The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan
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