Bishop Backs Squatters
September 21, 2016 10:36 PM   Subscribe

The Golden Age of Squatting, a history of London's squats and what squatting looks like in the present day.
The squat movement flowered in London in the 1970s, when an estimated 30,000 people lived in squats in Greater London, and the movement provided the base for many London subcultures over several decades. In 2012, the scene took a legal body blow when squatting in residential (rather than commercial) properties was made a criminal offense
posted by frimble (9 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've hung out in some cool punk and otherwise squats in Sydney; it's a big part of the culture/history here too.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 10:53 PM on September 21, 2016


(It should be noted that while squatting commercial properties isn't an offence in the UK, it is also not associated with virtually any of the protections that used to be afforded to residential squatters, and it is both fairly quick and easy to get someone evicted from a commercial property compared to a residential one.)
posted by Dysk at 1:02 AM on September 22, 2016


There were so many squats in north London in the 80s that when I was 14, we even had our own private one across the road from school, for smoking in. And in the 60s and 70s there were derelict and bombed-out houses everywhere. There are houses near me that now sell for 6-7 million pounds which were squats then. Good times.

At that time the old Victorian housing stock was often viewed as uninhabitable even if it wasn't actually slums. After the war, working class people wanted to live in newly built homes with central heating, windows that didn't leak, insulation, etc - most welcomed the new estates and housing projects; the popular myth of the evil architect and council smashing up lovely Victorian terraces only came about later. You could buy a Victorian house in the heart of Islington in the 70s for £5,000, because nobody wanted them. Then the houses and areas become gentrified and the middle classes decided that they did want them after all. So laws gradually crystallised to facilitate this.
posted by Coda Tronca at 1:32 AM on September 22, 2016 [6 favorites]


My Mum spent a good deal of time in London squats in the 70s. I was born when she was still living in London, but i'm not sure if she was living in them then. A lot of my aunts and uncles and older cousins are ridiculously nostalgic about those times. It genuinely seems like London has gone down the shitter in lots of ways.
posted by trif at 5:34 AM on September 22, 2016


The Golden Age of Squatting

Well that's no surprise. It's the king of the compound lifts, along with the deadlift.

what?
posted by leotrotsky at 6:04 AM on September 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


You could buy a Victorian house in the heart of Islington in the 70s for £5,000, because nobody wanted them

*weeps*.

This is why on every street of £2m rather small terraced houses there's always one that doesn't have a Farrow&Ball door — it's where someone has been living with no mortgage for decades. London's property market is so, so fucked.
posted by bonaldi at 9:38 AM on September 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


A surprising amount of terraced houses are still owned by the council - some of those non-Farrow&Ball doors will be those.
posted by Coda Tronca at 10:09 AM on September 22, 2016


Well that's no surprise. It's the king of the compound lifts, along with the deadlift.

The Golden Age of Squatting should be the name of Ed Zercher's biography.
posted by baconaut at 11:16 AM on September 22, 2016


I don't know if I'm projecting here but what frustrates me is that there never seems to be just an ordinary housing market. (I know, I know Omaha or something.) But it always seems to go from if not quite corpses on the corner certainly run down to completely unaffordable with nothing in between. The ends of the spectrum get valorized within their own contexts but people who just want to live somewhere stable are irrelevant.
posted by Pembquist at 6:10 PM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


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