Notes on a housing crisis

Beth Jones

A blink in London’s metropolis, under the shadow of Grenfell, lives a street not unlike any other at face value- but its history is one of a nation. Beth Jones explores Frestonia, an independent state of squatters born out of Freston Road, a place beyond property, through her sit down conversations with citizens of Frestonia. How did a small group of impoverished radical squatters resist the Greater London Council, Thatcher, and private property?

Looking up and down Freston Road it would be easy to write it off as just another post-war lace-curtain residential area, skirting the edge of the Westway. In between Notting Hill and Shepherds Bush, it’s encased in that distinctly West London mix of art galleries, tower-blocks, council estates, corner shops, proper caffs and six-pound-a-latte coffee chains- always on the brink of urban chrysiasis, its skin stripped pallid by gold. Terraced houses huddling alongside one edge of the road, big brutalist blocks of flexible office space dragooning the other. It’s easy to feel you know where you stand, between the pre-fabs and the angels, to read its history as something familiar, mute, British- yet you’d be wrong. You are, in fact, not even in the UK. Freston Road was- and still is- home to The Independent Republic of Frestonia

Back in the 1970s, Freston Road was home to a squatting community that took on the Greater London Council, seceded from the UK and tried to join the United Nations, mapping out a form of resistance to a housing crisis not unlike the one we are facing today. The squat there began in about 1971 when a group of people from the odd-job work agency, Gentle Ghost, came across a row of empty houses that had been left derelict for over a decade by the GLC. Over the ensuing ten years these houses filled up with a huge variety of occupants: hippies, alcoholics, schizophrenics, punks, political firebrands, families. Frestonians were mostly people there out of necessity, seeking asylum from the brutal housing crisis of the 1970s. They were people who had nowhere else to go, between poor and very poor, for whom Freston Road was something of a haven from the iniquities of the world outside- with the exception of the few who squatted to make a stand. As Frestonian Shelley Assiter remembers, “we were hippies and believed in peace and love- not that we necessarily knew what that was- and then in came the punks who said ‘up yours’ and we went through this cycle. We had a punk household that was absolutely insane- the kind of madness going on there- and I was trying to bring up two little kids next to that- but there was spirit there, there was fight, there was hope.” 

The people who lived tended to exist on the borderlands in one way or another, they required freedom that other configurations of living could not provide; Tony Sleep, another Frestonian, commented that the general feeling he observed within Frestonia was one of “a plague on all their houses”, a sense that no particular brand of political, social or cultural affiliation could speak to the myriad of experiences had by the squatters, “not anarchists but turmoilists”. 

In 1977 the GLC attempted to force an eviction and the squatters mobilised. They unanimously voted on 31st October to secede from the UK. Part-publicity stunt, part “anarchic theatre”, part a reflection of genuinely felt otherness, the campaign was reported around the world and halted the GLC’s plan in its tracks. A referendum established their independence and a further 73% voted to join the European Economic Community and thus The Independent Republic of Frestonia was born. Ambassadors and ministers were appointed- the Frestonian ambassador to Great Britain was the playwright Heathcote Williams, the only person with whom the GLC were sanctioned to speak; notoriously hard to get hold of and, once contacted, notoriously difficult to understand. Postage stamps and passports were produced, there was talk of inventing a currency, they applied to join the Common Market and wrote to the United Nations to request membership, asking that peacekeeping forces be sent to protect their sovereignty, if necessary: “If delays in processing our application occur, an invasion into Frestonia and eviction by the Greater London Council and other organs of the British government may occur”. They conducted interviews with TV crews from across the world, put on plays and exhibitions in the People’s Theatre, stamped people’s passports at the checkpoint, designed a flag and all adopted the surname/ road name Bramley as their last name- à la The Ramones. 

Yet beyond the play and coquettish provocation of the council, existed a serious and committed claim to autarky. Upon receiving no reply to their UN application, the Frestonians eventually threatened to take the UN Security Council to the Hague (hyperbole) yet wrote in this same letter, “we appreciate that there were human and humorous touches in our application to you… these should in no way conceal the very serious fact that we are fighting for our very survival” (fact). Furthermore, this embattlement spawned an entire lifestyle. Tony Sleep remembers the kinds of mutual aid  networks that emerged organically at Frestonia to combat the often-dire conditions: “water was the first thing that was needed and only a few houses had a water supply. So you’d get people turn up on the doorstep with a bucket saying “can I have some water?” and you’d get the water and you’d get a kind of barter obligation: if you’re nice to people and help them out, they’re inclined to help you out. So if you need to borrow a screwdriver or something and the guy who hasn’t got any water has got a screwdriver then you know it just is the beginning of quite radical relationships. A creche was formed to look after Frestonian children- open also to surrounding housing co-ops- and workshops were run to help people hone crafts and skills: art, woodwork, DIY, gardening, photography.  Anarchism in action, alive and kicking within the London metropolis!

The squatters were able to loosely separate themselves from dependency on the state, without requiring money, capital or property to do so. Frestonia was a space in which community took precedence over the kind of individualism propagated by the post-war affluent society, sustained by its inherent preferability from a life living in atomised, high-rise, substandard council accommodation. Squats engendered visionary ideas about care-centred, anti-capitalist formations of living,  as one squatter noted “we definitely saw it as the beginning- yes, beginning- of a new kind of community.” Clifford Harper, whilst living in a squat in Camberwell illustrated part of a 1976 series called Radical Technology that aimed to sketch out autonomous ways of living: communal gardens, workshops, autarkic housing where people grew their own food and made their wares.  However, it wasn’t easy living. Living in the squats could be risky and harsh. The houses were often falling down, condemned; Shelley remembers “I lived in a squat that had no proper windows, it had a polythene sheet, it had no heating- the conditions were horrendous but we were not in the street and communities were developed out of necessity.” Kept above water by sheer force of need, there but for the grace of God. 

This is a story of a housing crisis, close in nature to our own- and more importantly, resistance in the face of it. By 1980, as Tony recalls, he, as someone with maximum points on Hammersmith and Fulham’s waiting list and a small child, was told he would be waiting twenty-two years to be housed. Such was the state of council housing at the time, it was immortalised in song, to the tune of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’: 

It’s a long wait for a council house/ it’s a long wait we know,

It’s a long wait for my council house/ through the wind and rain and snow, 

Come back tomorrow/ we’ve heard it all before, 

So the next time you see a house that’s empty/ just walk through that door’.

Rental properties were often near-uninhabitable; Rachmanists and criminal landlords were rife. The new developments that were being built such as Trellick Tower- the Tower of Terror, remembered by interviewees as a “piss-soaked hell-hole”, characterised in The Observer in 1978 as “hideous, bleak, anonymous and intimidating, [smelling] vaguely of urine”- were often neglected and unsafe. Best case scenario in terms of living conditions, people were sent away to characterless estates far out of London, transplanted out of their lives into places they knew no one. 

It is also a story of homelessness, an account erased from media accounts that have always preferred to present squatting as the preserve of disaffected rich kids (“not hapless, homeless people but work-shy characters existing on public assistance money and preying by intent on innocent members of society whose abodes they take over” in the words of one paper). A particularly powerful expression of this can be found in an issue of Anarchy from 1974, where the anonymous author writes “I’m not squatting to publicise the problems of homeless people- I am homeless. I’m not squatting because I think that if enough people do it capitalism will collapse- it won’t. I’m squatting because I can’t afford, on my wages, to pay rent without living pretty close to poverty. In short, there’s nothing revolutionary about my squatting,” adding “that’s not to say, of course, that it can’t be used as a revolutionary tactic, and that it can’t be a powerful way of showing people the real possibilities of a different way of life.”  Frestonia too, Shelley recalls “ was not a community of conscientiousness- it was not ‘we fight certain things and believe in certain stuff’, it wasn’t that. It was that we were all needy- it was about survival”. This serious undercurrent of crisis and poverty weaves through the story of Frestonia’s independence movement, avowedly camp in the Susan Sontag sense of the word “to revel in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, and exaggeration”, whilst, as camp often is, establishing a powerful opposition, a fuck that, to the powers that be. Theatre rooted in trial. 

The squats of the 1970s broadly did not survive Thatcher’s Britain. Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme decimated social housing, council houses were sold off in droves and developers moved in making it harder for squatters to hold onto the places they called home. The consuming nature of the squatting lifestyle and constant embattlement from the authorities left many squatters too done out to fight back. They were having kids, moving on. Frestonia hung on until 1983 when the GLC began the demolition process. However, by then the Frestonians had started to organise, setting up the Bramley Housing Co-op to manage the properties left in place of the squats and persuading the Notting Hill Housing Trust to give priority-spaces to Frestonians and to keep a communal garden, sustaining the community beyond the parameters of the lost decade and into the neoliberal. As Tony Sleep says, “Frestonia didn’t cease when the squats were demolished. How could it? They were only useful ruins. Frestonia was…its improbable family”. Frestonia was a way of life and a form of resistance; playing authority at its own game.

Freston Road now sits under the shadow of Grenfell- you can see it from the top of the road, from Shelley Assiter’s front door. It is a sight that demands oxygen, anatomical and tarp-covered. The area around Latimer Road now embodies a lineage of crisis- each cycle of degradation descending further into Dante’s circles. It does not need to be said that Grenfell is a lacerating assertion of the fact that housing crises are not hollow or rhetorical things- that policy has consequences. Grenfell has delivered such deep, anguished fury that, though prevented from being writ large by the sheer brutality of the economy, the seeds of resistance are palpable. Shelley sees that the place to start is in questioning the system of property ownership that underlines the way people in social housing are treated.  “When I go somewhere and fill in a form, I am asked ‘do you own your property’ and I say no, it is a kind of a stigma. I do not own my property. And this is something that, before Thatcher, before the 1980s it was totally the opposite. The neoliberalism that came in with her established that in order to be a person, you need to own a property. There is so much we are working against culturally.” 

What we need now, according to Shelley, is more resistance to the monetisation of housing trusts, the landlords of cooperative and social housing (“housing trusts have lost the plot- they have become property developers, their intention is to make money”), more active community engagement at the level of co-operatives, a resistance to any kind of “I’m alright Jack” mentality. She worries that we are falling into an “apathetic sleep”- carving through not just the general consensus of society but spaces such as Freston Road too. Community requires active engagement- it asks us to become subject to one another, accountable, awake.

Fresonia was born of need. The need is here now. The pendulum swings back; need, anger, resistance, the deep belief in something different because you cannot conceive of anything else. Shelley ends our interview with coming back to this- to how community speaks to the bare-faced terror of isolation, how collective need forms the core of social resistance: “We came from severe homelessness and performed a near enough miracle getting to where we are now. Frestonia still exists, we are still an independent state, we are still a community and what comes with it- which I treasure a lot- is a sense of safety. We know each other, we look out for each other. I brought up my two kids here on my own and had it not been for feeling safe enough that other people are around, I know it would’ve been so much harder for me. Despite the difficulties, there is a real staying power and a sense of the importance of community regardless. I want to emphasise that- this is a community and I am part of a community and I believe in communities to no end. This is really the way forward if you ask me, power in numbers.” 

Artwork by Sam Knowles