanent anxiety and Phil’s feelings of jealousy over Keith demonstrate how temporality and instability are intertwined with sexuality and affection. McKenna seems to emphasise how the housing conditions shape urban precarity but also undermine the possibilities of selfhood. In the novel, the promises of freedom and development are always crushed by the weight of precarity, showing how London’s exclusions operate not only through material scarcity but also by shaping identity, selfhood, desires, and aspirations. Consequently, the sum of these factors forecloses a sense of futurity in the characters. If Ed’s body and Phil’s sexuality remain hostages of the precarious housing, Maggie has to face the ultimate consequence: expulsion from London and abandonment of her metropolitan dreams.
Expulsions and the impossibility of the future
In the novel, London is first depicted as a site of opportunities for the characters, as happens to Maggie, Ed’s girlfriend and Phil’s best friend. Growing up in Basildon, she dreamt of pursuing her artistic aspirations in the big city, and she made it: “Her first big height had been getting out of Basildon at seventeen and making it all the way to art school” (McKenna 72). However, Maggie realises soon enough that her urban university experience is going to be shaped by class and wealth: “Working to pay for materials and rent, it had taken almost a year to realise that most of the other students didn’t have to work, even though they lived in spacious central London flats. She hadn’t even heard of that kind of wealth before she moved to London. It was another world” (McKenna 72). As a working-class student, Maggie enters classed spaces at London University and astonishingly encounters a new type of wealth she had never even conceived before. The academic context and the cultural spheres are also shaped by class privilege, unable to be separated from economic inequalities. Nancy Fraser points out this relationship:
“Cultural norms that are unfairly biased against some are institutionalised in the state and the economy; meanwhile, economic disadvantage impedes equal participation in the making of culture, in public spheres and in everyday life. The result is often a vicious circle of cultural and economic subordination” (Fraser 72–73)
Maggie’s classmates can dedicate themselves to their art because they are backed by financial stability; they monopolise symbolic capital while she scrambles and struggles for survival. Sara Ahmed details the temporal stakes, that what one does and does not have can structure the way one feels, the way one understands time or the way one inhabits space: “This is another way of describing how social class involves the temporality of ‘the background,’ as what shapes the conditions of arrival: if you inherit class privilege, then you have more resources ‘behind’ you, which can be converted into capital that can ‘propel’ you forward and up” (Ahmed 137). Maggie’s classmates possess a symbolic and cultural capital that Maggie lacks because she lacks the propulsion, hence remaining stalled. Not only does Maggie see this class gap in her classmates’ flats and material, but it also affects Maggie’s performance in class and her own sense of self:
Two students spoke at length, using superfluous rhetorical flourishes in the hope of winning the tutor’s approval. Like the tutor, they spoke in North London accents, tinged by South London twangs. Their names were Ireland and Oslo—people with this accent were often named after European cities or former British colonies—and Maggie, who never spoke in class, envied them. She tried to gather her thoughts, plucking quotes from memory, putting one word after another, but class finished before her sentence had time to leave her mouth. (McKenna 68)
Just as housing and the job market, academic space becomes another classed enclosure, but it takes a subtler form here. Maggie’s failed attempt to participate in class reflects the affective dimensions of class dynamics. Her shame and hesitation to speak contrast with the fluency and ‘superfluous rhetorical flourishes of her peers’. Therefore, the passage emphasises how class capital determines even verbal performance. Beverley Skeggs describes this affective dynamic: “Even when inversion, reversal, or challenge to legitimacy and inequality occurs, these responses are shaped by the terrain of the class-infused social encounter, an encounter which is always a performance generated from the structure of class relations” (“Feeling Class” 283). The cosmopolitan names and accents of her classmates become markers of class and identity, signalling a space where Maggie is not included. They represent a symbolic and cultural capital Maggie lacks. Her aspirations are left stranded as a result.
Maggie is Ed’s girlfriend and, therefore, she also lives in the damp flat. After art school and her encounter with true wealth, she abandons her artistic career: “She doesn’t make art anymore. She just socialises in proximity to it. And now that she’s leaving Hackney, she can’t even claim that” (McKenna 37). Maggie bins her art supplies because she feels embarrassed by looking at them, signalling, once again, the affective dimension of class. She survives by working in a café and living in the damp flat with Ed. However, finding out her pregnancy prompts them to decide to move back to Basildon, forcing her expulsion from the capital: “In Basildon, she will have houseplants and also, a baby, therefore, will not regret her decision to leave. She and Ed will walk along the estuary with the child in between them” (McKenna 33). Saskia Sassen has long theorised about a new dynamic within our current capitalism: “We are confronting a formidable problem in our global political economy: the emergence of new logics of expulsion” (1; emphasis in original). According to Sassen, this is the neoliberal endpoint; Maggie’s thinking about moving back to Basildon is not a lifestyle choice; it is an expulsion. The new baby, housing precarity, and job insecurity make it impossible for Maggie and Ed to remain in London. Under this logic, Basildon represents a homely, middle-class fantasy that London is unable to provide: “And so she pictures herself in Basildon. She’ll be a person who owns houseplants. They will crowd her kitchen, hang from her shelves and climb her walls. She will consider whether they need more or less water, more or less light” (McKenna 33). The idea of having houseplants is very symbolic because it embodies the fantasy of domestic stability and a slower temporality that Maggie has not yet experienced. In London, with her precarious, damp flat and insecure job at the café, she does not have the time nor the energy to consider whether her plants need more or less light.
Maggie moved to London with the promise of pursuing a career in the arts and leaves it with dread and money preoccupations: “Of course, the money. The slow slog towards the back wall of their overdraft. Even at their most frugal—no holidays, no takeaways, no new clothes—they can’t afford their life in London, and that’s without a baby” (McKenna 10). London, as a global city, represents a financial power node of the global capital. This generates a network of structures that maximise inequality by promoting low-paid jobs and inflating the housing market. The result is the expulsion of those who cannot afford to live under that system, the working classes. London denies Maggie both the possibility of housing and the possibility of a future. The novel, therefore, reinforces the idea of relational space; Basildon is imagined as a relief because Maggie can no longer endure the stressful, expensive life in London. The periphery becomes aspirational because the centre is no longer holding the promise of tomorrow. Ali, Maggie’s best friend, summarises London’s unfulfilled promise with a colourful simile: “We’re all too busy trying to survive. I feel like living in London is like living on the constant verge of an orgasm but never being able to cum” (McKenna 71). This sudden eruption of Ali’s point of view through dialogue emphasises precarity’s collective dimension. Even if the three main perspectives are those of the protagonists, dialogue allows other characters to give their opinion, constructing a more pluralistic ‘state of the city/nation’ portrait. Ali’s words summarise the blocked, unfulfilled promise: London’s exclusions and expulsions are, therefore, material, spatial, and affective. The raw corporality of her simile underscores once again the class dimension, merging sexual frustration (as it happens with Ed and his gig job), temporal suspension (in perpetually denying the orgasm, there is a denial of the future), and the economic side of better wages that, like the cum, never arrive. Those unable to convert to the economic and cultural logics of financial capital in the global city are expelled to the periphery, crushed by the weight of their unrealised aspirations and expectations.
There is an explicit disappointment that resonates throughout the book and becomes clearer with Maggie. Once she breaks up with Ed and has an abortion, Maggie mourns the promises of the past and the disillusionment of the present: “She thinks of social housing. Her mother bought their terrace from the council when Maggie was four years old, and since Maggie moved to London nearly a decade ago, she’s only ever lived in ex-council flats. She thinks of the fifties and sixties, all those people who were finally given a secure place to live” (McKenna 307). The historical comparison emphasises how housing precarity mediates classed experiences. Whereas Maggie’s mum was able to enjoy a small, decent space, Maggie’s inability to find a space is symbolic of her inability to see a future: “How thrilling it must have been, to look towards the future and to see yourself in it” (McKenna 307). The housing crisis has turned into a time crisis. Maggie’s inability to anchor a proper adulthood in London reveals the capital’s neoliberal verdict: working-class futures cannot be built on rented damp flats or spaces on the verge of eviction, so they need to abandon their metropolitan aspirations.
Conclusion
Evenings and Weekends dissects the brutal contradiction of contemporary life in London with detailed, novelistic precision: a global city luring youngsters under the promise of artistic visibility, or queer freedom, only to expel them through class violence. The three housing trajectories in the novel show that class is far from a mere fixed income level but rather a material process, created through damp flats, eviction fears, and dreams of the periphery. The protagonists of the novel embody how class is not merely lived through income but through access to spaces. Ed’s Dalston flat revives his asthma and suffocates his intimacy; Phil’s Elephant & Castle warehouse allows Keith’s physical breakthrough, but solely through illegal tenancy; Maggie’s imagined Basildon houseplants are a symbol of the impossibility of reaching decent life standards in the metropolis. These are not backdrops but become plot engines that structure the novel’s affective architecture. The conditions of the place, the insecurities of the jobs or the unaffordable rents are markers of the protagonists’ lack of access to decent spaces where they can develop their identity and existence in peace, without stress. Hence, housing becomes the central arena of urban precarity where classed experiences materialise the most and, therefore, the novel’s structuring antagonist.
By narrating the consequences of inequality, gentrification, and displacement, McKenna’s novel affirms David Madden and Peter Marcuse’s claims about housing: “Housing is more than shelter; it can provide personal safety and ontological security. While the domestic environment can be the site of oppression and injustice, it also has the potential to serve as a confirmation of one’s agency, cultural identity, and individuality” (12). Thus, the housing crisis becomes a crisis of life itself, an existential rupture. McKenna highlights this ontology through the novel: Ed’s slow death, Phil’s disrupted spatial orientation, and Maggie’s expulsion from cultural capital pinpoint housing’s constituent role in neoliberal subjectivation. This loss extends beyond property to identity itself. Shame, dissociation, and exhaustion emerge as precarity’s spatial dialectics, each linked to the different spatial shortcomings. Through formal choices such as the sometimes-Austenian dialogue as class revealer or the multi-perspective free indirect discourse, McKenna portrays housing as the novel’s central and hostile source of conflict. The damp flat inflicts class violence somatically on Ed and Maggie; the warehouse does not merely frame queerness, but conditions queer becoming, and the houseplant fantasy narrates the fate of a constrained future. Therefore, Evenings and Weekends transforms the housing crisis into the narrative force that generates every major conflict, blocked promise or emotion in the text. Through damp flats, illegal warehouses, and imagined Basildon fantasies, McKenna shows how neoliberal London goes beyond excluding the young working-class; it structurally blocks them from becoming who they might have been. The houseplant fantasy does not just show Maggie’s disappointment, paradigmatic of a whole generation, but it also reveals why working-class futures cannot exist in neoliberal London.