The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan

in service industries, 13 artists and musicians, twelve manual labourers, twelve skilled labourers, eleven children, ten professionals, eight teachers, eight ‘housewives’ [sic], 24 registered unemployed, including a number of people in unclassifiable community activities, and six unknown.⁵⁷

      Some squatters did come from decidedly upper-middle-class households. They were architectural graduates, trainee solicitors, medical students and teachers. Others were young people who arrived in search of a place to stay, including a pair of ‘junkies’ who had been trapped in the ‘hostel circuit’ and were looking for a home of their own. Most were young and in their twenties, though there was a group of older squatters. As Wates concluded, the square became a ‘haven for all kinds of social misfits’.⁵⁸

      And yet, if these were ‘misfits’ in search of affordable housing, they all shared a desire to establish some form of alternative living. In the words of one of their counterparts in Brixton:

      To me living in Villa Road means more than just squatting and living on social security; it means living amongst people who are trying to set up alternatives for themselves, and anyone else who can no longer accept what society offers or is doing to itself; alternatives, for instance housing and ways of living with people, education, community care, sex attitudes, work and technology.⁵⁹

      The few modest surveys conducted with London squatters in the 1970s stressed the importance of housing.⁶⁰ But they also pointed to a correlation between the search for ‘suitable accommodation’ and the ‘need to live more communally’.⁶¹ Squatting opened up, in this way, new possibilities for the cultivation of alternative political identities and subjectivities. To be a squatter unsurprisingly meant many different things to many different people.

      In East London, a group of feminist activists that were linked to a nationwide grouping, Big Flame, were developing ‘new models of working and living and organising’ in the early 1970s. Drawing on the work of groups such as Lotta Continua in Italy and Solidarity in the UK, the East London Big Flame (ELBF) challenged traditional forms of leftist militancy which, in their eyes, did not meet the needs of women nor address the problems that local communities of colour routinely faced. They advocated a form of autonomous politics that placed particular emphasis on ‘developing experimental ways of living and relating’.⁶²

      The ELBF was active in East London between 1973 and 1975 and was involved in a number of different struggles that extended far beyond the workplace and included squatting on their own behalf and to support homeless families in the occupation of empty houses and abandoned blocks of flats. Members of the ELBF were also part of the Mile End Collective who were living in a number of houses around Bow. Two of the houses were squatted and one was used for the establishment of a community playgroup. A food co-operative was set up by the ELBF on the Lincoln Estate in Bow, though this was forced to close due to constant police harassment.⁶³

      Other members lived in Tower Hamlets and played an important role in the Tower Hamlets Housing Action Group which brought squatters, tenants and other activists together to ‘do something to stop the destruction of their part of London’.⁶⁴ The Group helped to support the fifty families squatting Sumner House, an empty block of flats, in the autumn of 1974. ELBF members were also linked to the Bengali Housing Action Group (BHAG), who were installing families in properties on the Stephen and Matilda Estate near Tower Bridge in the mid-1970s.⁶⁵

      The emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s ultimately played a decisive role in the establishment of a number of women’s centres across London including the South London’s Women Centre on Radnor Terrace in Vauxhall, the Crossroads Women’s Centre on Drummond Street near Euston and the Brixton Women’s Centre on Railton Road.⁶⁶ These were spaces grounded in struggles around women’s liberation and, as such, they provided a radical milieu where new forms of resistance against patriarchal power structures, endemic sexual violence and other forms of oppression were developed.

      These were also struggles linked to the various histories of gay radical culture in 1970s London and the questioning of queer sexual identities that emerged during this period. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was, after all, set up in October 1970 in a meeting at the London School of Economics. The GLF drew inspiration from various liberationist groups in the United States and was committed to a social and sexual revolution that was predicated, in part, on experiments with alternative forms of communal living.⁶⁷

      While the first incarnation of the GLF dissolved in 1972, the spirit of the original organisation was carried forward by local groups in London and elsewhere who were inspired by earlier GLF communities in Brixton, Notting Hill and Bethnal Green. In Brixton, beginning in 1974, members of the South London GLF squatted a number of dilapidated back-to-back houses on Railton Road and Mayall Road which were home to over sixty men and were later converted into a housing co-operative.⁶⁸ They also set up the South London Gay Community Centre at 78 Railton Road, which opened in March 1974 and was evicted in April 1976. The squats were widely seen as a pragmatic, practical solution to the challenges and difficulties of living a straight ‘separatist life’. At the same time, they also represented an ‘experimental space where men with loosely shared politics, sexuality and investment in youth and counterculture came together’.⁶⁹

      The centre became, in its own right, a key site within the radical queer community in South London. It hosted a number of different groups and events and, until its closure in 1976, was part of an infrastructure of alternative community-based groups on Railton Road which included two women’s centres, an Anarchist News Service, the Brixton Advice Centre and a food co-operative on nearby Shakespeare Road.⁷⁰

      The development of the queer squatting scene in Brixton was, as the historian Matt Cook reminds us, ‘part – and partly representative – of a broader history of 1970s counterculture in London and beyond’. The Brixton squatters were, in many ways, successful in articulating ‘an alternative vision of queer urban life’ and they did so through a form of ‘direct action’ which afforded them a ‘degree of self-determination within the city’.⁷¹ And yet, these were alternative identifications and community formations that were part of an expansive history with its own exclusions and blind spots. These are stories that have tended to be colour-blind, overlooking the role assumed by communities of colour within London’s squatting community.

      It was, after all, on Railton Road in Brixton in 1972 that Olive Morris and Liz Turnbell, members of the British Black Panthers Movement, squatted an empty flat. The first successful squat of a private property in Lambeth was 121 Railton Road. Morris and Turnbell resisted a number of evictions over the course of the next few months though, in the face of growing police pressure, they eventually moved down the road and squatted a council property.⁷² Once they had moved, a bookstore, Sabaar Bookshop, was opened at 121 Railton Road. It doubled as a meeting place and advice centre for local black activists. The flat above the bookstore was, in turn, occupied by a group of squatters linked to the Brixton and Croydon Collective. They were previously involved in a major squat on Evendale Road near Loughborough Junction and were part of Black Roof, an organisation that played an instrumental role in coordinating and defending black squatters living in Brixton and Clapham.⁷³

      The British Black Panthers dissolved in 1973. It reformed as a group of organisations including the Brixton Black Women’s Group, which was set up by Olive Morris and other women to address specific issues faced by black women living in the UK. It operated out of a squat at 64 Railton Road before moving to Stockwell Green where it became the Black Women’s Centre. The Race Today Collective was started in the same year and was based at 165–7 Railton Road (C.L.R. James later lived at the same address). It’s membership included Darcus Howe, Farukh Dhondy, Leila Hassan, Gus John and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Dhondy, in particular, played an important role in the BHAG, who were squatting flats across East London.⁷⁴

      Looking through the lens of critical race and feminist theory, it can be argued that various struggles over squatting in London were, in some ways, intersectional.⁷⁵ Issues of race, class, gender and sexuality were all present and raised by different groups, though these entanglements were often ignored and the approaches that were adopted by activists across the city were