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the days of the Poor Law. By the end of the 1960s, hard as it may be to imagine today, there
were three million families living in hostels and slums around the UK. These were the ‘invisible
homeless,’ constantly passed between different welfare authorities, their children taken in and

out of care.

Bailey’s LSC set the tone for the early stages of the squatting movement — young, highly-
politicized radicals committed to direct action on behalf of disenfranchised elements of
society. The great anarchist historian Colin Ward saw the LSC as a “harbinger of a new style of

social and political activity that changes demoralized and helpless people from being
the objects of social policy to becoming active fighters in their own cause.”

The initial stages of the LSC’s campaign involved a series of brief, symbolic, protest squats to

generate media attention. Their first action was to infiltrate a block of luxury flats on Wanstead
High Street, East London, which had been built four years earlier but were still empty, largely
because of the high rents being asked for them. Two members of the LSC posed as electricians
to get in, and then opened the door for the rest of the group. They climbed to the roof and
strung up banners, tossing leaflets to the crowd of supporters and onlookers below. After a

couple of hours, they descended to give a press conference.

Then on 18 January, 1969, activists ‘cracked’ a
condemned house in Notting Hill and moved in

one Maggie O’Shannon and her two children.
Owners the Inner London Education Authority
reacted with predictable belligerence, but
following an upswell of media support for

O’Shannon, they pushed a rent book through her
letter box. She became the first person since the
1940s to obtain permanent housing through
squatting, and the movement began.

A key aspect of the LSC’s campaign was its
targeted courting of the media. Crucially, the
organizers were not the ones who were living in
the squats they opened, nor were they the focus

of the broadly sympathetic newspaper treatment
of their campaigns. They focused the attention on
others, though, crucially, this wasn’t true of all

squatting movements of the period.

It would be simplistic to say that the squatting movement split as 1969 progressed, but there is
no question that another, distinct tendency began to emerge alongside the LSC. This took the

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