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
