The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan
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