Thirty years of squatting
First published in the Guardian, February 1998)

On a dull December afternoon, thirty years ago this week, two men carrying tool bags similar to those used by workers from the London Electricity Board rang the bell on the outer door of a block of empty luxury flats next to Snaresbrook station, in east London. They asked the porter to be allowed in "to inspect the wiring".

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. This time it was opened to a larger group of people carrying banners, leaflets and a megaphone -- and accompanied by various newspaper reporters, photographers and camera crews. Following the advance guard of "electricians" into the building, the group made their way onto the roof, where they remained in occupation, in defiance of police efforts to get them to leave, for the next couple of hours.

One of the "electricians" who'd conned their way into the block of flats was Alf Williams. On the roof, he'd unfurled a banner proclaiming: "I lived in hostels for four years while these flats were empty." It was during his involvement in a campaign against conditions at a hostel for homeless families in Abridge, Essex, that he first mentioned the possibility of squatting empty homes to house the homeless. In November 1968, after watching the third screening of Jeremy Sandford's homelessness drama Cathy Come Home on television, a small group of friends at housing activist Ron Bailey's east London home decided to put Alf's suggestion into practice.

The Snaresbrook action might only have been a token occupation, but it marked the first shot in a campaign that was to lead to a massive upsurge in squatting throughout the country. On Sunday 1st December 1968, on the roof of those empty luxury flats, the London Squatters Campaign was born.

In fact, squatting had never really gone away since its re-emergence in the post-war squatting campaign of 1945-46. This had peaked in the autumn of 1946, by which time, according to government figures, there were 39,535 people squatting in 1,038 armed forces camps in England and Wales and a further 4,000 in Scotland. When the campaign spread to hotels and luxury flats in London (such as the 148 apartments at the Duchess of Bedford Buildings in Kensington), the government instructed the police to post guards on prominent empty properties and seal off squatted buildings. As part of the clampdown, five communists were prosecuted and jailed for their role in the Duchess of Bedford Buildings squat.

But 850 service camps were also handed over to squatters, the last of which were still occupied until into the 1960s. And countless individual, unorganised families continued to take their housing needs into their own hands by moving into empty properties without the owners' permission. What happened in December 1968 was not so much a new departure as a revival of an existing tradition marrying well-organised, high-profile protest with the very practical self help activity of using empty homes to house homeless people. Soon after the token occupation at Snaresbrook, homeless families were moving into empty properties with the intention of staying -- and demanding that their owners negotiate with them to give them permission to do so.

Ron Bailey maintains that the activists who were involved back in 1968 always expected the revived squatting movement to become very widespread. "We made a judgement that it was realistically possible to get many thousands of homeless people to take action on their own behalf," he says.

This turned out not to have been an idealistic dream. By the mid-1970s, an estimated 50,000 people were squatting in Britain. The numbers fell as a result of an "amnesty" by the then Conservative-controlled Greater London Council in 1977, which legitimised the status of some 12,000 squatters in their properties. But they were back up to the 50,000 mark by the early 1980s; and though less well-organised or visible than in the past, there are still probably in the region of 30,000 or so people squatting today.

Yet it took a series of hard-fought legal, media and sometimes physical battles before squatting became established as anything more than an isolated protest activity. When the London Squatters Campaign started to move homeless families into empty council properties in the London Borough of Redbridge in 1969, for example, the local council responded by sending in squads of private bailiffs, who beat up and evicted the squatters. The bailiffs, operating without court orders or other legal authority, were supplied by a firm run by Barry Quartermain. Described in a Sunday Times exposé that summer as a man who "tears a London telephone directory into quarters as he lectures you about the toughness of his henchmen", he was later to serve a three-year jail sentence for offences committed in pursuit of his "business".

Assiduous legal work and careful cultivation of the media eventually compelled property owners to obtain possession orders through the courts when seeking the eviction of squatters. This limited protection encouraged others to take up squatting, and towards the end of 1969 Lewisham became the first council in the country to "licence" squatters to use its empty properties. By the end of 1971, a dozen local authorities had entered into agreements with squatting groups in their areas, with even hard-line Redbridge Council giving way in June 1972.

It wasn't always so consensual. The takeover of 144 Piccadilly, in central London, in September 1969 by a group of mainly young, single squatters under the banner of the "London Street Commune" prompted a press panic about "drug taking, couples making love while others look on, rule by heavy mob armed with iron bars, foul language, filth and stench", as the front page of The People put it at the time. "Hippiedilly" became the focus for the first of many run-ins between squatters and the media, culminating in the mid-1970s in a prolonged press campaign that ultimately led to a tightening of the law to make it easier for property owners to obtain possession from unlawful occupants.

The Daily Telegraph was far from alone in fuming (in 1975) that: "Innumerable houses up and down the country are now in illegal occupation by organised gangs of thugs, layabouts and revolutionary fanatics." But the reality, then as now, was more prosaic.

In fact, as various surveys of squatters have shown over the years, the vast majority have turned to squatting as the last, desperate act of people who are simply looking for somewhere to live. Jim Paton, a longstanding squatting activist who has been a member for the past 19 years of the volunteer collective that runs Advisory Service for Squatters, publishers of The Squatters' Handbook, says that this even more true today than it has ever been. For every politically-committed activist who uses squatting as a tactic in an anti-roads campaign or a purported "lifestyle choice" en route from art school to owner occupation, there are many hundreds more for whom it is either that or the street.

But even for the most desperate individuals, forced perhaps into occupying a derelict, rat-infested building for the want of any other alternative, squatting offers an element of direct control over their lives that may be unavailable from any other source. Ron Bailey believes that the biggest achievement of squatting over the past 30 years has been to put some of the remedies to homelessness back into the hands of the homeless.

"The main improvements in the position of homeless people have been brought about not by political parties," he argues, "but as a result of direct action by the homeless themselves." Thus squatting has played its part not only in the obvious respect of forcing property owners to bring some of their empty properties back into use, but also in helping to bring about changes in homelessness policy, provision and legislation.

The revived squatting movement that emerged from 1968 onwards has left its mark in scores of "short-life" housing organisations, housing associations and co-operatives across the country. Some of these are now coming under increasing pressure as hard-pressed local authorities take back properties either to sell or to accommodate other categories of homeless people for whom they have a statutory responsibility.

It would be ironic indeed if, having once made the transition from direct action protest to legitimate status, some of these groups were now forced back in the opposite direction. The owners of empty property had better look carefully at the credentials of any electricians asking to inspect their wiring.