housing crisis. A growing number of people were frozen out of home ownership and were unable to secure a council tenancy. Rent hikes in the private sector combined with widespread displacement and a growing number of vacant properties, many of which had been left empty by borough councils pending redevelopment schemes which had not yet commenced or had been postponed or abandoned.
If there were roughly 1,000 licensed squatters across London at the end of 1971, there were fewer unlicensed occupiers. In the years that followed, however, it was a sharp rise in the latter that characterised the rapid development of the squatting movement in London. The geographical concentration of empty council property provided a critical mass of homes that, in turn, provided an infrastructure ideally suited for organisation and mobilisation. The numbers of squatters quickly grew and, by 1974, the number of licensed and unlicensed squatters in London had risen to 3,000 and 7,000 respectively.50
Where possible, squatters targeted clusters of empty properties owned by local authorities. They were easier to hold – legally and politically – and doing so drew attention to the failings of the state in meeting their own stated obligations regarding the provision of affordable housing. A number of new groups sprang up that were, more often than not, rooted in neighbourhoods and grounded in struggles that were intensely local. This was reflected in the names they chose (the Islington Squatters, the Elgin Avenue Squatters in Maida Vale, the Finsbury Park squatters in Harringay, the Villa Road Squatters in Brixton, the Broadway Market Squatters Association in Hackney, etc.).51 It was also reflected in the infrastructures and tactics adopted by the groups. Local meetings were held regularly in order to generate support within the local community. Many groups also produced their own flyers and newsletters which drew further attention to local campaigns around squatting as well as wider political struggles.52 In some cases, squatters were successful in opening small offices that were used to share news and information, and provide support and assistance to people looking for a place to live.
At the same time, squatters began to move into privately owned properties in a series of high-profile actions. The most spectacular was the January 1974 occupation of Centre Point, a thirty-five-storey office block on Oxford Street that had been empty since its completion in 1963. There were other notable occupations during the same period. In Whitechapel, a block of nineteenth-century tenement houses on Myrdle Street and Parfett Street, was squatted in March 1972. The block was owned by Epracent, a small textile business, which was running the tenements down as the area had been marked for clearance by Tower Hamlets Council. The squatters were successfully evicted from a number of houses on Myrdle Street in February 1973 only to reoccupy a number of properties on neighbouring Parfett Street.53 The houses were once again cleared. Each property was boarded up and a large Alsatian dog was led into each house. In response, the squatters hired a group of dog handlers who removed the dogs and took them to Leman Street Police Station as ‘strays’. They then moved back into the properties and were eventually able to secure licences from the council.54
In Camden, a series of similar occupations began in 1973 in response to the activities of the Stock Conversion and Investment Trust, who were buying property and evicting tenants as part of future office development plans. On Camden High Street they were successfully stopped by squatters who occupied an old antique shop at number 220. In Tolmers Square near Euston Station, over forty-nine houses owned by Camden Council and Stock Conversion were squatted between 1973 and 1979. Many of the houses had been abandoned for up to eight years and were in need of serious repair. A number were painstakingly restored. A studio and workshop were established as well as a bakery, a wholefood store, a community garden and The Gorilla, a militant left-wing bookstore.55 While Stock Conversion eventually took out summonses against the squatters, the company backed down in the face of widespread opposition. It finally agreed to sell its stake in the area to Camden Council in 1975, who went ahead with a scaled-back redevelopment of the square that included an office block and 250 public housing units.56
There remains, for the most part, little real data on squatters during this period. A 1975 article by Nick Wates in New Society gives us, however, a glimpse into who actually squatted in Tolmers Square. These were not the layabouts or hardened revolutionaries of popular mythologising. Rather, they were a ‘diverse range of people with differing social status, age, wealth and attitudes’. According to Wates, of the 186 squatters occupying the square in June 1975,
There were 40 students, 16 white-collar workers, 16 workers in service industries, 13 artists and musicians, twelve manual labourers, twelve skilled labourers, eleven children, ten professionals, eight teachers, eight ‘housewives’ [sic], 24 registered unemployed, including a number of people in unclassifiable community activities, and six unknown.57
Some squatters did come from decidedly upper-middle-class households. They were architectural graduates, trainee solicitors, medical students and teachers. Others were young people who arrived in search of a place to stay, including a pair of ‘junkies’ who had been trapped in the ‘hostel circuit’ and were looking for a home of their own. Most were young and in their twenties, though there was a group of older squatters. As Wates concluded, the square became a ‘haven for all kinds of social misfits’.58
And yet, if these were ‘misfits’ in search of affordable housing, they all shared a desire to establish some form of alternative living. In the words of one of their counterparts in Brixton:
To me living in Villa Road means more than just squatting and living on social security; it means living amongst people who are trying to set up alternatives for themselves, and anyone else who can no longer accept what society offers or is doing to itself; alternatives, for instance housing and ways of living with people, education, community care, sex attitudes, work and technology.59
The few modest surveys conducted with London squatters in the 1970s stressed the importance of housing.60 But they also pointed to a correlation between the search for ‘suitable accommodation’ and the ‘need to live more communally’.61 Squatting opened up, in this way, new possibilities for the cultivation of alternative political identities and subjectivities. To be a squatter unsurprisingly meant many different things to many different people.
In East London, a group of feminist activists that were linked to a nationwide grouping, Big Flame, were developing ‘new models of working and living and organising’ in the early 1970s. Drawing on the work of groups such as Lotta Continua in Italy and Solidarity in the UK, the East London Big Flame (ELBF) challenged traditional forms of leftist militancy which, in their eyes, did not meet the needs of women nor address the problems that local communities of colour routinely faced. They advocated a form of autonomous politics that placed particular emphasis on ‘developing experimental ways of living and relating’.62
The ELBF was active in East London between 1973 and 1975 and was involved in a number of different struggles that extended far beyond the workplace and included squatting on their own behalf and to support homeless families in the occupation of empty houses and abandoned blocks of flats. Members of the ELBF were also part of the Mile End Collective who were living in a number of houses around Bow. Two of the houses were squatted and one was used for the establishment of a community playgroup. A food co-operative was set up by the ELBF on the Lincoln Estate in Bow, though this was forced to close due to constant police harassment.63
Other members lived in Tower Hamlets and played an important role in the Tower Hamlets Housing Action Group which brought squatters, tenants and other activists together to ‘do something to stop the destruction of their part of London’.64 The Group helped to support the fifty families squatting Sumner House, an empty block of flats, in the autumn of 1974. ELBF members were also linked to the Bengali Housing Action Group (BHAG), who were installing families in properties on the Stephen and Matilda Estate near Tower Bridge in the mid-1970s.65
The emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s ultimately played a
