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
