FORUM: Squatting is just not going to go away

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Published: 22 September, 2011
by MYK ZEITLIN

SIXTY-five years ago this month a squatting movement was sweeping the country.

Properties such as the Ivanhoe Hotel in Bloomsbury (now the Marlborough) were squatted as part of a campaign started by ex-servicemen and women for housing and for the requisitioning of empty property.

On September 18 I led a history walk around a section of central London including the Marlborough.

It also included Tolmers Square, which would have been completely eaten up by office blocks without the resistance of squatters and tenants in the 1970s, 153-157 Cleveland Street which was to have been turned into a car park before squatters led resistance, and Centre Point, occupied for two days in 1974 in protest at homelessness and building for profit rather than need.

Centre Point had been empty since being built in 1963 but had increased in value from £5million to about £50million in the meantime.

It also included spaces squatted for different purposes; bookshops, women’s centres, social space, wholefood shops and one of the recent Really Free Schools, opened in protest at the privatisation of education and knowledge.

The campaign of 1946, although suppressed by mounted police and criminal charges, succeeded in forcing more powers for councils to requisition and build housing for those in need.

There was a practical recognition that the market could not satisfy people’s needs for housing and space.

The struggles of the 1960s and 1970s continued this process, putting pressure on councils to buy up empty properties and let them be used for co-ops or other more imaginative ways to cater for housing need, while trying to resist the renewed encroachment of the market.

Today instead of squatting being allowed to help find the new solutions so obviously required, it is under attack both by the government and sections of the media.

There are hundreds of thousands of empty properties across the country, while those due for demolition or major works aren’t even counted.

Thousands of people are on housing waiting lists, while other options become unaffordable or otherwise impossible. Thousands of people squat, mainly in long-term empty properties owned by institutions; banks, councils, speculators… but the government and media only want to talk about cases where individuals say they’ve been excluded from their home.

Where this is the case existing law makes squatting illegal.

The tabloids talk of people as “plagues” and “invasions” and of course “gangs”, with particular abuse of people who they have classified as “gypsies”.

Not all the people vilified are even squatting; some have been given tenancies by people who might not have had the right to do so; some are tenants which the landlords simply want to get rid of.

The tabloids recently showed great sympathy for a couple whose new house (rather than the one they were living in of course) in West Hampstead was squatted before they were planning to move in and have their child.

At the same time no sympathy was shown for a “heavily pregnant” woman “kicked out” of another house under vague circumstances.

Another ex-squat visited on my walk was in Huntley Street, where the eviction of 46 flats in 1978 involved the first use of new powers under the new Criminal Law Act.

The legislation was brought in following a media campaign of misinformation about people’s homes supposedly squatted when they were on holiday.

A letter in The Times in 1975 claimed that squatters had occupied the writer’s home and the police had refused to do anything about it.

This led to a spate of angry articles and letters, taking little notice of a later letter from the Metropolitan Police solicitor stating that the story “was not in accordance with the facts” and that the property had long been empty and up for sale.

There are existing legal remedies for people wanting property back. They can also come to arrangements when they are not going to use the property. Creating new laws in response to invented conditions is dangerous and absurd. Squatting is not going to go away as people need housing and social space to live.

• Myk Zeitlin is a volunteer at Advisory Service for Squatters and has squatted and rented in Camden