Sisterhood and Squatting in the 1970s: Feminism, Housing and Urban Change in Hackney

Fig 1.

Areas of housing in poor physical condition and overcrowding in Inner London. Based on 1966 Housing Survey, Greater London Development Plan, 1969, Greater London Council.

To walk through Islington, Camden and Hackney in the early 1970s was to walk along street after street of soot-blackened, late Georgian and Victorian terraces and villas, boarded up and left semi-derelict. In 1971 Greater London contained 23,100 empty dwellings awaiting demolition; twenty-nine percent of this housing stock was built before 1875 and sixty-seven percent between 1875 and 1919.¹ By the middle of the decade, thousands of these houses had been reclaimed and repaired by squatters, in a movement which re-emerged in the late 1960s and which, by 1976, was estimated to involve between twenty and thirty thousand people throughout Greater London.² This historic spatial configuration of the city allowed the social and political movements of the 1970s to flourish, as groups of like-minded people began to live and work in close proximity. For women, it enabled radical experiments in collective living and shared childcare and for some feminists, active in the women's liberation movement, it provided the framework for an extensive network of women-only housing, together with social and political spaces. This paper examines the origins of a community of women who moved in and squatted the streets surrounding Broadway Market and London Fields in Hackney during the 1970s.³ Through oral testimony, it uncovers the historical importance of this community to wider feminist politics in London, and the significance for women of taking control over their immediate built environment.

SQUATTING IN INNER LONDON

A complex set of conditions caused the stalling of postwar planning and housing policy which, in turn, resulted in the empty, derelict streets of inner London in the 1970s: these have been investigated in detail by others.⁴ However, one of the reasons was the success of what Andrew Saint has described as the London County Council's (LCC) 'policy of dispersal of its inhabitants'.⁵ 'Dispersal' originated with Victorian reformers, with their horror of the slum and commitment to slum clearance. It continued into the twentieth century with Abercrombie and Forshaw's post WW2 plan for the relocation of a million people, and industry, from Inner London to satellite New Towns.⁶ Postwar population decline was acute: between 1951 and 1961 Greater London lost about 54,000 people a year and between 1961 and 1966 this increased to an outflow of around 70,000 people a year.⁷ These leavers were mostly young families with children moving out to the new towns and to suburbs on the outskirts of London. In the London Borough of Hackney between 1951 and 1966 the population fell by six percent, equivalent to 15,731 people moving out.⁸

For those who stayed in London there was a desperate shortage of decent housing. When the LCC was replaced by the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1965, work on producing a new plan for the future of London began under the first Labour administration and continued from 1967 under the Conservatives. The Greater London Development Plan (GLDP), published in 1969, provided new data which revealed London's decline and proposed a framework for future development through improved transport, employment and housing.⁹ However the GLDP housing strategy still identified large areas of nineteenth-century housing for clearance, to be replaced with new housing mainly in the form of flats.¹⁰ The studies that made up the 1969 Plan identified five Inner London Boroughs – Tower Hamlets, Newham, Southwark, Lambeth and Hackney – as containing seventy percent of Inner London's unfit houses. These were houses which lacked the three essential household amenities: exclusive use of their own water supply (including hot water), a bath, and an indoor toilet. In 1969, only thirty-six percent of Hackney households had all three amenities.¹¹ Housing unfit for human habitation was also identified 'by reason of their bad arrangement, or the narrowness or bad arrangement of the streets...