Page 10 - C.A.L.L. #44 - Fall 2018

form of an increasingly prominent collection of countercultural types who saw squatting as a
means to challenging mainstream values: private property, naturally, but also many of the
‘bourgeois’ characteristics that irked them in their parents. This second tendency was a

somewhat grittier incarnation of the Hippy movement, and it was they who came to define
squatting in the minds of the general public.

Certainly the hippy squatters did their part in changing prevailing attitudes, but they also often
obscured and complicated the work of true activists engaged in the Sisyphen plod of social

change. This divide still exists today: for every one more or less sober crew who want to save
an abandoned public building from collapse or to protest against gentrification, there are two
whose sole goal is to get in, do a rave, sell warm cans of Stella for three quid, and disappear on
Monday morning, leaving behind only squalor and sleep-deprived civilians.

The evolution of the movement during the early and mid-1970s was exemplified by two
distinct squat projects, both emblematic in their failures and successes.

The Free Independent Republic of Frestonia was founded on 30 October 1977, when the 120

inhabitants of Freston Street in Kensington, the entirety of which had recently been squatted,
made a unilateral declaration of independence from Great Britain. They applied for full
membership of the United Nations and the EEC, and sent a telegram to the Queen announcing
their secession. A full cabinet of ministers was appointed; everyone who wasn’t made a

minister became an ambassador.

The Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, David Rappaport-Bramley, articulated their aims in a
letter to the Secretary General of the UN: “the GLC [Greater London Council] and the British
government, through a long history of neglect and mismanagement of Frestonia, have

forfeited the right to determine the future of the area…” The hoped-for media frenzy ensued,
with tabloid photographers queuing up to take pictures of the Minister of the Interior in his
pushchair. They showed the reporters their communal garden, which fed nearly the whole

street, and eloquently communicated their desire to live together as a self-sufficient community
(all the squatters had changed their last name to Bramley, in response to an earlier change in
GLC housing policy). The GLC felt obliged to come to terms with Frestonia, and the street
remained squatted for several years.

Frestonia built upon the lessons of a previous, similar project, based in a different part of
London: Kentish Town, where in 1972 there were 292 people squatting in 52 houses. The
community was centered around Prince of Wales Crescent, a whole street that had been
standing empty for seven years, pending redevelopment. When they moved in, the squatters

had to fix up the place, building, plumbing and wiring. A number of workshops were set up —
electronics, engineering, silk-screening, jewelry, carpentry — and an eclectic mix of
organizations instituted: the London filmmakers co-op, Little Sister of Jesus, European Theatre

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