Squatting -- the real story

Fighting back:squatters organise to defend their rights

Part of the success of the 1975 campaign against squatters lay in the relatively fragmented state of the movement. It is worth comparing the media myth of a highly organised squatting movement with the reality of that movement's response to the attacks on it. The only answer that squatters could often find was to attempt to persuade the media to present a more balanced picture. Letters were written to newspapers but rarely published; press conferences were called but largely ignored; the Sunday People had its offices picketed one evening but its anti-squatter tirades continued unabashed. Journalists who wrote articles favourable to squatters had them returned by editors. In the face of wide-ranging opposition from the establishment and the mass media, the squatting movement, in common with other radical social movements, had no complete answer. It remained isolated and divided, with neither the support nor the cohesive political perspective which would have enabled it to mount a more effective response to the opposition. Many squatters' reactions to the onslaught was to play down the fact that they were squatting. To appease neighbours, some even pretended they were not squatters and were paying rent. More positively, an increasing number of squatters began to organise in a variety of ways to cope with the threat.

The local level
The most common form of organisation was the local squatting group at street or block level. Squatting groups sprang up all over London (there were 14 in Tower Hamlets alone in 1975) and in many other towns too. They were usually created to resolve practical problems like opening up houses and repairs and they rarely became very active until eviction loomed. At this point, street meetings would start being held weekly or even daily. People would be deployed on a variety of tasks; printing leaflets and news-sheets, negotiating with owners and housing authorities, handling the legal defence, organising social events, raising money, seeking support from other groups, finding new squats, liaising with the press and perhaps building barricades.
The style of organisation and political strategy on the nature of the opposition, the aspirations and skills of the squatters and the emergence or otherwise of leadership. The success of local organisation varied too, but the potential was shown dramatically in 1975 by the victory of the Elgin Avenue squatters. After a long and protracted battle, they managed to persuade the GLC to rehouse all the families in permanent accommodation, and all the single people in short-life property.
The most significant factor in the Elgin Avenue victory was that the squatters had organised over a period of years. They had built links with important local organisations and had gained the support of, amongst others, the local MP, the trades council and the federation of local tenants and residents associations.
Elgin Avenue marked a tremendous victory for the squatting movement but there was still no general recognition of single people's right to housing. The agreement to rehousing was presented as a one-off deal and statements emphasised that it did not apply to other squatters. Indeed, victory in Elgin Avenue proved to be exceptional,as very few other squatters won rehousing. On 7 November 1975, 300 police evicted 70 squatters from Cornwall Terrace and two months later 150 were used at the eviction in Hornsey Rise, once the home of 350 squatters. In both places brave, but belated, attempts were made to mobilise shifting and unstable squatter populations. Such efforts came to little, largely because the squats had attracted large numbers of people with no interest in organisation or even in squatting as a political movement. When eviction loomed, the residents moved on in many cases to new and isolated squats. Both of these squats experienced unpleasant degrees of social disintegration Petty theft was rife, `hard' drug dealers had moved in and the proportion of people who created problems began to exceed the capacity of more 'together' squatters to cope with them.
It was not only disorganised squats which fell to the bailiffs in the aftermath of the 1975 campaign against squatting. Prince of Wales Crescent, in Camden, described in detail earlier, became very chaotic and when the bailiffs turned up in March 1976 the number of squatters had fallen drastically - from 300 one year before to under 100. A campaign to persuade Camden Council to allow the community to remain had failed. Instead the squatters demanded rehousing for everyone still living in the Crescent. In fact, the families were rehoused by the Council and the more established projects were offered rented short-life buildings elsewhere. But for the single people who failed to get rehousing there was no alternative to squatting and a group of them took over Trentishoe Mansions a block of GLC flats next to Cambridge Circus in central London.
The Cornwall Terrace and Hornsey Rise squatters and the thousands of individual squatters evicted during 1975-76 failed to get rehousing because of the absence of effective organised action. In contrast, Prince of Wales Crescent squatters were relatively well organised. Their failure stemmed from a variety of other factors, of which the climate of local opinion created largely by the lifestyle of the squatters was the most significant. This affected the extent to which squatters were able to mobilise outside support and also undermined their confidence, thereby reducing their willing ness to struggle. The Crescent squatters did try to secure support from local organisations in the same way that the Elgin Avenue squatters had but it was a case of too little too late. The difficulty of attracting outside support was often accentuated by the parochial attitudes of squatter activists who were reluctant to get involved in council politics and their lack of concern for the (often legitimate) complaints by other local residents about the behaviour of the squatters. Too often squatting was raised as the major issue with the rights and needs of other people being forgotten or ignored. In their five years of residence in the Crescent, the squatters only made serious approaches to other local groups when they needed support against eviction; needless to say there was no sudden rush of altruistic support for their cause.
There were no infallible blueprints for local organisation. While the Elgin Avenue squatters achieved some of their goals by confrontation including the building of barricades, other groups used the same tactics and failed. Occasionally successes were achieved by behind the scenes negotiations with councillors (see Chapter 13 on Seymour Buildings). In other cases a lot of noise and publicity was more effective (see Chapts 10, 11 12), and indeed it is likely that quiet negotiations were only made possible as a result of the `noise' being made by the squatting movement as a whole. Sometimes a great deal of work had to be done: lobbying, writing letters, preparing alternative plans, and above all, building up local support, tasks made doubly difficult by the temporary and unstable nature of most squats and the consequent absence of telephones and contact addresses. Many activists soon learned that local organisation had to include social and practical aspects as well as political ones. People would only start to campaign collectively once they felt they had some common unity. In the face of eviction threats, many areas where there was squatting came alive, with a familiar pattern of benefit concerts, jumble sales and other events.
Attempts by squatting groups to achieve recognition as communities usually failed. So too did most attempts to get rehousing in the same locality, In fact, that was a concession which councils were very reluctant to make as they were anxious to break up groups that proved strong. When successful, the most that could usually be expected was permanent tenancies for families and short-life houses on licence for single people - frequently not in the same area. Yet this was better than simply being kicked out from squat to squat which invariably happened in areas where there was no organisation.

Wider horizons
In addition to the large number of local groups, there were several attempts to organise squatters on a wider level. Where a number of groups existed in one town or borough, federations were sometimes established to coordinate the activities of street groups, mount joint campaigns and enable experience to be shared. Occasionally local groups too took important initiatives. For instance in 1974, squatters in West London started the Ruff Tuff Creem Puff Estate Agency which published regular bulletins of squattable empty property all over the country (its activities are described in detail in Chapter 18). Squatters in the East End pubfished lists of empty houses and farms in the country and another group even put out lists of unused canal boats in Lancashire. Squatters in Islington produced the first issue of the Squatters Handbook in early 1973 and many other publications to spread information and experience appeared around this time. Street theatre groups, such as Demolition Decorators and Rough Theatre, wrote plays about squatting and injected a sense of humour into squatting demos and benefits.

FSAS versus ALS
The first London-wide organisation of unlicensed squatters to appear, after the demise of the London Squatters Campaign in 1969, was All London Squatters.(ALS). Set up in 1973 in response to an unfavourable ruling in the courts (the McPhail case, p 160), it reflected the failure of the Family Squatters Advisory Service (FSAS) to defend the interests of unlicensed squatters. ALS was a more open organisation which invited the participation of both licensed and unlicensed squatters from all over London. It had no restrictions upon what kinds of groups could send representatives, unlike the FSAS management committee which only included delegates from groups with licensing agreements (mainly because this was the only way in which FSAS was able to obtain funding from Shelter).
The major difference between the two bodies was essentially political, particularly in their respective attitudes towards direct action and unlicensed squatting. FSAS was often accused of having abandoned direct action and being just another part of the state housing machinery. Its response, stated in an information sheet, was that it `was not set up to promote direct action'. ALS, on the other hand, was set up for precisely that.
Shortly after the formation of ALS, the split within the ranks of the squatting movement came to a head over the issue of handing back council owned licensed houses when the occupants were not being offered rehousing. Groups were faced with the choice of refusing and thus jeopardising their arrangements with local councils, or of evicting their own members. The most notable example of this occurred when Student Community Housing (SCH) was asked to return houses given to it by the GLC in Elgin Avenue, West London. This led to a bitter row between SCH and Elgin Avenue squatters and during the dispute, FSAS made the astonishing claim that some squatting groups were `being manipulated by property speculators to force councils to agree to demolition or development, or to provide public relations for speculators'!
The growing militancy of unlicensed squatters, and of those licensed squatters who were refusing to move out when required, was seen as a threat to the `reasonable' approach forcefully advocated by FSAS:
`Whilst we recognise that breaking or threatening to break agreements may sometimes be justified, we believe that the success of the movement has rested as much upon our collective credibility through keeping agreements as upon our determination to be an active part of the Housing Movement.' '
This approach assumed that, except in rare instances, owners of empty property could be persuaded by rational argument to make use of it. In opposition to this philosophy, the militants in ALS believed that licence agreements were not producing enough houses and that the only way to get more was to step up direct action. The divisions within the squatting movement were again heightened during the Centre Point occupation in January 1974. Although it was organised by people active in FSAS, many squatters from ALS joined the demonstration outside and were disappointed when the occupiers decided to leave after only two days as it seemed a waste of the effort that had gone into the occupation. `Stay put - weekend revolutionaries', they chanted, and urged those inside to move homeless people into the 36 flats attached to Centre Point. They argued that this was not the time for 'token' protest squats.
ALS planned a militant answer to what it saw as the `Centre Point let-down'. In March a group of activists took over 5-7 Dover Street, a new block of luxury flats in Mayfair. The flats were occupied by homeless families who were evicted after six weeks.

ASS is born
Within FSAS the schism was almost complete by this stage. A core of `moderates' became opposed to unlicensed squatting as it attracted bad publicity. FSAS began to disintegrate as a representative assembly, even of licensed squatting groups, and bitterly split into two factions. By July 1975 the nature of the organisation had completely changed and it renamed itself the Advisory Service for Squat-`leading' the broad mass of squatters, aiming to work closely with unlicensed squatting groups and individual squatters. Shelter, threatened with a loss of charitable income if it continued to support a squatting organisation withdrew its funding. This loss of income put ASS in a precarious financial position. As there was no money to pay wages, the service became entirely dependent upon voluntary unpaid effort but ASS managed to survive. Money for stationery, the telephone and other essential items (including, ironically, rent for its office) was raised through donations and benefit concerts. The service was still functioning as an advice centre in the Autumn of 1980 as this book went to press. ( and it still is in 2002!!)
ASS was also different from FSASin that it ceased to function as a federation of local groups and became a collective controlled by the people who worked for it. The workers were opposed to the way FSAS had attempted to become a central body which could speak authoritatively for all squatters and which imposed its will on recalcitrant local groups. The ASS collective felt that FSAS had ceased to be a loose association of free and equal groups but had become a centrally-directed monlithic body devoted to'leading' the mass of squatters, a form of organisation incompatible with the structure of the squatting movement.
Political disagreements hindered the formation during 1975 of an organisation to replace ALS which had virtually ceased to function by the time the summer media attack was launched. The differences were primarily between those who favoured a loose arrangement and whose political views tended to be libertarian or anarchist, and those who favoured a more centralist arrangement and whose politics tended to be Trotskyist. A Squatters Convention, attended by 250 people, at the end of May 1975, was dominated by this split and failed to produce any concrete mandate for future organisation.

SAC
But the press campaign of the summer made the creation of an organisation essential. In August, a London-wide meeting called through ASS, and attended by 100 squatters, accepted a proposal from Piers Corbyn - one of the main activists at Elgin Avenue - to set up the Squatters Action Council (SAC), `a body of elected members delegated from each squatting group in which observers are welcome to participate'. Its purpose was to `organise and campaign to defend squatting and to develop the fight for decent housing for all'. Its immediate tasks were to respond to media attacks, mobilise against evictions, organise against the Criminal Trespass Law and build links with trade unions and tenants organisations.
One of SAC's most effective achievements proved to be organising large scale occupations which individual squatters would have found difficult to undertake. For example, in 1977 it organised its own contribution to the Queen's Jubilee celebrations in the form of a long series of `Jubilee Squats'. The first, and most daring, took place on Jubilee Day (6 June) at No 18 Canton House Terrace, on the Mall, a house the Crown Commissioners had kept empty for two years. As it was on the Queen's procession route, the police declared the squat to ALS or SAC. be a `security risk' and sent the Special Patrol Group to evict the occupants. Backed up with Alsatian dogs, they broke in through the roof and warned the squatters to leave `or else'. They did so, but the same night achieved partial revenge by squatting Camden House, a police-owned block in central Camden that had been empty for four years despite the efforts of Short-Life Community Housing (formerly Student Community Housing) to bring it into use. The police displayed a sense of urgency over evicting the squatters which had been completely absent from their efforts to find a use for the block and the eviction was carried out with a High Court possession order just two months after the flats were squatted.
SAC, like ALS, was intended to bring together squatters from all over London and, in theory anyway, outside the capital. Yet meetings were frequently attended by fewer than a dozen people, who were sometimes delegates in name only, with the result that the strength of both organisations lay in the handful of active individuals who kept them going, rather than in the local groups which were supposedly represented. Most squatters never had any sense of identification with either supposedly represented. Most squatters never had any sense of identification with either ALS or SAC.
Neither of these organisations, nor ASS, really managed to mobilise squatters into an effective political force. Nonetheless, they did play an invaluable role: ALS and SAC through the initiation of particular campaigns, the opening of mass squats, the organising of actions involving large numbers of people, and the production of newssheets, and ASS (and, to a lesser extent, SAC) through the provision of advice and the production of the Squatters Handbook (taken on by ASS in 1977) and other informative material.

A whole new ball game: winning concessions and learning to live with the new law