The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan
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.
The neighbours are our best barricades. (Naboerne er vores bedste barrikader.)
Popular Slogan, Nørrebro Residents Association
(housing activist group active in Copenhagen, 1973–80)
Squatting has always been a mode of confrontation. If you want to change something, you have to not only engage in confrontations but also provoke them.
Amsterdam squatter1
On 29 April 1980, a children’s adventure and activity playground on the corner of Stengade and Slotsgade in the working-class district of Nørrebro in Copenhagen was demolished in a major police operation. The playground known as ‘Byggeren’ (slang for a ‘place to build’) was squatted in June 1973 by activists from the Nørrebro Beboeraktion (NB), a grassroots tenant association that had been formed a few months earlier to challenge the planned urban redevelopment of the neighbourhood.2 Over 800 police officers were deployed to provide support to the work squad whose bulldozers crashed into the makeshift structures erected on the site. A number of activists had, however, climbed on top of the structures to protest their destruction. They fell to the ground as the roofs caved in and were forced to scramble away to avoid being run over by the bulldozers.3
Local residents and activists responded to the brutal tactics adopted by the police by erecting a series of barricades in the streets. A city bus was commandeered and placed sideways across an intersection to block traffic, its tyres deflated. Containers from a number of building sites were also used, with banners draped across them reading ‘Police out of Nørrebro – Byggeren will never surrender’ (‘politet ud af Nørrebro – Byggeren overgiver sig aldrig’). In the street fighting that ensued, the police were driven out of the neighbourhood.4 The playground was carefully rebuilt during the night, only for it to be destroyed again a few days later in another major police operation. As one activist recalled:
We were beaten up by the police; they followed us