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While these were primarily for their own privacy it also helped to make lesbian households indistinguishable from the rest of the street.

In this particular and much smaller community in the streets around London Fields, lesbians, while living openly, fitted into the existing urban nexus of mixed squats, council tenants and homeowners. Furniture and other artifacts were often left behind: in one house an ARP helmet, overcoat and gas mask were found hanging on a hook in the under-stairs cupboard. However in most of the houses water and electricity needed to be reconnected and by the mid s there were women electricians and plumbers who were skilled enough to help new squatters reinstate services.

The process of acquiring these essential skills varied. Lynne H. Using this knowledge, she was able to rewire and put in new sockets for her squat. Not all the squats were in good condition. Anny Brackx moved in to a house in Marlborough Avenue in the early s without water or electricity and with a leaking roof, which already housed two women. And then, a few months later, when she was fed up going to the public washing places, she took a course in plumbing, and she plumbed in a bath, which was, I thought, fantastic.

And so we gradually got everything together to have a household, you know, because we cooked for each other. Other women had worked alongside men in mixed communes and squats and learnt basic building skills. However acquired, confidence in using traditionally male skills was essential for women who went on to train for formal qualifications in the building trades.

These women were also active in Women in Manual Trades, a feminist support and campaign group set up to encourage women into the building trades, which still exists. The architectural design of the large late Georgian houses and smaller Victorian terraces allowed flexibility in the way they were occupied. Damp basements were utilized for workshops, meeting-rooms or newly installed bathrooms. Building materials were recycled from houses which were too derelict to repair or which had been partly destroyed by Hackney council to prevent squatting.

Working chimneys and fireplaces were the main source of heating, supplemented with electric or gas fires, as fuel in the form of timber off-cuts was readily available from the skips in the yards of small furniture factories in the surrounding streets and near the canal. Resources were shared between some households so that wholefood basics were bought in bulk and fuel collection rotated.

Many houses had large gardens stocked with mature trees and flowerbeds that had been carefully looked after by former tenants. They were appreciated as private and communal social spaces; some women grew vegetables, and one household even kept chickens. Frankie recounted how the gardens were used: The back gardens were very, very important.

Although women created private domestic spaces in shared houses they also met in public spaces. There were group sports activities and, for a while, there was a Sunday hockey match on London Fields instituted when someone came into possession of a load of hockey sticks. Large groups of women were less welcome in the nearby pubs.

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We ended up being quite welcome at a pub called the Belgrave on Queensbridge Road. It was a big, huge pub, and it was great. Cheap communal living, shared instruments for band members and spaces for rehearsals and song-writing sessions were all available. Frankie Green remembers regular band practices in the houses around London Fields. From the very beginning children were part of the community and shared childcare was the norm, with some women taking on significant roles in their lives. Paddy Tanton moved in to a squat with two women, one of whom had a small child.

No matter how supportive, friends and lovers could not provide protection from the justice system and at that time lesbian mothers were extremely vulnerable to the courts.

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Living in close physical proximity in the squats enabled groups of feminist women to meet, organize and discuss politics as part of daily life. Lynne Alderson, who after a time working in Compendium bookshop in North London set up Sisterwrite bookshop with two other women, squatted near London Fields. Others had mainstream jobs including, nurses, teachers, social workers, journalists, factory workers, gardeners, carpenters, electricians, jewellers, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, booksellers and printers.

Political actions, many involving graffiti as a response to current events, were spontaneous and quickly organized. When Astrid Proll, a former member of the German Red Army Fraction who had been living and working under an assumed identity as part of the community was arrested in , a support group was quickly organized. Graffiti backing her rapidly appeared. Closer to home there were frequent expeditions to paint out fascist and racist National Front slogans which appeared regularly on the tin hoardings around vacant plots of land and derelict houses.

So, Christmas Day, we used to go out spray-painting because there was nobody about, and you could just do what you liked. Most of the women who moved to Broadway Market moved there because it was a lesbian community and in many ways it was a much freer time for women to be able to live and act in this way, even though in terms of housing it was also precarious. This period of large-scale, organized squatting in London started to decline when the Conservatives gained control of the GLC in The new owners, often middle-class professionals, could then apply for a low-interest loan from the GLC for the costs of repair.

Those who objected to individual home ownership and who wished to remain in their homes and retain control over their housing were given the option to form housing co-operatives.

Broadway Market Squatters Association, after much debate, split into three distinct groups, each group setting up a separate housing co-op. Most of the women-only households, together with an extended local family of three households who had become neighbours in squatted properties in the same streets, formed London Fields Housing Co-op. This was set up in and in granted funding from the GLC to purchase and renovate seventeen of the squatted properties.

After splitting in into two management groups, women-only and mixed, London Fields Housing Co-operative continued operating for many years, held together by a core group of women who had arrived as squatters in the s. Squatting in the area continued, however, after the GLC amnesty. London Borough of Hackney was now responsible for most of the streets designated to become part of the Broadway Market Re-Development Scheme and continued to issue short-life licences on these houses while the development and refurbishment programme was held up for another decade.

New squats were opened up and existing ones taken over by women who continued to arrive throughout the s. Many of these women were travellers looking for short-term places to stay and they created a parallel community with very little overlap between the slightly older women who had arrived in the s. Trederwen Road graffiti These women remained in their squatted houses until the final days of the street, even as it was demolished around them.

When Hackney finally started full-scale redevelopment of the area, these last women squatters were rehoused across the borough in council flats where many still live. Housing tenure in the area around Broadway Market remains mixed, with renting from council or housing association together with private ownership contributing to a community that remains vibrant despite the exclusive aspects of gentrification and regeneration.

It offered cheap housing for young single women and mothers who were not provided for in standard council accommodation designed around the nuclear family. Communities did not exist in isolation but were part of a wider network of thousands of London squatters, constantly defending their right to housing and exemplifying a sense of solidarity that usually overrode a multitude of different political perspectives and positions.

Lesbian lives in the s were precarious. Lesbians had few legal rights and lost their children in custody battles and their jobs through discrimination, while many were thrown out of the parental home and ostracized by families. The squatting community around Broadway Market offered a place to gather together, its mutual support allowed lesbian women to live openly and move freely within the neighbourhood streets.

It was in some senses utopian: an opportunity for self-determination, to live autonomously, to imagine and create a different world. The important and revolutionary aspect of the squats described here is that it was women who wielded the crow-bars and jemmies, and repaired and adapted the built environment.

While the extensive urban squatting of the s appeared as a result of historically specific circumstances, when empty residential properties coincided with high numbers of homeless young people under a less restrictive legal system, the rallying call of squatting remains timeless. She has researched and published widely on the history of the built environment including her book An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialised Building in Britain —70 Routledge I am indebted to Sally Alexander for her support and encouragement throughout.

This article has been written from an insider perspective. I was part of the London Fields squatting community for a time before I became involved with setting up the housing co-op in See also Kevin C. I am grateful to the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of Westminster, for a grant to enable transcription of the oral history recordings used in this paper. They are part of an ongoing project to create an oral history record of feminist women squatters who lived in the London Fields area in the s and s, which will be deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute and Library.

Larkham, and Keith D. Andrew Saint, London, , p. Greater London Development Plan. Report of Studies , Greater London Council, The GDLP identified that overcrowded households tended to occur in families with small children in rented accommodation with very poor facilities.

Overcrowding was concentrated in two main areas, Islington, Hackney and Camden, and to the west in a belt running from Earls Court up to Willesden. Housing problem areas suffered from both overcrowding and poor physical condition of dwellings and these were concentrated in the eastern zone.

See Chapter 2, Population and Housing pp. The superficial surveys reveal that many houses were designated for demolition on spurious grounds and the process was merely a necessary stage in the development plan. Bailey, Squatters , p. See for a long investigative article on the evictions appeared in Sunday Times , 11 May , and Thames Today TV news programme broadcast interviews with the squatting families.

Later the same year World in Action filmed a documentary on the Redbridge squatters. The Victorian Society, founded in , was given a role at governmental level in to comment on listed building consent when all applications for demolition had to be passed to the Society for appraisal. Squatting: the Real Story , ed. Peter Somerville and Nigel Springings, , pp. GLF published a statement implicitly criticizing newly emerging gay and lesbian social and cultural scene.

Jennifer Evans and Matt Cook, London, There is a larger literature on squatting in mainland Europe, much of it relatively recent and analyzing squatting in relation to urban renewal, but little has been written on lesbian communities. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem characterized American suburbia as a prison for married women while in Britain the social institution of marriage was seen as legitimizing domestic labour in the home, see Lee Comer, Wedlocked Women , Leeds, , among others.

Lynne Harne and Elaine Miller, Spare Rib was a feminist magazine set up in Between and it was produced by a collective of women, whose membership changed over time and who were committed to non-hierarchical working. See the British Library online archive: www. Interview with Frankie Green.

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Six members of the Angry Brigade were arrested at a flat in Amhurst Road in The Lesbian Custody Project was set up in , within the feminist organization Rights of Women, to support lesbian mothers. There was widespread hostility against lesbian mothers in the courts throughout the s, and from judges, psychologists, welfare and social workers and teachers.

A survey of 36 lesbian mothers in dispute over custody with former partners revealed that over half avoided court proceedings, where it was customary for judges to focus on lesbianism as the primary reason for mothers to not have custody of their children, over any consideration of the quality of parental relationship or wishes of the children Harne , pp.

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Horace Cutler became leader of the GLC when the Conservatives won the local government election in Cutler, The Cutler Files , , p. The s saw the rise of a new housing bureaucracy needed to organize and fund short-life repairs and licences for newly created housing co-operatives.

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Short-life funding for basic repairs was available for co-ops which had not been given funding to purchase their properties but were allowed to manage them until they were either sold, often to Housing Associations, or refurbished. The organization and politics surrounding short-life housing are investigated and described in detail by Anna Bowman in her thesis Interim spaces: reshaping London: the role of short life property, to This network was not confined to London.

Bakhtin, M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Austin: University of Texas Press.