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 up the stairways and inside the flats; they drove down the streets on their motorcycles randomly beating up people with their clubs. A legally assembled protest demonstration was violently smashed – people were held isolated for weeks in prison … It was civil war in Nørrebro.5
What became known as the ‘Battle of Byggeren’ (‘Slaget om Byggere’) led to a series of violent confrontations with the police over the next two weeks. A number of protesters and officers were injured. Several arrests were made.6
At the same time as the Copenhagen police were busy demolishing a playground, a few hundred miles away in Amsterdam a group of squatters were making the final preparations for a day of action to mark the coronation of Queen Beatrice. The coronation was, by law, required to take place in Amsterdam. While authorities were planning a day of national celebration, they were worried about the threat of disruption from the city’s growing and increasingly radical squatters’ movement. It was, after all, only a month earlier that tanks had rolled on to the streets of the city as part of an operation to evict a squat on the Vondelstraat.7
For their part, the squatters’ movement declared April to be a month of action under the slogan ‘no housing, no coronation’ (‘Geen woning, geen kroning’). What this meant in practical terms was twofold. The squatters planned, on the one hand, to use the campaign to draw further attention to an ongoing housing crisis in Amsterdam. On the other hand, they saw the coronation as an opportunity to ‘crack’ and squat as many houses across the city as possible.
Some squatters, however, were unsatisfied with the tactics adopted by the wider movement and advocated a more aggressive and confrontational approach. A group calling itself the Autonomen (Autonomists) began circulating (anonymously) a flyer across the city advocating a ‘day of action’ (‘aktiedag’) on 30 April 1980. The flyer itself included pictures of Beatrice superimposed on bombs, a reference perhaps to the smoke bombs which disrupted her wedding in 1966. A second poster appeared a few weeks later calling for a demonstration ‘with effects’.
Most squatters were at pains to distance themselves from the proposed demonstration, which nevertheless went ahead despite police efforts to lock down the city. It sparked a series of violent riots that drew in a large crowd, many of whom were not squatters. The ‘Coronation Riots’ lasted well into the night and were some of the worst that Amsterdam had ever seen, prompting widespread public condemnation. Over forty arrests were made, none of whom were connected to the squatters’ movement in the city. Thirteen were later convicted.8
The ‘Battle of Byggeren’ and the ‘Coronation Riots’ are events that have come to occupy an important place within the history of squatting in Copenhagen and Amsterdam respectively. Social historians often remind
