Page 8 - C.A.L.L. #44 - Fall 2018

activist communities across the UK. Thousands of people suddenly found that sitting in their
front room had become a criminal offense.

Many thought this would be the death of squatting, but in recent years there has been a

resurgence of bigger, politicized squats in commercially-zoned properties. Squatting today
implies a more frontline lifestyle than it did before, and on the whole attracts only highly
committed individuals. Nevertheless, many currents of British radical politics still embrace it as
one of the few tactics available to the dispossessed. Sisters Uncut, a feminist direct action

collective, fighting the funding cuts for domestic violence services that the Conservative
government has been rolling out since 2009, squatted a council flat in Hackney this summer
and turned it into a centre for victims of domestic violence. Or there is Grow Heathrow, an ‘eco-
squat’ in an abandoned market garden on land slated to be concreted over by the proposed

expansion of the airport, which for the past six years has been a hub for community resistance
to the expansion, as well as many national grassroots networks.

The success of these and many other initiatives shows how squatting in the UK still constitutes
a coherent, well-organized and powerful tradition of resistance. With this in mind, it is worth

considering the recent history of squatting in London, as it provides lessons that are applicable
to the contemporary struggle against oppression and exploitation.

The modern squatting

movement started on 18
November, 1968 in the kitchen of
teacher Ron Bailey, with the
founding of the London

Squatters Campaign (LSC). The
LSC initially comprised around
15 people, most of whom, Bailey
later wrote, ‘were from the

libertarian left – there were a
couple of anarchists… three or
four people from the solidarity
group, and some ‘unattached’

libertarians.’ The immediate aim of the LSC was clear: the rehousing of poor families from
slums or hostels in the swathes of local authority housing stock that at that time stood empty.
Its broader goal was to spearhead a movement that would inspire homeless people and slum
dwellers to squat en masse.

Bailey was a veteran activist. He had spent years travelling England, talking with people who
lived in Welfare Department ‘temporary housing,’ largely hostels provided by local authorities.
Unsanitary, crowded and cold, these hostels enshrined a workhouse mentality left over from

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