Our team

Katherine Brickell
Co-investigator

Katherine is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London and is best known for her feminist and legal-oriented geographical research on home and its unmaking. She has longstanding expertise in studying household debt in people’s everyday domestic and working lives, including its gendered dynamics. Her books include Home SOS (2020), The Handbook of Displacement (2020) and Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017). With Mel Nowicki, Katherine has a decade of experience co-researching family homelessness and Temporary Accommodation in London, Greater Manchester, and Dublin.

Mel Nowicki
Co-investigator

Mel is Associate Professor in Urban and Social Geography at Oxford Brookes University, and Visiting Associate Professor at King's College London. Her research explores the lived experience of housing precarity. Her current research focuses on the rise of family homelessness and Temporary Accommodation in the UK and Ireland, and understanding how shrinking domestic space is shifting our expectations of home. Her first book, Bringing Home the Housing Crisis: Politics, Precarity and Domicide in Austerity London, was published by Bristol Policy Press in 2023.

Shared Health Foundation
Project partner

Shared Health Foundation is a clinically-led and evidence-based non-profit, passionate about reducing the impact poverty has on health. SHF primarily support homeless families in Greater Manchester. They also campaign for policy change and are co-secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation. With the APPG HTA, they are currently leading the SAFE Campaign to place a statutory obligation on local councils to notify a child’s school and GP when a family becomes homeless.

Wates Family Enterprise Trust
Project partner

Launched in 2008, WFET is an independent charity which supports thought leadership to tackle the critical challenges of quality and quantity of homes in the UK. This includes improving understanding of the triggers leading to homelessness.

Impact on Urban Health
Project partner

Urban areas, like inner-city London, have some of the most extreme health outcomes. Alongside their vibrancy and diversity sit stark health inequalities. At Impact on Urban Health, we want to change this. We believe that we can remove obstacles to good health, by making urban areas healthier places for everyone to live.

People’s Health Trust
Project partner

People’s Health Trust believes in a world without health inequalities. People are dying too young because of where they live or who they are. Since 2011 People's Health Trust has partnered with a vibrant network of over 3000 community organisations across Great Britain, supporting them with funding at a grassroots level to find vital and timely solutions to tackle the causes of poor health.

Maureen and Derek Morton Trust
Project partner

The Maureen and Derek Morton Trust is a small grant making trust focused on supporting innovative organisations and projects tackling inequality. The Trust has a particular interest in preventing and addressing homelessness.

Chartered Institute of Housing
Housing allocations policy collaborator

CIH are the professional body for people who work in housing, the independent voice for housing and the home of professional standards. The Debt Trap team are working closely with CIH’s Policy Leads Stephanie Morphew and Sam Lister.

Fraser Curry
Research assistant

Fraser is a PhD student at King's College London researching housing, urban popular economies and political ecology. His doctoral research explores post-war histories of migration to West London and the role that kinship, familial and community relations play in finding and financing housing. Previously, he has worked on property guardianship in Senegal, young people's social infrastructures in East London, and social housing policy in the UK. He holds an MSc in Urbanisation and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Miranda Keast
Consultant

Miranda is an independent consultant who combines an extensive background working in leadership roles in the homelessness sector with strong research experience. She is currently undertaking a professional doctorate in social policy at Cardiff University exploring how homeless migrants experience the making of home in the UK. In the last four years she has led and developed research and network coordination projects for organisations such as Shelter, Crisis, the Museum of Homelessness and Housing Justice.

Claire Brickell
Consultant

Claire Brickell is an award-winning public sector research leader with over 15 years of experience across academic and government sectors. She specialises in taking a user centred approach to knotty policy problems and draws on an extensive methodological toolbox from social research and digital paradigms. Claire holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and previously led research teams across four government departments.

Bison Bison
Book cover and graphic design

Bison Bison is a D&AD award-winning graphic design agency based in London.

Di Boyle
Illustrator

Diana is a freelance illustrator/artist living and working in Alberta, Canada.