I was a fellow Architecture Diploma year (1974-1975) classmate of Caroline Lwin and Barry Shaw at The Bartlett, University College London (UCL). I was from Seattle and the lone American in our class. I had been living in a bedsit near Queensway but by the Easter break I needed to find a new place to live as I was running out of money. Caroline and Barry suggested that I might be able to find a place in Tolmers Square so I moved out of my bedsit and stashed my trunk with all of my belongings at at Caroline’s and Nick Wates’ house and then went off to Spain for a week.

When I got back, I crashed one night at their house and the next day several other residents liberated 3 Tolmers Square after the tenants had moved out and then handed the house over to me! There was a bit of a scene outside the house with some of the upset previous tenants. The police arrived and I was terrified that I would be arrested and deported. When the police wanted to go inside the house, I was advised by fellow squatters not to let them in but after a bit of negotiation they did go inside and confirm that people had entered through an open window and had not broken in. Amazingly the police left and I now had possession of the house. By the end of the day, two Irish couples had moved into the ground floor and a young woman into the second floor.
 

 
The house was in shockingly bad condition with serious damp in the back wall and leaky windows. The WC under the stairs was really gross but it worked. There was one small cold water sink on the stair landing surrounded by crumbling plaster. I was appalled that people had been actually paying rent to live there.

The house had been rather grand and had seen better days (I later found out that the house had belonged to the original developer.  (See The man who built Tolmers Square). I lived in what would have been the main reception room on the first floor with a plaster rose on the ceiling and French windows looking out over the entire square.

My living conditions were primitive but there was electricity, water and mail delivery. I don’t know what I would have done had I not been able to live there and I was extremely grateful to Caroline and Barry and for the welcome of the Tolmers Square community. I stayed there until the end of June when I returned home to Seattle. I managed to find a job and worked in a few architectural firms in Seattle.

In 1977, I was back in London for a friend’s wedding and was staying in Marylebone. Walking around one day I ran into Caroline on the street and had a short chat. She mentioned that there was to be a party/concert at the Square that night and said I should come. After a show at the Marquis Club, another Seattle friend and I went to the party and then we walked over and visited Barry. It was late and we woke him up but it was good to see him.

In 1980, my future wife Virginia and I were again in London and stayed at a friend’s house in Limehouse. I discovered that Nick and Caroline were now living across the street so we dropped in one evening to say hello and found them working on a book about squatting (Squatting, the real story).

In 1981 Virginia and I moved to Philadelphia and got married the next year. I worked for a handful of Philadelphia architectural firms, most notably Wallace Roberts & Todd, and then retired in 2019 and turned to writing about art & architectural history. My book on the English stained-glass artist Henry Holiday was published by Lund Humphries in 2023. I am on Linkedin.

Read more about the author George B Bryant