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Listening to 'The Squat Generation' about Irish squatters in London in the 80s and 90s. I was one of 1000s of Irish who squatted there and helped open & fix up about a dozen squats for myself & new arrivals over two summers https://soundcloud.com/magiscully/the-squat-generation
By the time I arrived squatting privately owned building was legally tricky but thanks to Thatcherism there were 1000s of empty council flats & other properties like hostels the funding had dried up for - initially I camped in the back garden of two such squatted ex hostels
We found a long abandoned house around the corner that was in a bad state, pipes had been ripped out and there had been a fire on the top floor. There were also 70 2l bottles of piss in one upstairs room left by the previous occupant!
The hostels were on Green Lanes (293) while this first squat was Gloucester Drive. Google street view shows me modern apartment blocs in each location - this photo was taken by a 1st gen. Turkish migrant I met outside who had taken the job to escape the family garment trade
More arrived and we opened up more squats nearby, all on the strip from Finsbury Park to Clissold Park. Including 5th and 15th floor of a tower bloc that is now gone. The huge squat communities of Stoke Newington were a short distance away - one even had. stake board rink
The council put steel panels over doors & windows of places that were in reasonable repair. Opening those involved crow bars & a lot of noise so when we returned the day after opening the 15th and a huge guy got in the lift with us to ask about the noise last night we gulped
But he turned out to be grand - a lot of neighbours preferred reasonably clued in squatters as otherwise vacants could be broken open to use as shooting galleries by heroin addicts. We got into one of those once & there were needles everywhere
After listening to a lot of the documentary the voices in it are only sort of representative, its very heavy on people who became artists and pretty thin on the politics of squatting and the period beyond scene setting - but probably hard to capture everything
The following year we opened a wave of squats closer to town, in the huge council housing estate that stretched around Old Street, a short walk from the Barbican. This was the summer of the build up to the poll tax riot & we went to local organising meetings
It was also the anniversary of troops going into the north, we wrote & quietly photocopied about 500 copies of an Irish anarchist 'Troops Out Now' leaflet and talked London anarchists into talking part in the protest marches - these were under constant attack from fascists
Particularly this one organised by the RCP (now Spiked) through their Irish Freedom Movement front. The National Front had put a huge effort in & leafletted army barracks in the run up - 100s of fascists and off duty soldiers made constant attacks on the march
I came dangerously close to not posting this as we foolishly left the end of the march in a small group, didm't realise fascist scouts had spotted us and get chased into the underground by about 40 very large fascists, we'd have been pounded to pulp
But we hadn't actually gone into the Underground station, as we fled them a bus had corned coming between us and we'd taken a right angle, got onto another bus and hid. As it pulled out we could see the fascists charging down the steps into the station
I was working as a NHS hospital porter in South Kensington, the pay was so low (95 a week) I've no idea how anybody rented on that income but free accommodation meant I'd enough to spend the last month of the summer interlining to Paris, Prague, Budapest & beyond.
10s of 1000s squatted in London in this period, as well as providing accommodation for people who might otherwise have been homeless (prior to squatting I'd lived in Tent City near Wormwood scrubs) it also put pressure on those owning vacant properties to bring them into use
With something like 300,000 empty properties in Ireland and a massive housing crisis I often look at the many many abandoned buildings in Dublin and wonder why squatting here remains relatively small. The answer is courts willing to quickly throw people on the streets
In London that could only happen if an owner proved they were bringing the building into use. There was a public squatting wave in Dublin in 2015 - there were multiple evictions and most of those buildings remain empty to this day while people sleep in the doorways
Rental costs meant Irish migrants in London often lived in very over crowded conditions to share rent. Before we squatted 26 of us lived in a 3 bedroom house much as many Brazilian & Eastern European migrants have to today. But in both cases the economy depended on our labour
I'm lucky to have secure housing but I have spent time in the last few years covering the housing movement and in particular those aspects that involved squatting, many of the pieces at https://www.wsm.ie/squat are mine.
There is an interview I did with one participant in the 2015 squatting struggle in Dublin with video of many of the evictions that we talked about at
RTE 1989 archive - Jim Fahy looks at squat squalor which many young Irish immigrants have to endure when they arrive in London.. talks to Padraic Kenna, Inishfree Housing Association, who reads a letter from an Irish emigrant in a London prison https://www.rte.ie/archives/2014/0509/616221-squatters-in-london/
This image of the front of the Squatters Handbook which I think was produced out of the Freedom press building was pointed out by @aaocarroll who appears in one of the photos upthread along with the retrospective piece from the V&A site here https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/disobedient-objects/made-possible-by-squatting-myth-memory-mimesis
High rent, low pay element must be very familiar situation for migrants trying to live & work in Dublin today. We had some big advantages in terms of same language & automatic work rights & one big disadvantage in terms of attitudes to the Irish which mirror racism here now /23
London cops were often very hostile, although because so many Irish migrants were very precarious they seldom bothered to arrest you, just gave you a battering & went on their way. Special Patrol Groups were particularly notorious, I was followed by a van load one night /24
Another occasion when we were interrupted trying to break open a new squat one of our number broke his collar bone while fleeing. Cops found him on the ground in agony, laughed and said 'you can find your own way to hospital paddy' & left /25
But the unlucky got fitted up for crimes cops needed to solve, the most infamous cases being those related to republican bombings when under pressure cops decided any Paddy would do and framed Birmingham 6 & Guildford 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seven /26
They were still in prison when I was there and every Irish person knew of their cases. If you were politically active it meant you were very careful of what you said, particularly in work. Even the Pogues 'Streets of Sorrow' was banned until early 90s
I was secretary of the TCD Socialist Society, the previous secretary had been jailed for 25 years in 1987 as part of the Winchester 3 persons unknown conspiracy trial, they were released in 1990 https://apnews.com/5daa927b61afb718436d1122b0df157f /28
Shoutout to @poguesofficial I was a #Pogues fan before going to London but their songs about life there were often very close to the life we were living and we loved them. Saw them play at the free gig in Finsbury Park in 1987(?) /30
One regret is the political climate meant there were conversations at the time I was afraid to follow, in particular when one of the older guys in a factory I worked in told me he had been in the Para's and what was happening in Ireland was terrible. /31
Possibly the most overtly political squatting publication of the time was Crowbar magazine multiple issues of which appeared over several years. There are fragments of it to be found online, this March 1985 cover is from the end of the Great Miners Strike
Crowbar No 32 published a letter from #HBlock prisoners on the aftermath of the mass escape that describers the sustained beatings suffered by 19 recaptured prisoners - this 1984 issue is at https://archive.org/details/Crowbar_201509/page/n7
In fact looking through those two issues its striking how despite the very old school layout (probably printed via Gestetner, a mess process involving an ink filled drum and wax paper) the topics of international solidarity & opposing rape culture remain with us today.
I remember this Crowbar back page / poster - its reproduced in this TimeOut piece on Lesbian culture in the squatting movement that includes a guesstimate of 30,000 people squatting https://www.timeout.com/london/blog/meet-the-lesbian-punks-whove-been-written-out-of-londons-history-042517
I'm now thinking of doing a video explainer that looks at the short to medium term value of squatting in combatting #ClimateCrisis - basically bringing vacants back into use probably has a massive benefit over new construction for the 40 key years ahead https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/proof-greenest-building-one-already-standing-released-new-report-preservation-green-lab.html
Some concrete (pun intended) figures here with 11% of current energy related emissions coming from the construction process and a further 28% from operating buildings (heating etc). Concrete is responsible for 7% GG emissions
This BBC piece goes into the GG emissions from the concrete production process in a lot more detail. It both requires high temperature (1400c) which may involve fossil fuels and the process itself release a lot of CO2, half of the total https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844
I cycle past a massive regeneration project over the last months that has seen several large existing buildings torn down with the materials dumped & now a larger concrete & steel edifice going up. It's in central Dublin so probably transport efficency means this makes sense
But what doesn't make sense is allowing 200k buildings to remain empty while large numbers are homeless and the only offered solution is new builds resulting in major emissions. Secure long term squatting allowing residents to improve energy efficiency should be a route
Squatting has often been legalised in emergency situations, often after wars have destroyed housing & left ownership of vacant unclear. In terms of both homelessness & #ClimateCrisis we are in an emergency where secure squatting would help over 4 key decades
