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With squatting in the news again, six readers recount their experiences of living in unused housing space
Mayfair squat
A squat in Mayfair, London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

simonmcandrew: 'Squats provide an alternative setup outside the mainstream'

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As dictatorships struggle and anarchists proliferate, it is perhaps fitting that I was inspired to squat by the KGB. In 1999 Kalex, Gaspard and Bruno – aka the KGB – opened the doors of 59, rue de Rivoli to the public and established six floors of open artists' studios within. French law is such that during the winter months, it is more difficult to make evictions: our Parisian brothers and sisters have a six-month window of opportunity in which to organise themselves. Surprisingly, some owners still aren't ready to evict come springtime.

Because of its prime location and its level of organisation, 59 Rivoli soon became the third most visited cultural destination in France, after the Pompidou and the Louvre. I fell in love there and married the girl of my dreams. I also set up a salon in the Musée Igor Balut, where I cut people's hair for whatever they'd offer me. I left Paris to teach hairdressing in Japan, an opportunity that came about thanks to the people I'd met at 59.

It was our dream to recreate something like this when we returned to London and so began DA! in 2006 at 43 Kensington High Street. We used the buildings not as places to live in, but as places to visit. Over the next two years DA! moved on to Tottenham Court Road and Mayfair, where we attracted a lot of media attention at the time.

It's been a few years since we squatted, but we'll always visit one if we hear about it on the grapevine. Squats provide an alternative setup outside the mainstream where people are not bound by dull things like paying the rent, financial planning, justification and subordination. But my wife and I are also pragmatic and we've moved on from DA! – it's not the ideal situation in which to bring up our children. Instead, we're working on a new project called Art in empty buildings. The idea is for artists to make use of places with the owners' consent. It may not be as sensational as DA! was, but I believe the advancements in communication we're all making will enable us to collaborate in new ways. For us it'll be making use of empty buildings to benefit the owners, the neighbourhood, and ourselves.

sparclear: 'I wish I could say hardships made people altruistic, but mistrust prevailed'


In March 1977 we squatted a mansion in Swiss Cottage, after a friend who was already there offered us the chance to stay. My partner's full-time wages were not enough to rent in London. When we arrived, I nearly fainted from the Hitchcockian grimness. Huge fungi grew out of damp walls, the uncleaned toilets had to be cleaned with caustic soda, there were drug dealers and people lurking around with undiagnosed mental illnesses.

Our child was one so we took the basement, which opened up to a garden I tended for him to play in. It made our lives a lot healthier, as did the kindness of a Czech woman who lived upstairs. She had hot water and lent us her bathroom regularly. Everyone there was a refugee or outcast of some kind. I helped a couple of them write their letters to the Home Office, detailing cruelties and injustice in countries they'd fled. They keenly took cash-in-hand jobs such as cooking, cleaning, or decorating. Without benefits, shoplifting was their norm – any pocketable food, even steak.

I wish I could say hardships made people altruistic, but mistrust prevailed. We tried to counteract it with civility. We took care the building didn't get shamefully dirty and stayed calm when estate agents lurched round to survey it, drunk from their lavish lunch. Sharp contrasts between the "haves" and "have-nots" were highlighted as vast house restorations boomed nearby, always with skips to rummage. I still have a fine trowel and a kitchen chair, which I keep as mementos from that time.

The following winter, we finally rented a GLC "short-life" flat in a seedier district, again without proper plumbing. Housekeeping was very tough: the laundry was always hard work and there were always problems keeping warm. There were excellent public baths down the road, though.

Councils and freeholders seem contemptible when they abandon buildings and trash interiors deliberately to discourage "occupation". Exploitative jobs and impossibly high rents for tiny spaces still create suffering, especially for young families, when vacated high-street shop fronts could be redesigned into environmentally friendly dwellings. I believe everyone needs garden space, fresh air, trees and affable communities.

janis: 'Everyone has certain basic rights, such as the right to a home'

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I'm a housing activist. Me and two others get rough sleepers referred to us by homelessness social workers and help them to open squats for themselves. In the three years we've been doing this, we've helped roughly 35 people house themselves. Our longest-lasting squat was opened in April 2009 and is still occupied. We aim to provide a breather for people who have slipped between the cracks of the system. Squatting also enables socially isolated people to make new friends, slowly bringing them back into a social circle. Out of all the people we've helped, four are no longer unemployed and managed to scrape together enough for a tenancy deposit. Statistically it might not seem like a great success rate, but in human terms, helping someone get out of the doorways even for a minute makes our efforts worthwhile.

I've explored over 50 derelict "empties" and they are always the buildings of owners who can afford to leave a home empty for a few years or even decades – such as the four houses on Norton Folgate, owned by the Corporation of London, which have been empty for 40-50 years.

Everyone has certain basic rights, such as the right to a home. It often takes many bitter struggles, sometimes to the death, to win recognition of such a right. The first form of squatters rights to be codified was the Forcible Entry Act 1381, a concession won after the bloody peasant poll tax rebellion. The very existence of council housing and secure tenancies (although much reduced from their original forms), are a direct result of the UK's housing movements for secure housing. Widespread squatting, rent strikes and eviction resistance were instrumental in driving home the point that when rent profits conflict with a basic human right, the unconditional right to housing must prevail and free-market capitalism is suspended. Having worked as a housing adviser, I have come across many dodgy landlords who evict their tenants by taking them to court as squatters – they're out within a week. Imagine if squatting was criminalised.

Everyone should know that it is illegal, by virtue of the Criminal Law Act 1977, to occupy a house already being lived in immediately before the occupation. It is an act so daft that it never happens and nobody has ever been arrested, let alone charged for it – ask the Crown Prosecution Services. Can someone please tell the Sun and the Daily Mail?

alisonkilling: 'Anti-squatting is a common arrangement in the Netherlands'

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I currently live in a vacant office building in the centre of Rotterdam. I have an anti-squat contract with the owner, which means that I live here legally. I put down a deposit when I moved in, pay rent, am liable for any damage that I cause and have to give a notice period when I move out – or more likely move out at a few weeks' notice should the owner want their building back. It answers many of the objections that squatters have about vacant buildings, and balances that with the needs of the building owners.

It is quite a common arrangement in the Netherlands. It was not entirely convincingly posited by the government as the legal replacement for squats and the community services that they often provide – squatting was banned last year. They suggested that owners would be encouraged to let out buildings at below market levels if they were to be empty for more than a year, although it is unclear how this could really be enforced.

Inhabiting otherwise vacant buildings is valuable for a number of reasons. For a start, occupied buildings get maintained. When pipes burst in our building last winter, it was quickly reported and fixed. From the point of view of public space, it is also important for buildings to be inhabited to keep the surrounding spaces lively. A large block in Rotterdam, of which the courtyard is currently being developed as the new city hall, has been taken over at ground level by a local arts foundation. For the duration of the building works they will run a gallery, a small cinema and burger joint there – a welcome addition to the life of the city.

A typical contract provides for only three or four weeks' notice of having to move, combined with a leasing period of indeterminate length – anti-squat arrangements are really only suitable for those flexible enough to move as necessary. Friends have been obliged to move three or four times in a year and while the anti-squat organisation usually managed to find them a new anti-squat to move into, there was no guarantee of where this new place would be. These are not insurmountable problems for many students, but it is easy to see how it would bar access to many other groups.

Anti-squat does not hold all the answers to the problems of empty buildings – namely that alongside these vacant spaces exist a large number of people in need of adequate housing – but it does provide a few solutions. The term "anti-squat" is also problematic, setting it up in opposition to squatting and as a possible replacement for it, when in fact it owes squatting a large debt. It is difficult to see how, without the prior work by the squats in establishing successful arts and community uses in abandoned buildings, that the agreement with owners and city councillors around the temporary use of the Rotterdam city hall building could have been realised.

Cremma: 'We created a bubble away from the rest of the world'


I squatted for a couple of years in Leeds in what became know as the "Clarendon Collective". It was a row of very large empty houses near the centre, and over the course of two years we moved from one house to the next as we were evicted, much to the annoyance of the security company employed to secure the buildings. It was the best couple of years in my life. Across the four houses there were about 50 rooms, all refurbished and intended to be used as nurses dorms, I think. I heard there was a kind of scam – the NHS trust sold them to a developer on the condition that they rent them out for 10 years to the NHS. Instead they found a pretext for not doing that, and were waiting out the 10-year term to sell the houses on. Before we arrived, drug addicts were stealing copper piping, Yorkshire flagstones and lead tiles, taking advantage of a quiet, unpopulated street.

We weren't political or protestors. Half of us were graduates, half local Leeds people. We created a bubble away from the rest of the world, which was quite insular, positive, supportive and creative. We would organise open mics, some bands were formed and many of us organised events for our own community. Most people there rejected the "normal" world and decided to create their own version. The police knew we were there and let us get on with it, generally seeing it as a civil matter. Often we knew more about the relevant laws than they did, which greatly helped.

My opinion on squatting? I loved it. The constant threat of eviction and need to work together created strong and lasting friendships. It is misleading to generalise about squatters, as they are as varied as the communities that rent houses. Squatting is simply living in a house without paying rent and disputing who has the rights to property. It gets romanticised a little more than it deserves: if there are houses left empty for a period of years, it stands to reason that creative people who don't want to pay rent or claim housing benefit can and will use them.

twmsion: 'There was an art to picking a property that had potential'

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I squatted houses in the late 1980s and early 1990s around Nottingham. My reasons were partly practical (rented accommodation was not easy to come by) and partly for the transgressive nature of taking a DIY approach to housing. At the time there were usually four or five squats going in the city and a core of 20-30 people living in them, with others passing through and dipping in and out. These ranged from larger places (cohabitation there usually ended in tears) to smaller shared houses, which ran for up to a couple of years and were true homes. Smaller groups made it easier to make the house liveable and tended to stay under the radar.

As I remember, the routine was to break in, put our own locks on the doors and stick the legal notice from the Squatters Handbook in the window. The golden rules were never to leave the house empty after taking possession and to not let the authorities in. There was an art to picking a property that had potential: the best ones being council-owned and in slight disrepair. If the property looked like it may last for over a few months it was not unheard of to sign up for the electric and water (I did this once myself) and pay bills. Most of the people I lived with were in their late teens and early 20s, with one or two wiser heads pushing 30. Most conformed to the punk ethic of the time and lived on giros, some did architectural salvage, others applied themselves to playing in local bands. Generally, we would class ourselves as anarchists in the same way that someone who goes to church at Christmas calls themselves Christians.

People think of squatting as a way of life for workshy hippies, but the largest movement occurred after the second world war, with returning servicemen housing themselves and their families in disused houses and hotels. The fact is that housing is a right, which needs to be balanced with a landlord's right to own a house. How can someone – or a council – be allowed to keep an empty dwelling while people are homeless?


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