Читать книгу The Autonomous City - Alexander Vasudevan - Страница 9

Asses, swine, have litter spread,

And with fitting food are fed,

All things have a home but one,

Thou, Oh Englishman hast none!

Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’¹

I was homeless, pissed off, had nowhere to stay

Half of fucking London tinned up and grey

It was then that I noticed every flat in the block

Had a squatters legal warning and a newly fitted lock.

Goodbye bed and breakfast, farewell rent

Why not force a window and take up residence.

Squatters’ song²

In 1994, the artist and photographer Tom Hunter began to construct a model of the street in Hackney that had been his London home since 1991. Hunter was part of a community of over a hundred squatters who had occupied a series of Victorian terraced houses on Ellingfort Road, a narrow side street that ran under the Great Eastern Railway line and connected Mare Street with the eastern edge of London Fields. By the early 1970s, many of the houses on the street were run down and in need of serious repair. The London Borough of Hackney (LBH) elected to purchase many of the houses as part of a plan to create an Industrial Improvement Area. Existing residents and businesses were evicted.³

Squatters soon moved into some of the empty buildings. A group of travellers occupied the yards. While some houses on neighbouring Martello Street were converted into studios with the help of the artist-run organisation Acme, the majority of houses on Ellingfort Road remained empty. Between 1985 and 1992, they were occupied by squatters who transformed the street into a vibrant community. Garden walls were knocked down to create a community garden while a former motorcycle repair shop became a café. There was even a city farm with chickens and goats. As Hunter later recalled, ‘It was all very varied … Two doors down the guys were motorbike dispatch riders – they’d save up enough money and go off to the Far East for a few months. Next door to me there was a builder, and a girl who worked in a casino as a croupier. There were charity workers, people doing hardcore labouring jobs, and others who were saving up. It was a really good mixture.’⁴

The threat of eviction only served to galvanise the community. In 1994, the LBH unveiled new plans to demolish the houses in order to make way for a new industrial zone that included a frozen chicken warehouse. The squatters as well as other local residents and businesses resisted. They formed the London Fields Renewal Partnership and drew up an alternative plan for the neighbourhood.⁵ In the case of Tom Hunter, resistance also assumed a decidedly aesthetic form. He was in the midst of constructing his final submission for the degree show at the London College of Printing. With his friend, James MacKinnon, Hunter constructed an exact replica model of the street he lived on.

Hunter began by producing a series of 5 × 4 transparencies using a large-format camera. The transparencies as well as other photographs were combined with wood and cardboard to make the final model. The Ghetto, as it was known, painstakingly recreated the exteriors of the squats as well as the lit-up interiors of the rooms, complete with the people who lived there. In Hunter’s own words, ‘I wanted to make a document of the area before it was bulldozed, that was the idea. Because I wanted to represent everyone’s houses before they were all destroyed so that in generations to come they could see what was there.’⁶ ‘I was trying,’ Hunter added, ‘to get people to look at the urban landscape, for people to look at my friends and the way they live and see that it was quite beautiful and worth having a look at.’

The final model quickly became a cause célèbre attracting attention from The Guardian and Time Out, as well as the Museum of London. With the media spotlight on the local neighbourhood, the LBH backed down and initiated negotiations with the squatters. It was agreed that the squatters would form a co-operative to purchase and rehabilitate the houses using borrowed money from a housing association. Hunter’s own life took a different turn as he set off across Europe in a repurposed double decker bus named Le Crowbar as part of a touring convoy that organised free gigs, raves and festivals.⁷ His model neighbourhood, in turn, became part of the official exhibition at the Museum of London and is currently on display in the ‘World City Gallery’.

The model as well as the series of photographs produced by Hunter is just one of many attempts by London’s squatters to record their own actions. This is a community that has, over the past few decades, devoted significant energy to archiving their own practices and representations and to documenting the spaces they created and the identities they performed, often in the face of their imminent destruction. Memory, as we’re often told, is productive. It produces archives, bodies of writing, ways of being and talking. For London’s squatting community, the makeshift archives they produced were conscious acts of remembrance rooted in wider struggles over the city’s past, present and future.

London is a city that has been continuously made and remade through struggles over space, whether as buildings, commons or communities.⁸ Squatters have occupied an important if overlooked place within these conflicts, especially as ‘squatters’ rights’ have, until recently, encouraged Londoners to house themselves.⁹ As the organisers of a 2013 exhibition, Made Possible by Squatting, concluded, ‘historically, squatting an empty building has been a way to create a temporary home. The occupation of an empty building may last days, weeks or years, but once evicted, buildings are eventually demolished or redeveloped along with the lives that were lived inside them.’¹⁰ While some of London’s squatted spaces have endured and survived, many simply vanished without a trace. For many squatters, holding on to the fragments and remainders of these spaces, not to mention the actions which animated them, matters.

The desire to assemble such an archive has always been loaded with ‘emotional urgency and need’.¹¹ It is, on the one hand, shaped by a conviction that ongoing forms of squatting must necessarily emerge from a historically grounded understanding of their own past. On the other hand, it is driven by a commitment to capturing something of the experience of being part of a movement.¹² These are archives that provide us with important clues into what it meant (and means) to be a squatter in London.

They point to the often precarious forms of survival sought by some of London’s most desperate residents. And yet, they also show that the squat was a place of collective world-making: a place to express anger and solidarity, to explore new identities and different intimacies, to experience and share new feelings, and to defy authority and live autonomously. It is perhaps no surprise that the history of squatting in London has always been characterised by its sheer diversity, attracting students, apprentices, runaways, workers, drop-outs, anarchists, punks, gay and lesbian activists, queer and trans groups, black nationalists, migrants, refugees and environmentalists.

With the exception of Squatting: The Real Story, an edited collection first published in 1980, the complex and ever-changing histories of squatting in London and elsewhere have, however, received little sustained attention. A whole host of practices and subcultures and the different spaces (art spaces, bookshops, crèches, free schools, protest camps) they created and supported have been largely neglected. These are histories that demand to be written.¹³

In the case of London these are, in turn, histories that date back to the late 1960s, though there origins are much older. As the activist and former squatter, Ron Bailey, reflected at the time, ‘the current squatters movement was born in 1968 but, like all new-born organisms, the seed had been sown long before’.¹⁴ According to Bailey, after the First World War a sharp rise in unemployment prompted many men to seize empty municipal property with a view to setting up relief organisations within local neighbourhoods. Rent and rate strikes were also common, especially in the East End.

A number of historians have shown that the interwar years were also marked by a significant rise in self-build housing on marginal plotlands near London, most notably in Essex, on small patches of land that were no longer used for agriculture (known locally as ‘three-horse land’) as well as reclaimed coastal sites including Jaywick Sands and Canvey Island. Colin Ward reminds us that ‘plotlanders’ were not squatters in any strict sense. Most had, in fact, paid for their sites which were slowly and incrementally transformed from makeshift army huts, chalets and sheds into more permanent forms of housing. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act put an end, however, to this kind of ‘self-help house-building’.¹⁵

It was with the end of the Second World War, that squatting re-emerged on an unprecedented scale.¹⁶ These were campaigns that began in 1945 as a direct action movement against rising homelessness and the lack of social housing for veterans and their families. The returning soldiers responded by seizing empty properties. In Brighton, a group of veterans (known as the ‘Vigilantes’) occupied three empty homes in which the families of servicemen were installed.¹⁷ Other properties across the country were also squatted, many of which were located in south coast resorts and had been left empty to profit from high holiday rents during the short summer season. The movement soon expanded to the mass takeover of service camps and, by October 1946, there were 39,535 people squatting in 1,038 camps in England and Wales. There were a further 4,000 squatters in Scotland.¹⁸

The government clamped down on the campaign, focusing in particular on squatters in London who had begun to occupy a number of high-profile buildings including a series of luxury flats in Duchess of Bedford House in Kensington. What became known as the ‘Great Sunday Squat’ was organised by members of the Communist Party who were successful in moving over one hundred families on 8 September 1946 with the help of the Women’s Voluntary Service, as well as police officers who carried luggage for the squatters. So many people turned up hoping to be housed that Communist stewards were forced to scour the neighbourhood for additional housing. Eight other empty buildings were found and taken over. Other would-be occupiers were moved to a building in Marylebone. A further two buildings were squatted the next day in Pimlico and St John’s Wood.¹⁹

The squatters’ own case histories provide a glimpse into the kind of housing insecurity they and many others faced:

‘Husband, wife, 5 children …

2 Rooms, one very small used as kitchen. All slept in one room.

Shared lav. In bad repair.’

‘Husband, wife, 2 children under 14, baby expected.

Room damp infested. Officially overcrowded.’

‘Husband, wife, 4 children …

Had two rooms, but one burnt out so living in one room. Beetles, damp and rot.’

‘Widow, 3 girls … Three rooms basement and ground floor.

Running with water and ceiling falling down. Slugs and beetles all over floor, climbing on tables and shelves. Rats.’²⁰

While the actions of the squatters were generally well received in the press, and even celebrated in some quarters as an expression of English patriotism, the government took a firm stance.²¹ Possession orders were served on the leaders of the movement. The Cabinet also instructed the Home Office to draft a new law that would make squatting a criminal offence. At the same time, a more heavy-handed approach was adopted by the authorities. Guards were placed on empty buildings across London. Some houses were blockaded by the police. Food and other supplies including bedding were prevented from reaching them, though in the case of the squatters in St John’s Wood, an elaborate pulley system to deliver supplies from a neighbouring house was devised.²²

In the face of intense pressure, the occupations in London quickly crumbled. The Communist Party backed down despite plans for a new wave of occupations. The government seized the opportunity, issuing a statement promising immunity from prosecution to any squatter who was willing to leave voluntarily.²³ Efforts were also made to secure temporary accommodation for those who would otherwise be homeless. The plans for new criminal legislation were quickly scrapped. While there was some resistance, the squatters reluctantly caved in. The occupants of Duchess of Bedford House left on 20 September accompanied by a small marching band. They were moved to an Old Ladies Home in Hampstead along with other squatters from across the city.²⁴

The squatted service camps were equally successful. Many were handed over to their occupants, though over time they were incorporated into the wider public housing system and used by social services to house homeless families well into the 1950s. As a series of reports produced by Mass Observation in the late 1940s and early 1950s show, the majority of the camp ‘squatters’ were not politically motivated or committed to the overthrow of private property. They were driven by a more immediate need to secure housing. This was, as one commentator later opined, ‘mass action by ordinary people’ who turned to squatting as the only possible way to try and get a decent home.²⁵ As the conditions in the camps worsened over time, many of their occupants simply left.²⁶

The 1945–6 campaign served as an important if often forgotten point of reference for the next wave of squatting which emerged in London and elsewhere in the UK in the late 1960s. The main impetus for the so-called ‘rebirth’ of the squatting movement came from activists linked with the Committee of 100, a nuclear disarmament group, and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Others belonged to a series of equally small groups such as the London Anarchists, the East London Libertarian Group, Solidarity and Socialist Action.²⁷ Many were also involved in a series of direct action struggles that targeted the poor living conditions faced by many working-class families living in temporary accommodation or Greater London Council (GLC) slums in and around London. Local authorities had a statutory duty to house families, though they were often dispersed or put into hostels where the conditions were usually poor.²⁸ It was against this backdrop, moreover, that Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home, a film documenting the experience of homelessness in the UK, was first televised, sparking widespread anger and concern. Both Crisis and Shelter, national charities dedicated to the fight against homelessness, were also set up in the wake of the film.²⁹

While Crisis and Shelter worked closely with local authorities, others advocated a more militant self-help approach. The London Squatters Campaign was, in this way, formed on 18 November 1968 during a meeting hosted by Ron Bailey. The aim of the campaign was to rehouse families from hostels or slums by ‘means of squatting’. As Bailey added:

We hoped that our action would spark off a squatting campaign on a mass scale, and that homeless people and slum dwellers would be inspired to squat in large numbers by small but successful actions … We saw our campaign as having a radicalising effect on existing movements in the housing field – tenants associations, action committees, community project groups, etc. If these could be radicalised and linked together then we would really have achieved something.³⁰

On 1 December 1968, activists from the campaign linked up with a small group of homeless families to occupy an empty block of luxury flats on Wanstead High Street that had been vacant for over four years. A second occupation of an empty vicarage in Leyton followed on Christmas Day. While the occupations were largely symbolic in nature, the campaign escalated in the new year as its organisers began to install homeless families into a series of properties in the London Borough of Redbridge. Redbridge Council had been planning a major redevelopment scheme in Ilford, though it had not been approved by the Ministry of Housing. The council nevertheless chose to leave a number of houses in the neighbourhood to rot (some for over ten years), though they remained in good condition.³¹

Beginning in February 1969 and over the course of the next six months, a total of seventeen houses were squatted by thirteen separate families, one of whom had been homeless for over twelve years.³² The council responded by taking the squatters to court. In one particular case, they applied to the Barking Magistrates Court for restitution of a property under the 1429 Forcible Entry Act. A breach of the act would have given the council the opportunity to apply to the local magistrates to clear the premises, arrest the occupiers and hand the property back to them.

As it happened, Ron Bailey was sitting in the public gallery as the council barrister argued that the squatters were ‘forcibly detaining’ the premises. The magistrates insisted that they view the premises to see for themselves whether this was indeed the case. Legally, it was within the right of the squatters to refuse to grant the owner access to the property. They were obliged, however, to provide access to the magistrates. Bailey later recalled how he had to dash from the courthouse to the property in question (a house on Cleveland Drive) in order to warn the occupants that the magistrates were on their way and that they were to be let in when they knocked on the door. A couple of minutes later, the magistrates arrived and were shown in.

A few days later, they ruled in favour of the squatters. They saw no reason to hand back the premises to the council, who sought an Order of Mandamus from the High Court. The case was ultimately adjourned sine die, with Lord Justice Salmon referencing an old case heard during the reign of George III in his speech. ‘The poorest man,’ he noted, ‘may, in his cottage, beat defiance to all the forces of the Crown. The storm may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England may not enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold of a ruined tenement.’³³

The Redbridge squatters were ‘in possession’ and the High Court therefore insisted that a court order was needed to evict the occupiers.³⁴ The council was successful in obtaining a series of named possession orders, which prompted the squatters to adopt a new tactic. The occupants simply swapped houses so that the people named on the possession order where no longer resident at the property to which the order was applied. The council was forced to start again.³⁵

Frustrated by the squatters’ success, the council resorted to more destructive measures. A ‘scorched earth’ policy was rolled out as council workmen were employed to gut dozens of houses in the borough. Floorboards were removed, sinks and toilets smashed, electrical fittings and wiring ripped out. They also turned to other forms of violence. A firm of private bailiffs were hired and carried out a series of illegal evictions in April 1969. A number of squatters were beaten up by the bailiffs, many of whom were sporting National Front badges.³⁶ As one squatter recalled in an affidavit describing their eviction, ‘I was never served with any court order ordering me to hand over possession of the property to the Council or to anybody else. I firmly believe that there was never any legal steps taken to make us quit the premises.’³⁷

The April 1969 evictions were a major blow to the Redbridge squatters, who regrouped and began a new series of occupations in June. They also made preparations in anticipation that the council would act quickly to clear them out. When the bailiffs returned to (illegally) evict the squatters, they were rebuffed and forced to strike a retreat. By this point, the struggles in Redbridge had reached the national press and a second unsuccessful attempt to evict the squatters on 25 June was featured in all the evening papers. Pictures of helmeted bailiffs attacking a house with bottles and bricks were greeted with widespread condemnation as public sympathy for the squatters grew. The squatters were interviewed by journalists from all over the world including Izvestia and Moscow Radio.³⁸

The media spotlight and negative publicity forced the council to back down and negotiate with the squatters. In July 1969, a formal agreement was reached, though some of the squatters were reluctant to vacate houses they had occupied and defended. They denounced the agreement as tantamount to ‘surrender’.³⁹ In the end, however, they voted two to one to accept the agreement. As a result, some of the squatters were immediately rehoused in permanent council accommodation, though it was only after a lengthy review that a number of empty properties were licensed on a short-life basis to homeless families in the borough.⁴⁰ Several properties were handed over to squatters on similar terms in 1972.

The success of the London Squatters’ Campaign triggered a rapid expansion in what became a mass movement of sorts. A number of short-lived campaigns came into being in Notting Hill, Harringay, Wandsworth, Fulham, Greenwich and Lewisham. While the squatters in Fulham adopted a defensive approach which ultimately contributed to their eviction, their counterparts in Lewisham, the South East London Squatters, began negotiations with the local council in order to secure empty properties on short-term licences.⁴¹

The negotiations lasted months as the Labour minority on the council attempted to block a deal with the squatters. An arrangement was nevertheless reached in December 1969. According to the deal, only families on the council waiting list were to be housed as licensees. They were required, on the one hand, to leave a property when requested and there was no guarantee that they could be rehoused. The same families, on the other had, had their points ‘frozen’ on the waiting list for a council house so that they would continue to be assessed on the basis of their pre-squatting points. It was, in this context, that the Lewisham Family Squatting Association was established. By early 1970, it was responsible for over eighty houses. Ron Bailey, one of the founding members of the London Squatters’ Campaign, was hired to help run an association that came to house over one hundred families at any given time over the next five years.⁴²

Licensed squatting was adopted across the city as councils in Camden, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich and Lambeth reached agreements with local squatting groups. It is also in this context that the Family Squatting Advisory Service (FSAS) was set up with funding from Shelter. The main focus of the FSAS was to provide support to family squatting groups who were encouraged to organise and run their own groups within a wider grassroots network. The FSAS also provided support on the legal and practical aspects of squatting, and by the end of 1971, twelve separate London councils had reached an agreement with local squatting groups who represented more than 1,000 licensed squatters.⁴³

And yet, the creation of licensed squatting was equally responsible for growing divisions between squatters, and raised important questions about what it meant to be a squatter and the extent to which squatting was still seen as a desperate if acceptable course of action. On the one side, were ‘responsible’ working-class families who squatted out of a desperate need for housing. On the other side, were growing numbers of young people – many homeless and sleeping rough in London’s parks or in ‘derrys’ – who were in search of somewhere to live communally.⁴⁴ It was the occupation of an empty fifty-room mansion at 144 Piccadilly by members of the London Street Commune in September 1969 that brought these divisions and tensions into sharp relief. The LSC, as it was known, was led by Phil Cohen, a former member of King Mob, an offshoot of the British Situationist International. Under the slogan ‘We are the Writing on your Walls’, the group was responsible for a number of high-profile occupations in 1969, including 144 Piccadilly.⁴⁵

Unlike the squatters in Redbridge, the ‘communards’ were widely criticised in the press as ‘hippie thugs’, ‘scroungers’ and ‘parasites’. Even the London Squatters’ Campaign were at pains to distance themselves from the occupiers of 144 Piccadilly who, in their eyes, were ‘simply amusing themselves’. The campaign issued a statement where they noted that:

Those of us who advocate and organise to secure the rights of the homeless and badly housed, are concerned to change and improve society – not to amuse ourselves. We have no intention of joining in the current anti-hippy chorus but we wish to stress the difference between the two types of operation.⁴⁶

The illegal eviction of 144 Piccadilly – the police entered the premises without a possession order – was widely celebrated in the press. An editorial in The Times went so far as to call for the criminalisation of squatting and argued that ‘if groups of hippies continue to roam from one unoccupied building to another, they could be prosecuted under the Vagrancy Acts’.⁴⁷

The legacy of the events of September 1969 was wide ranging. As a number of commentators have argued, it provided the ‘historical basis for later popular … media images of squatters’. At stake here was a distinction between so-called ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ squatters, between those who squatted out of immediate necessity and those who did so for cultural and political reasons. Out of these distinctions, a host of enduring media myths emerged which routinely portrayed squatters as ‘hardened political militants who lived rent-free on social security handouts, using the homeless for their own ends’.⁴⁸

A close analysis of the countless flyers, pamphlets and press releases produced by squatters and other activists during the 1970s yields a rather different picture. As Kesia Reeve has shown in a careful examination of over 430 documents produced by squatters between 1969 and 1980, of the 220 which clearly stated their objectives, all but twelve focused on addressing immediate housing needs (relieving homelessness, increasing supply of affordable housing, etc).⁴⁹

These needs only intensified in the early 1970s as neighbourhood gentrification and property speculation served to deepen an existing housing crisis. A growing number of people were frozen out of home ownership and were unable to secure a council tenancy. Rent hikes in the private sector combined with widespread displacement and a growing number of vacant properties, many of which had been left empty by borough councils pending redevelopment schemes which had not yet commenced or had been postponed or abandoned.

If there were roughly 1,000 licensed squatters across London at the end of 1971, there were fewer unlicensed occupiers. In the years that followed, however, it was a sharp rise in the latter that characterised the rapid development of the squatting movement in London. The geographical concentration of empty council property provided a critical mass of homes that, in turn, provided an infrastructure ideally suited for organisation and mobilisation. The numbers of squatters quickly grew and, by 1974, the number of licensed and unlicensed squatters in London had risen to 3,000 and 7,000 respectively.⁵⁰

Where possible, squatters targeted clusters of empty properties owned by local authorities. They were easier to hold – legally and politically – and doing so drew attention to the failings of the state in meeting their own stated obligations regarding the provision of affordable housing. A number of new groups sprang up that were, more often than not, rooted in neighbourhoods and grounded in struggles that were intensely local. This was reflected in the names they chose (the Islington Squatters, the Elgin Avenue Squatters in Maida Vale, the Finsbury Park squatters in Harringay, the Villa Road Squatters in Brixton, the Broadway Market Squatters Association in Hackney, etc.).⁵¹ It was also reflected in the infrastructures and tactics adopted by the groups. Local meetings were held regularly in order to generate support within the local community. Many groups also produced their own flyers and newsletters which drew further attention to local campaigns around squatting as well as wider political struggles.⁵² In some cases, squatters were successful in opening small offices that were used to share news and information, and provide support and assistance to people looking for a place to live.

At the same time, squatters began to move into privately owned properties in a series of high-profile actions. The most spectacular was the January 1974 occupation of Centre Point, a thirty-five-storey office block on Oxford Street that had been empty since its completion in 1963. There were other notable occupations during the same period. In Whitechapel, a block of nineteenth-century tenement houses on Myrdle Street and Parfett Street, was squatted in March 1972. The block was owned by Epracent, a small textile business, which was running the tenements down as the area had been marked for clearance by Tower Hamlets Council. The squatters were successfully evicted from a number of houses on Myrdle Street in February 1973 only to reoccupy a number of properties on neighbouring Parfett Street.⁵³ The houses were once again cleared. Each property was boarded up and a large Alsatian dog was led into each house. In response, the squatters hired a group of dog handlers who removed the dogs and took them to Leman Street Police Station as ‘strays’. They then moved back into the properties and were eventually able to secure licences from the council.⁵⁴

In Camden, a series of similar occupations began in 1973 in response to the activities of the Stock Conversion and Investment Trust, who were buying property and evicting tenants as part of future office development plans. On Camden High Street they were successfully stopped by squatters who occupied an old antique shop at number 220. In Tolmers Square near Euston Station, over forty-nine houses owned by Camden Council and Stock Conversion were squatted between 1973 and 1979. Many of the houses had been abandoned for up to eight years and were in need of serious repair. A number were painstakingly restored. A studio and workshop were established as well as a bakery, a wholefood store, a community garden and The Gorilla, a militant left-wing bookstore.⁵⁵ While Stock Conversion eventually took out summonses against the squatters, the company backed down in the face of widespread opposition. It finally agreed to sell its stake in the area to Camden Council in 1975, who went ahead with a scaled-back redevelopment of the square that included an office block and 250 public housing units.⁵⁶

There remains, for the most part, little real data on squatters during this period. A 1975 article by Nick Wates in New Society gives us, however, a glimpse into who actually squatted in Tolmers Square. These were not the layabouts or hardened revolutionaries of popular mythologising. Rather, they were a ‘diverse range of people with differing social status, age, wealth and attitudes’. According to Wates, of the 186 squatters occupying the square in June 1975,

There were 40 students, 16 white-collar workers, 16 workers in service industries, 13 artists and musicians, twelve manual labourers, twelve skilled labourers, eleven children, ten professionals, eight teachers, eight ‘housewives’ [sic], 24 registered unemployed, including a number of people in unclassifiable community activities, and six unknown.⁵⁷

Some squatters did come from decidedly upper-middle-class households. They were architectural graduates, trainee solicitors, medical students and teachers. Others were young people who arrived in search of a place to stay, including a pair of ‘junkies’ who had been trapped in the ‘hostel circuit’ and were looking for a home of their own. Most were young and in their twenties, though there was a group of older squatters. As Wates concluded, the square became a ‘haven for all kinds of social misfits’.⁵⁸

And yet, if these were ‘misfits’ in search of affordable housing, they all shared a desire to establish some form of alternative living. In the words of one of their counterparts in Brixton:

To me living in Villa Road means more than just squatting and living on social security; it means living amongst people who are trying to set up alternatives for themselves, and anyone else who can no longer accept what society offers or is doing to itself; alternatives, for instance housing and ways of living with people, education, community care, sex attitudes, work and technology.⁵⁹

The few modest surveys conducted with London squatters in the 1970s stressed the importance of housing.⁶⁰ But they also pointed to a correlation between the search for ‘suitable accommodation’ and the ‘need to live more communally’.⁶¹ Squatting opened up, in this way, new possibilities for the cultivation of alternative political identities and subjectivities. To be a squatter unsurprisingly meant many different things to many different people.

In East London, a group of feminist activists that were linked to a nationwide grouping, Big Flame, were developing ‘new models of working and living and organising’ in the early 1970s. Drawing on the work of groups such as Lotta Continua in Italy and Solidarity in the UK, the East London Big Flame (ELBF) challenged traditional forms of leftist militancy which, in their eyes, did not meet the needs of women nor address the problems that local communities of colour routinely faced. They advocated a form of autonomous politics that placed particular emphasis on ‘developing experimental ways of living and relating’.⁶²

The ELBF was active in East London between 1973 and 1975 and was involved in a number of different struggles that extended far beyond the workplace and included squatting on their own behalf and to support homeless families in the occupation of empty houses and abandoned blocks of flats. Members of the ELBF were also part of the Mile End Collective who were living in a number of houses around Bow. Two of the houses were squatted and one was used for the establishment of a community playgroup. A food co-operative was set up by the ELBF on the Lincoln Estate in Bow, though this was forced to close due to constant police harassment.⁶³

Other members lived in Tower Hamlets and played an important role in the Tower Hamlets Housing Action Group which brought squatters, tenants and other activists together to ‘do something to stop the destruction of their part of London’.⁶⁴ The Group helped to support the fifty families squatting Sumner House, an empty block of flats, in the autumn of 1974. ELBF members were also linked to the Bengali Housing Action Group (BHAG), who were installing families in properties on the Stephen and Matilda Estate near Tower Bridge in the mid-1970s.⁶⁵

The emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s ultimately played a decisive role in the establishment of a number of women’s centres across London including the South London’s Women Centre on Radnor Terrace in Vauxhall, the Crossroads Women’s Centre on Drummond Street near Euston and the Brixton Women’s Centre on Railton Road.⁶⁶ These were spaces grounded in struggles around women’s liberation and, as such, they provided a radical milieu where new forms of resistance against patriarchal power structures, endemic sexual violence and other forms of oppression were developed.

These were also struggles linked to the various histories of gay radical culture in 1970s London and the questioning of queer sexual identities that emerged during this period. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was, after all, set up in October 1970 in a meeting at the London School of Economics. The GLF drew inspiration from various liberationist groups in the United States and was committed to a social and sexual revolution that was predicated, in part, on experiments with alternative forms of communal living.⁶⁷

While the first incarnation of the GLF dissolved in 1972, the spirit of the original organisation was carried forward by local groups in London and elsewhere who were inspired by earlier GLF communities in Brixton, Notting Hill and Bethnal Green. In Brixton, beginning in 1974, members of the South London GLF squatted a number of dilapidated back-to-back houses on Railton Road and Mayall Road which were home to over sixty men and were later converted into a housing co-operative.⁶⁸ They also set up the South London Gay Community Centre at 78 Railton Road, which opened in March 1974 and was evicted in April 1976. The squats were widely seen as a pragmatic, practical solution to the challenges and difficulties of living a straight ‘separatist life’. At the same time, they also represented an ‘experimental space where men with loosely shared politics, sexuality and investment in youth and counterculture came together’.⁶⁹

The centre became, in its own right, a key site within the radical queer community in South London. It hosted a number of different groups and events and, until its closure in 1976, was part of an infrastructure of alternative community-based groups on Railton Road which included two women’s centres, an Anarchist News Service, the Brixton Advice Centre and a food co-operative on nearby Shakespeare Road.⁷⁰

The development of the queer squatting scene in Brixton was, as the historian Matt Cook reminds us, ‘part – and partly representative – of a broader history of 1970s counterculture in London and beyond’. The Brixton squatters were, in many ways, successful in articulating ‘an alternative vision of queer urban life’ and they did so through a form of ‘direct action’ which afforded them a ‘degree of self-determination within the city’.⁷¹ And yet, these were alternative identifications and community formations that were part of an expansive history with its own exclusions and blind spots. These are stories that have tended to be colour-blind, overlooking the role assumed by communities of colour within London’s squatting community.

It was, after all, on Railton Road in Brixton in 1972 that Olive Morris and Liz Turnbell, members of the British Black Panthers Movement, squatted an empty flat. The first successful squat of a private property in Lambeth was 121 Railton Road. Morris and Turnbell resisted a number of evictions over the course of the next few months though, in the face of growing police pressure, they eventually moved down the road and squatted a council property.⁷² Once they had moved, a bookstore, Sabaar Bookshop, was opened at 121 Railton Road. It doubled as a meeting place and advice centre for local black activists. The flat above the bookstore was, in turn, occupied by a group of squatters linked to the Brixton and Croydon Collective. They were previously involved in a major squat on Evendale Road near Loughborough Junction and were part of Black Roof, an organisation that played an instrumental role in coordinating and defending black squatters living in Brixton and Clapham.⁷³

The British Black Panthers dissolved in 1973. It reformed as a group of organisations including the Brixton Black Women’s Group, which was set up by Olive Morris and other women to address specific issues faced by black women living in the UK. It operated out of a squat at 64 Railton Road before moving to Stockwell Green where it became the Black Women’s Centre. The Race Today Collective was started in the same year and was based at 165–7 Railton Road (C.L.R. James later lived at the same address). It’s membership included Darcus Howe, Farukh Dhondy, Leila Hassan, Gus John and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Dhondy, in particular, played an important role in the BHAG, who were squatting flats across East London.⁷⁴

Looking through the lens of critical race and feminist theory, it can be argued that various struggles over squatting in London were, in some ways, intersectional.⁷⁵ Issues of race, class, gender and sexuality were all present and raised by different groups, though these entanglements were often ignored and the approaches that were adopted by activists across the city were largely non-inclusive. What is nevertheless clear is that the number of squatters in London had risen sharply by the mid-1970s. A survey in September 1975 estimated that there were 20,000 squatters in council properties alone. The figure excluded those living in GLC and private properties, and it was suggested by some commentators that the overall number of squatters in the city could be upwards of 50,000.

As the number of squatters across London grew, efforts were made to coordinate at a citywide level. The first edition of the Squatters’ Handbook was produced in 1973 by a group of squatters in Islington. The same year, the All London Squatters (ALS) was founded with a view to defending the interests of unlicensed squatters. The ALS soon clashed with the FSAS over their approach to direct action and their willingness to negotiate with local authorities. Similar tensions within the FSAS led to the dissolution of the group and its reformation as the Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS) in July 1975. The ASS is still active and continues to support both licensed and unlicensed squatters. It offers legal and practical advice to squatters across London and is responsible for the publication of the Squatters’ Handbook (now in its 14th edition). Other citywide efforts including the Squatters’ Action Council and the London Squatters Union were largely unsuccessful in mobilising squatters.⁷⁶

The disagreements and tensions that erupted between squatters in the mid-1970s pointed to enduring questions surrounding what it meant to squat. It also prompted a series of legal moves that reflected shifting attitudes to the nature of squatting. A new era of legal ‘revanchism’ was ushered in which challenged the limited protection afforded to squatters in the civil courts. In 1972, this was extended to criminal law as the Law Commission began to reconsider the statutes on trespass. The Commission published its preliminary findings in June 1974 and recommended the repeal of the Forcible Entry Acts and the criminalisation of all forms of trespass.⁷⁷

In the wake of intense criticism, a watered-down Final Report was published in March 1976. The report formed the basis for the Criminal Law Act of 1977, which represented an ‘extension of the criminal law in the area of trespass’. While new offences came into force and were punishable through prison sentences, neither squatting nor trespass was, as such, made illegal. The act made it easier, however, to evict squatters. A squatter who resisted a request to leave a property on behalf of a ‘displaced residential occupier’ or a ‘protected intended occupier’ could be arrested and evicted without a court order. Resisting court-appointed bailiffs was reclassified as a form of ‘obstruction’.⁷⁸

In the late 1970s, London squatters were thus under sustained attack, legally or otherwise. There were countless high-profile evictions (Cornwall Terrace in 1975, Hornsey Rise in 1976, St Agnes Place in 1977). And yet, many organised squatting groups were remarkably resilient and were successful in eking out concessions, including the Street Group who managed to save a number of houses on Villa Road in Brixton which became part of a housing co-operative scheme.⁷⁹

Determined resistance by squatters prompted a volte face by the Conservative Administration running the GLC. In October 1977, they announced an amnesty to all squatters living in GLC properties provided that they registered within a month. Over 1,300 properties (out of 1,850) responded to the offer. Some were given tenancies, others licences.⁸⁰ The majority were eventually rehoused in other GLC properties. A number of squatting groups used the opportunity to set up housing co-operatives. Others, including a group living in a row of derelict GLC properties on Freston Road in West London, adopted a more imaginative approach. They declared independence from the UK and set up the ‘Free Independent Republic of Frestonia’. They even went so far as to write to the United Nations and request the presence of UN peacekeepers to prevent their imminent eviction. The UN never replied, though the media publicity led to negotiations with the GLC and the site was eventually handed over to the Notting Hill Housing Trust.⁸¹

During 1977, over 5,000 squats across London were ultimately legalised as a result of the GLC amnesty and through arrangements made between squatters and local councils. Combined with the Criminal Law Act, organised squatting and the wider housing struggle within which it was embedded – a struggle for decent affordable housing and the right to live co-operatively and communally – declined or had, at the very least, been neutralised. Most local squatting groups had folded by the end of 1979, though the ASS limped on as government cuts began to bite and a new generation of squatters slowly emerged.⁸²

The history of squatting in London in the 1980s has, in this context, received far less attention. The ‘movement’ of the 1970s was a mass housing movement. The various identities it produced and the radical social relations it prefigured were forged within a wide-ranging landscape of protest and resistance. Squatting in the 1980s and 1990s was, in contrast, characterised by the formation of dynamic albeit highly localised micro-communities and subcultures.⁸³ While electoral success brought the Left into power in a number of cities across the UK, councils were forced to adopt a defensive pragmatic stance in the face of cutbacks and pressures against social housing. By the mid-1980s, as one historian of the movement concluded, ‘the Left had dumped squatting as both a political project and as a practical solution to aspects of the housing crisis’.⁸⁴

There were of course efforts to recreate the kind of organised squatting that was successful in the 1970s, most notably perhaps around Bonnington Square in Vauxhall where a group of squatters occupied a number of empty properties in the early 1980s that had been acquired by the Inner London Education Authority.⁸⁵ The group formed a housing co-operative and were able to secure a lease for the properties, which were carefully restored. A community café and garden were also established.

At the same time, many of the organised squatting groups active during this period drew on an action repertoire that was increasingly indebted to the practices adopted by anarchists and autonomists in the UK and elsewhere. In Brixton, 121 Railton Road was reoccupied in 1979 by a group of Australian anarchists. Until its eviction in 1999, the 121 Centre served as a key meeting point for squatters across London. The Centre at various points included a café, a gig and rehearsal space, a bookshop, a printing room, meeting spaces and offices. A number of campaigns and groups were also based at the 121 Centre, including the radical women’s magazine Bad Attitude, AnarQuist (an anarcho-queer group), the Brixton Squatters’ Aid and the prisoner support group Anarchist Black Cross.

On the other side of South London, the anarcho-cum-experimental music group Bourbonese Qualk set up the Ambulance Station in an abandoned five-storey building on the Old Kent Road. After lengthy renovations, the top two floors of the squat were converted into artist studios. The squatters lived on the middle floor, while the first floor included a café and a series of meeting spaces for local anarchist groups and the Squatters Network of Walworth (SNOW). The ground floor encompassed a large performance space, a recording studio and a series of print workshops.⁸⁶

While the Ambulance Station is largely remembered for its place within an underground alternative music scene hosting a number of soon-to-be-famous bands (The Jesus and Mary Chain, Pulp, Primal Screen, etc.), through the work of SNOW, it was also linked to a series of largely neglected efforts to build a mass squatting movement in South London. SNOW were active between 1983 and 1988 and played an important role linking squatters to council tenants while providing ‘physical assistance with practical problems, and an opportunity to meet … other squatters’.⁸⁷ They published a fortnightly squatters’ magazine (The Wire), set up the Tenants and Squatters Campaign of Southwark and were responsible for housing over 3,000 squatters, many in empty council properties. There were active campaigns on a number of local estates (Rockingham, Kingslake, Pullens).⁸⁸

On the Pullens Estate, a strong tenant and squatter alliance had been established which successfully resisted a series of evictions in June 1986. It was, in fact, on the same estate that an abandoned building on Crampton Street was squatted in 1988. The front of the building was converted into the Fareshares Food Co-operative. The rest of the building was occupied by a group of local anarchists who set up the 56a Infoshop. Modelled on similar spaces in Germany and Holland, the 56A was the first of its kind in the UK serving as a social centre, bookstore, radical archive and bike workshop.⁸⁹

In North and East London, there were similar efforts to carve out autonomous spaces that provided, in turn, a context for the development of a range of youth identities and subcultures around casual drug use, punk and electronic music, environmentalism and queer politics. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there were large squatting communities in Hackney, Haringey and Stoke Newington. Many houses were only briefly squatted, other squats lasted for years. The majority of the houses were owned by the council and, in some cases, their occupiers were successful in securing short-term licences or tenancies. A number of squatted spaces were also set up to host gigs, parties and raves, though there remained a strong autonomist ethos among the squatters as was seen in the kind of militant tactics adopted by a group occupying the Stamford Hill Estate in Hackney. Over 500 police officers were deployed as ‘Orgreve came to Hackney’ in March 1988. The squatters responded by erecting a series of burning barricades. After three days of violent clashes with the police, they were finally evicted.⁹⁰

By the early 1990s, the squatting scene in London was far more subcultural than it had been in the 1970s, ‘disconnected’, in the words of one commentator, ‘from the waning levels of class struggle around labour, welfare and housing, though it was never entirely severed’.⁹¹ At the same time, the emergence of a thriving free party scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s led, in particular, to a series of high-profile rural raves and the exodus of thousands of Londoners on to illegally squatted plots of land.⁹² In the moral panic that ensued, the government passed the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act which provided a host of new powers to proscribe ‘trespassory assemblies’ and ‘remove persons attending or preparing for a rave’.⁹³

As part of the same act, the government also proposed a series of additional clauses on squatting. These changes were tantamount to further criminalisation and were challenged by a host of housing organisations and charities as well as a new group known as SQUASH (Squatters Action for Secure Homes). In the end, the government was forced to climb down and settle for less draconian measures (clauses 72–6 of the Criminal Justice Act).

The remnants of the squatting scene in London that survived into the late 1990s and early 2000s was no longer part of a wider housing movement in the city. If anything, it subsisted within a series of protest cultures that were receptive to a growing range of political identities. These were, moreover, cultures and identities that were increasingly embedded within an anti-globalisation movement that transformed many squats into convergence spaces hosting activists from around the world as part of anti-summit mobilisations, social forums and other international conferences. Other squats were set up as social centres that focused their activities ‘around the material emergencies of daily life’ (precarious work and housing) and their relationship to larger economic and ecological crises.⁹⁴ This includes a group of activists who occupied a disused market garden in the village of Sipson to protest against the construction of a third runway at Heathrow Airport. Over the past six years, Transition Heathrow has become a vital community space offering courses in food production, gardening and renewable energy.⁹⁵

The last few years have also seen a wider revival of squatting in London in the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2007. The austerity measures rolled out by the coalition government after 2010 led to a wave of occupations by students and other anti-austerity activists. The government responded in 2011 with the launch of a consultation on the criminalisation of squatting. SQUASH was reformed to challenge the proposed legislation which was ultimately fast-tracked as an amendment to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act. The law came into force on 1 September 2012, and for the first time it became a criminal offence to squat a residential building in the UK.⁹⁶

For many academics, charity workers and legal experts, the new law was anticipatory. In their eyes, it legislated against various future struggles for social justice and the use of ‘occupation’ as a direct action tactic.⁹⁷ Others argued that it would simply exacerbate a growing housing crisis in London.⁹⁸ Given the city’s unique position as the epicentre of a financialised corporate capitalism, this is a crisis that has, if anything, intensified over the past five years reinforced by the rapid ‘transformation of the city’s real estate market into a hub for footloose global capital’.⁹⁹ In London, urban regeneration, state-led gentrification and welfare cutbacks have all combined to create a housing market characterised by its inequality and insecurity.¹⁰⁰

And yet, for the young single mothers of the Focus E15 campaign who, in 2014, occupied a series of empty low-rise flats on the Carpenter Estate in Newham, or the feminist activists from the group Sisters Uncut who have been occupying an empty council home in Hackney to highlight the lack of support for survivors of domestic violence, squatting remains an urgent and necessary course of action.¹⁰¹ In other words, the squatting of empty buildings in London has a long history, but it also has a present and a future. Whether it is the Focus E15 campaign or the 2015 occupations of the Sweets Way and Aylesbury estates, or the tactics adopted by Sisters Uncut, what it means to be a squatter in London today can be understood as a source of new political alliances, solidarities and identities.

It would be wrong therefore to reduce and essentialise squatting to the singular pursuit of housing, however important and necessary this has been for numerous Londoners. For many, the very choice to squat was also predicated on a refusal to accept the categories and structures imposed on them. But if these are actions that provide a glimpse into another version of a ‘rebellious London’, we should finally remind ourselves of the thousands of people who squatted in the city with little or no link to any wider housing struggle.¹⁰² However invisible, these are stories that remain just as urgent even if they only appear fleetingly in court proceedings, charity reports and newspaper articles.¹⁰³ These are stories such as the one of Daniel Gauntlett who, having earlier been charged under new anti-squatting legislation, froze to death outside an empty bungalow in Aylesford outside London in 2013.¹⁰⁴ These are stories that are all too quickly forgotten, at a time when they need to be told more urgently than ever.