I recently finished Ron Bailey’s
The Squatters which was published as a Penguin special edition in 1973. The book is a first-hand account that captures one of the earliest attempts I have come across to build on the UK’s
post-war squatting movement and establish a formal squatting campaign in London, centering around four main aims:
- An immediate aim to rehouse families from hostels or slums by means of squatting. Despite provisions by Part III of the National Assistance Act (1948), which scrapped workhouses (established by the Poor Law 1601) and instead made it a statutory duty for local authorities to house homeless persons, Part III accommodation and hostels were overcrowded, under-funded, and generally in poor condition (some ex-service camps were still being used for this purpose, such as Hornchurch Airfield in Havering). Welfare departments used the threat of eviction or taking children into care in order to discipline such shelters, booting occupants onto the streets during the day, placing bars on the windows and locking doors at night, as well as refusing husbands and fathers permission to visit. By 1971, there were in excess of 21,000 people living in such conditions, in addition to 1.8m families living in accommodation classified ‘unfit for human habitation’; 3m families living in slums; and 2m families living in accommodation classed as ‘badly in need of repair’ (i.e. tomorrow’s slums). This situation is described by Bailey as ‘the basic human reason why squatters occupy empty property and challenge the housing authorities’ (1973, p20).
- To spread influence and spark-off a squatting campaign on a mass scale. While this didn’t happen to the extent to which they were hoping, there were a number of examples of families taking their own initiative and squatting independently from the broader groups I discuss below. Bailey attributes the lack of a mass campaign to ‘fear, alienation, [and a] conditioned acceptance of imposed values’ (1973, p184), whilst also blaming the actions of the ‘hippy squats’ (such as the London Street Commune) which brought bad publicity and reactionary feelings to the movement.
- To start an all-out attack on the housing authorities, with ordinary people taking action for themselves. Bailey emphasises that over 1000 properties were opened-up for desperate families all over London by the squatting campaign, and that many boroughs opted to close down hostels and instead utilise short-life houses as temporary accommodation.
- Have a radicalising effect on existing movements in the housing field, with the intention of linking them together. In accordance with his political views, Bailey asserts that the movement tended towards the grass roots and therefore allowed working people to take control of their own lives and develop their own movements outside of normal party political (non) channels.
These last three, as I will discuss below, indicate a social movement looking beyond necessityand towards a squatter organisation with a collective identity and view towards wider change. It is also suggestive of a number of conflicting ideologies which emerged within the movement, that have clear parallels to problems faced by movements today (such as Occupy in London). In particular, we might highlight values of solidarity and unity, which can conflict with different interpretations of libertarianism, autonomy, and anarchism (e.g. ‘ordinary people taking action for themselves’) which were emerging on the left at this time.
After some initial occupations of hostels in Kent and Essex in the mid-sixties, the London Squatter Campaign established it’s first ‘token squat’ at an overly-priced (and therefore vacant) luxury apartment block ‘The Hollies’ (Wanstead) in December 1968, with the intention of pointing out how ‘luxury flats lying empty for years while people rot in slums is an apt symbol of the false priorities of our ‘affluent’ society’ (Bailey 1973, p35). This squat created much publicity, and figures for empty properties in London soon began appearing in The Guardian (putting this at 470,000 in England & Wales) and The Financial Times (who claimed there were 5000 empty properties in London which the Greater London Council (GLC) did not intend to use again). Off the back of this initial squat, the decision was then taken by the campaign to take the risk moving-in homeless families into some of these empty buildings.
Redbridge, 1969
Despite the fact that the council’s redevelopment plan for central Ilford were yet to be approved by the Ministry for Housing, they had opted to deliberately leave houses empty until such time that they could be developed, rather than use them for even temporary housing. The London Squatters Campaign therefore decided that empty houses in this borough would create much public sympathy for the plight of the homeless, whilst giving their direct action a moral justification, installing 3 homeless families in Oakland Road (followed by further squats in the borough). When the council obtained court injunctions against the families as grounds to evict them; the families simply swapped houses (meaning that the injunction on that property was now useless) or sent others who were not named on the orders to collect the injunctions and tear them up (so that those that were named could not be arrested as in contempt of court).
The council upped their game, deciding to employ a local bailiff company (run by the notorious Barrie Quartermain who had insidiously promised that ‘Councils who employ me don’t have a Squatter problem anymore’) to evict the squatters. The activists argued that this was illegal, citing the same ‘Forcible Entry Act (1381)’ which had been used to prosecute the squatters from the Bedford House occupation in 1946. They argued that, according to this statute which had been used against that previous campaign, ‘one must not enter and repossess land without a court order ‘with strong hand or multitude of people’, even if one has a legal right of entry (a law which had been originally been intended to prevent landowners from forming militias to fight over land and instead bring all disputes to the courts). This meant that the subsequent violent attacks on the squats from the eviction firm hired by the council were, in their eyes, illegal. It also meant that they felt themselves justified to defend those properties, creating pits and booby traps in the garden, electric wiring in the roof, and installing barbed wire around the properties. Living under such siege conditions, however, created tension, friction, and stress in the squats, with some of the families opting to move out in order to protect their children from the bailiff violence.
This ‘siege mentality’ (Bailey 1973, p107) also created a further problem of house parochialism in which ‘the fact that they had, of necessity, to live communally… served only to knit together a small group of people who became increasingly hostile to all outsiders, except those who accepted their commune ideas’ (1973, p102-3). When the original squatting campaigners (such as Bailey) sought to negotiate with Redbridge council on behalf of the homeless families, one group who were occupying a building at Woodlands Road were quick to dismiss such measures as ‘selling-out’ and ‘cowardly’. Bailey describes this group as ‘a small group of the worst type of ‘anarchists’ who ‘though they had established the free society at ‘their’ house… the interests of the squatting families became subordinate to ‘the revolution’ (1973, p103), complaining that their ‘commune’ style squatting ‘did not help our public image’ (1973, p104).
This split is indicative of a rise of libertarianism on the Anglo-European left at this time, which lasts in some activist circles to the present day (think May 1968 in France or the Italian autonomia movement of the early 1970s who fought against formal organisations like the PCF or Italian unions, seeing these as necessarily oppressive). Such activists are against anything that hints of authority or a formal collective organisation which might limit or foreclose their own beliefs or values of individual liberty, emphasizing instead an anarchistic, organic approach to communal living. Yet for campaigners like Bailey (whilst considering himself an anarchist), the priority had to be the housing situation of the poor and desperate, which meant seeking concessions from local authorities and government, rather than asserting an autonomous or prefigurative space which might anticipate future alternatives. His animosity towards this group was therefore that it might forestall such concessions, creating bad publicity and therefore handing momentum back to the anti-squatting forces on the council.
Perhaps one of the most infamous examples of this was the way in which the media framed ‘The London Street Commune’ (or ‘Hippy House’ at 144 Piccadilly) in 1969, which Bailey describes as instigating ‘anti-squatter hysteria’ (1973, p124):
