CITY has, from its inception, paid close attention to London, to the ‘World…’ or ‘Global City’ ideologies underwriting its concentration of wealth and of poverty and to challenges from among its citizens to the prevailing orthodoxy. This paper focuses on London’s extreme experience of the housing crisis gripping the UK —itself the European nation with the fastest long-term growth of average house prices and widest regional disparities, driven by overblown financialisation and the priviledging of rent as a means of wealth accumulation, often by disposession. Londoners’ experience stems partly from four decades of neo-liberal transformation, partly from acellerated financialisation in the last 2 decades and is now being acellerated by the imposition of ‘austerity’ on low- and middle-income people. The social relationships of tenancy in social housing, private tenancy and mortgage-financed owner-occupation are, however, divisve and the paper ends by identifying what may be the beginning of a unified social movement, or at least a coalition, for change.