Page 11 - C.A.L.L. #44 - Fall 2018

Exchange, and, naturally, a Polytantric Academy. There was a free restaurant that cooked
unsold produce from local markets, and a free shop for recycling unwanted goods. There were
two community newsletters, an informal police force, a Mental Patients Union, and a drug

rehab clinic. The squatters also cleared a rubble-filled wasteland and built a public park.

Leaflets produced by the community described Prince of Wales Crescent as a “decentralized
urban self-managed community…[a] green revolution in the city.” They put forward plans to
Camden Council emphasizing mixed use and social heterogeneity: “It is a genuine organic

community. Planners are searching desperately to produce this phenomena in new estates, so
far without success. Prince of Wales Crescent is an excellent example of what people can do if
left to their own devices.”

This heart-warming utopianism turned out to be unsustainable. As the ‘70s progressed, the
squatting movement took on different characteristics, providing a refuge to the nascent Punk
scene. In fact, there is a sense in which Punk was indivisible from squatting — all the luminaries
lived in squats, from Shepherd’s Bush to Hampstead. Joe Strummer’s first band was named
after their place at 101 Walterton Terrace, and the Clash were later heavily involved in the Elgin

Avenue/Chippenham Road scene, comparable in scale to Prince of Wales Crescent. The Slits
used to rehearse at Strummer’s house. Meanwhile, ‘God Save the Queen’ was written in a squat
in Hampstead. As Johnny Rotten told Punk chronicler Jon Savage: “I went squatting with Sid.

Hampstead, not the posh end, but those awful Victorian dwellings round the back of the
station. Really desperate people lived up there. It was awful. I liked it.”

1977 was the turning point, the first formal pushback from the authorities, and the end of a
golden age of squatting in the UK.

At the time, local councils were also applying another, more insidious technique to defang the
squat movement: legalizing it. Increasingly, squatter collectives were allowed to remain in the
properties they occupied on the condition that they formalize their organization and become

legally responsible. This was an attractive option to those who were tired of insecurity and
many jumped at the chance, creating housing co-operatives many of which are still operational
today. The GLC even offered squatters an amnesty in 1977, giving them 28 days to give up
their squats in exchange for permanent housing. At the time, there were 5000 squatters in GLC
properties, 1000 of whom registered.

But squatting was far from dead, remaining the focus of the London alternative scene for
several decades more, and even experiencing a boom with the emergence of the occupied
social centre in the late ‘90s. Today, like all of London’s subcultures, squatting has been eroded

by the implacable tide that is swamping the city. But it remains one of the few true alternatives
to that tide, as well as a powerful weapon in the fight against injustice. In the words of the
invaluable Advisory Service for Squatters, squatting is still legal, still necessary, and still free.

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