Radical difference in ‘transitional commoning’: hidden histories of London’s squats to co-ops

Abstract

The wave of organised mass squatting that started in 1969 had a profound impact on London’s geographies, transforming the built environment and enacting different imaginaries and practices of home. Groups excluded from existing housing provision or seeking unconventional forms of collective dwelling turned to occupying publicly owned empty properties and setting up collectively managed homes as a form of precarious housing commons. Infrastructures of mutual support, local alliances and knowledge-sharing made possible for some of them to become formalised into ‘short-life housing co-operatives’ which provided affordable community-led housing for tens of thousands of individuals. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews, in this article I take a critical historical perspective to revisit the little-known case of squats that became short-life co-ops in London. I outline how squats and co-ops enabled and responded to the emergence of plural needs and desires at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression and struggles for women, gay and lesbian and Black liberation. I conclude by arguing the need for a research agenda that addresses radical difference in fluid processes of ‘transitional commoning’, to acknowledge and amplify powerful articulations of feminist, queer, and anti-racist reimagining of urban inhabitation.

Keywords:

• short-life co-operatives
• intersectionality
• transitional commoning
• housing commons
• squatting

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of the paper ‘The long legacy of short-life co-ops in London’, presented at the session ‘Critical Geographies of Occupation, Squatting and Trespass (1): Shelter, Housing, Home’, RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2019. A prior version of this paper was presented to an audience of activists and housing organisers on 28th March 2018 as part of ‘The Politics of Organised Squatting’ research programme at MayDay Rooms, London. My profound thanks to all research participants and to those who contributed to this work through comments and questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here and elsewhere in the article I deliberately use the phrase ‘gay and lesbian’, instead of the more inclusive LGBTQ+, to remain close to the historical movement sources of the 1970s and early 1980s.

2 Data about the histories of short-life housing co-ops is fragmented and often difficult to obtain, and much of archival materials are still analogic. The research underpinning this paper could not engage with such a rich topic in an exhaustive way, so this account is inevitably partial. The archives consulted include: The Advisory Services for Squatters’ collection at the Bishopsgate Institute, MayDay Rooms and 56a Infoshop in London. Further research on this subject could fruitfully engage with local authority archives, especially records of local government debates on housing policy, as well as with housing-specific collections within archives of political movements, such as the George Padmore Institute and the Feminist Library.

3 The political intricacies of such negotiations are beyond the scope of this article, as I discuss in more detail in another paper titled ‘Housing movements, commons and “precarious institutionalization”’(under review).

4 Other boroughs with between 25 and 250 properties were: Croydon, Greenwich, Redbridge, Enfield, Barnet, Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow. In Bowman’s estimates, around 15,000 residents were still living in short-life housing cooperatives in 1986, and still 10,000 approx. in the early 2000s (Bowman 2004, 262).

5 GLA, Annual trend in household tenure dataset.

6 Department of the Environment Survey 1975 Squatters’ Survey, cited ‘Squatters – Myth & Fact. A Summary of Surveys on Squatters’ by the Self Help Housing Research Library. 1977.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this paper was made possible thanks to the support of UAB’s P-Sphere COFUND programme, part of the Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, grant n. 66591. The writing up was supported through the ‘Inhabiting Radical Housing’ ERC Starting Grant project, n. 851940.

Notes on contributors

Mara Ferreri

Mara Ferreri is a Senior Researcher at the Beyond Inhabitation Lab and Assistant Professor at the DIST—Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy. Email: [email protected]