As told to Patrick Allen in 2021

I come from Portugal and was brought up in Lisbon. My father was an architect and I planned to follow the same career.  In 1969 I came to London. This was partly to avoid being drafted into the Portuguese army and being sent to fight colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique on behalf of the state. I enrolled on a degree course at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London.

I was on the same course in the same group and year as Nick Wates and Hugh Anderson. The three of us conceived the idea of arranging an event at the school of activities with visiting speakers.  We spoke to our tutor Llewellyn-Davies, the head of school. He gave us the go-ahead. We called it ‘Xses Week’ (see programme). It was open to anyone and there were many debates. A guy called Andy Milburn took part, a self-styled anarchist who lived in North Gower Street nearby. He was sharing a rented flat, but spread the word around that there were many houses empty in the area which could be squatted. I had heard about squatters in the press, but had never been in close contact with the movement.

Nick and I talked this over with other friends on the course – Barry, Doug and Caroline. We decided that after we graduated we would take one of the empty houses in Tolmers Square. We fixed a date to go in. We went with some tools to number 12 Tolmers Square. Two people, Barry and Nick, went round the back to gain entry through the basement window and then once inside they opened the front door for Doug and myself.

On our first night we cleaned the first floor room very well, made tea and settled in. The house had electricity and water which we connected around the house. I was familiar with Tolmers Square because I had often been to the cinema there. I recall seeing the film Once upon a time in the West directed by Sergio Leone starring Claudia Cardinale. The cinema closed shortly afterwards, in 1972, which was a great shame. I liked to go to the cinema on my way home from the Bartlett school.

I quickly moved my things into the house with help from Nick who had an open top Morris 1000. We gathered items of furniture, buying some from Simmonds, the second hand furniture shop in North Gower Street a few yards away. Others moved in. The initial household was me, Nick, Doug, Barry and myself but we were soon joined by Caroline and Atalia.

I took the ground floor front room. We removed the breeze blocks from the window. I decorated the room in egg yolk yellow with Chairman Mao and Portuguese posters on the walls. My girlfriend Christine Rieger moved in with me. We had met at the French Lycée in Lisbon, and in August 1972 she joined me in London.

I maintained a keen interest in Portuguese and Spanish politics. The Portuguese revolution swept aside the fascist regime on 25^th April 1974 thus ending my concerns about the draft, and in November 1975 the dictator of Spain, Franco, died. In his last days I remember organising a sweepstake, the prize going to the person who most closely predicted the date and time of his death.

In 1975 there was a change in the house – Jamie, Sacha and Cora moved in, and at the same time Barry and Atalia moved out to number 6 Tolmers Square. Jamie made his room in the basement, and I would have frequent talks with him about politics as we agreed about many things. Then my new girlfriend Sonia, from Brazil, moved in.

Everybody fitted in well with the new arrangements. The house specialised in producing big communal meals, everyone taking a turn to cook. Sonia and I produced the classic Brazilian dish, Feijoada  – pork and beans. For this you boil the black beans, roast the pork with onions using all the cheap cuts like the head, ears, trotters and belly, combine with the beans, macerate some of it so it is thick then serve with white rice, fried manioc mixed with bacon, thinly shredded cabbage greens fried with garlic and onion and slices of orange. This took all day to cook of course.

In September 1976 Sonia and I left 12 Tolmers Square to travel to South America. The photographs on the steps of number 12 were taken on the day of our departure. We left when the house was still in full swing. I kept in touch, and Nick would send me news and photographs.

We spent four years in South America, initially staying with Sonia‘s family and then in an apartment. I was a researcher for the state of São Paulo doing research into urban questions of policy. Then we returned to Lisbon where I practice and teach architecture and planning, but I have been back many times to London since. I have kept in touch with my Tolmers friends and seen the rather disappointing new Tolmers development which did not keep the square…. Even so it is a hundred times better than it would have been in the hands of Joe Levy.

What was special about living in Tolmers Square:

Firstly it changed my view in my professional sector of architecture and planning. Tolmers made me realise that people are important in planning, you have to involve communities in decisions. If you fight a good fight, collectively, people can change their environment (to a certain extent). This revolutionised my way of thinking about the profession of urban planner/designer, which I had by then adopted.

Next it revolutionised the way that I related to people. This started with my move to England as I had had a traditional upbringing in Portugal. The communal house in Tolmers Square helped me to develop a much healthier relationship with men and women. I am quite sure that I would not think as I do now if I it had not been for Tolmers.

Also, it changed my attitude to property, that you didn’t necessarily have to be the owner. The use of the property was more important than ownership.

Some changes happened almost without me noticing, like absorbing the British pragmatic spirit of doing things. We started a newspaper, Tolmers News. I still have copies and show them to my students. We had to do the writing, get the paper and do the offset printing. It got done and it was important to realise that you could do these things, a fantastic feeling. I had a go at the electricity in the house and on one occasion I crossed two wires together, there was a huge flash, and I was nearly killed – but I survived, and I learned something from this! Yes, that you must be careful with electricity, but, most of all, that you can do things with your hands and tools, something that was absent in the education of a French culture semi-aristocratic upper-class intellectual…! Manual and practical things were to be left to servants…

My life was affected in the way that I thought about many things, and it happened via practice not theory. I became a completely different person from what I had been. Things happened, and surreptitiously induced change. The British people didn’t need to change so much perhaps. I made long-lasting and deep friendships in Tolmers. I arrived at the Bartlett school in 1970 but for the first two years I did not have deep friendships, just hello, how are you. Then Nick Wates invited me to join his family for Christmas in Cumbria when he realized I could not go back to Portugal. At Tolmers I was lucky to be able to “break the ice” and form close relationships with many British people who lived in the house and the square.

I would not have become the person I am without my experience of Tolmers. It had an enormous influence on my development and my view of the world, and of people and relationships and, indeed, sex. Nowadays, my wife sometimes says to me ‘you’re not a squatter any more’, but I still act like one, on occasions… and that is good.

PS Pedro retained an archive of 500 colour slides of Tolmers which he digitised and made available to this website in March 2021.

Read more about the author Pedro George