Community House

Sometime in April 1974 John and Vera Wood squatted an empty and seriously dilapidated house at 213 North Gower Street. They were a fair bit older than most of the squatters – in their forties – and over time took an informal role as Tolmers Village elders.

I have a recollection that there was a kind of Village meeting where they were introduced to the rest of us and explained their plans for what was to become known as Community House. But perhaps that is just a dream from those astral years.

By October, when they featured in an article in the Sunday Telegraph on squatting and Tolmers, the house had been transformed.

The Telegraph, in its usual patrician manner, titled the article ‘Squatting a la mode de W.1’ and captioned the article’s photograph thus: ‘How the chic squat:- Vera Wood, squatter par excellence, spins a little wool in her contemporary Euston sitting room’ which, it is stated later, ‘would do no discredit to the pages of Harpers and Queen.’

The article, which continues in this vein of condescending estate agent/Sunday paper property page speak, conveys the feeling of being bemused/amused that ‘Squatting – which used, in London, to be an essentially working-class pursuit carried on in the remoter reaches of the city – has gone quite middle class and is lapping at the shores of W.1.’

There is little doubt that John and Vera would not have taken kindly to the tone of the article and would have felt that the Telegraph writer had completely missed the point of what they were doing.

It is true that the house at 213 had been immaculately rehabilitated (as a result of their own manual labour) and gave off a kind of warm glow – sanded floorboards, light coloured walls furnished with a sparse Shaker aesthetic with overtones of India and the East – breath of the Brahmaputra. But these were really only the outward signs of their intentions and beliefs.

In February 1975, an article in the Times, titled ‘Selfless sufficiency comes to Bloomsbury’, gave a much more accurate picture of their venture ‘to try alternative life-styles which may be of use to society in finding a way out of its anxiety and alienation’.

The front door was indeed ‘open all day’ and people ‘constantly in and out’.

On the ground floor at the front there was what would now be called a small wholefood shop where you could find wheat, oats, home made muesli, wholemeal bread, beans, dried fruit and honey. All at cost – about two thirds of shop prices. A far cry from the pages of Harpers and Queen. At the back there was a workshop with John and Vera’s tools available for use by anyone.

In the rear of the basement a wood store of usable timber collected from skips – cleaned and de-nailed – ‘people who collect it give it; people who want it take it’.

And at the front of the basement the village bakery, where every day wheat was hand ground into flour and perhaps 20-30 loaves of very solid wholemeal bread was baked.

At some point, Ches, Tim and I decided that we would take it in turns to do an early shift in the bakery grinding flour.

Bakery

A hallway with white walls, ochre paintwork and sanded floorboards. Sunlight and mung beans, baskets of pulses and grains ranged in ordered tiers. In the sparse basement the flour grinder sits on a worktop, clamped to the wooden boards, the green painted cast wheel with its hanging arm and handle patiently waiting for the wheat.

When you arrived in the dawn, John was long awake and preparing for the bread making, the big mixing bowls ready for the gritty tang of the flour. You would scoop the golden grains into the hopper, grasp the wooden handle and begin to turn. Slowly at first, feeling the resistance of the husks against the mill, then faster until the arm muscles warmed up. Trying to catch a rhythm, as the aching set in and the breath grew shorter. The hard kernels transformed by the turning of the wheel into soft dunes of flour rising slowly in the ochre stoneware bowl.

By the time the first bowl was full the heady smell of yeast filled the bakery and John would come by fussing, anxious to begin mixing the dough. As the grinding continued the flour, yeast, salt and water were blended into a great elastic mound with a large wooden spoon. On and on you turned the bakery prayer wheel, a Vedic manna pouring from the mill’s spout.

When it was over John brought breakfast: a bowl of rich muesli, oatflakes and seeds, peppered with nuts, dried fruit swimming in creamy milk. Shoulders aching, you would sit on the floor, struggling to lift the spoon to your mouth while he squatted, his back to the wall, rolling a cigarette. Sometimes you’d stay on to help with the kneading, rolling the soft dappled dough over the bench, squeezing, punching, turning and folding it over as the ovens warmed.

Then back up the stairs, soft plumes of incense, nag champa – sandalwood and frangipani – rolling down from the upper floors, past the cats basking in the doorstep sun out into North Gower Street.

At the crossroads the Crown and Anchor and the TGWU building stare blankly at one another and turning left, the Halal shops are setting up stall for another day.

Field oven (or Ghost in the machine)

It was unusually cold at the beginning of June 1975 – there were frosts and even snow across much of the UK. The weather suddenly changed on June 4, with temperatures in the high 20s, until June 14. Rain and cold weather followed until June 20 when the mercury hit the high 20s again.

In the sweltering days before the second Tolmers carnival on 28 June 1975, an unexpected form gradually takes shape in the communal garden in Drummond Street.

Ches and Tim are constructing a field oven from an old oil barrel and reclaimed angle iron.

John passes by at intervals to inspect progress and perhaps make a suggestion or two – for the oven is being made for him to bake bread in the Square on the day of carnival.

Hacksaws and drills, nuts and bolts, spanners and hammers. Sweat and curses.

A metal hand nibbler borrowed from Alex (who has form working with oil barrels as the home made wind generator on the roof of Euston Street attests) to painstakingly cut the door in the end of the barrel.

There is no internet, or YouTube video, to guide the would be constructor – only something perhaps in the Whole Earth catalogue. Work progresses through improvisation, trial and error, discussion and argument.

Finally, at the end of the long hot days, something resembling a steel sculpture of a four legged animal stands on the dry parched grass.

The oven needs to be tested before the carnival and Ches and Tim decide to roast a chicken inside; a celebratory meal after days of hard graft.

The next morning John comes to see the final article – he opens the door …

When he learns that a chicken has been cooked in the oven he is horrified and says he cannot use it to bake bread, explaining to its baffled makers that the spirit of the chicken remains inside. He walks back along Drummond Street to the bakery in North Gower Street.

The oven-animal remains in the garden for a while before being dismantled and discarded.

Or perhaps it disappears mysteriously on one of those summer nights …

See all  photos of 213 North Gower Street 

See Community House Collection

See Times article ‘Selfless sufficiency comes to Bloomsbury’ by Michael Baily

See Where are they now profile for John Wood

See Where are they now profile for Vera Wood

Looking at these 50-year-old photos, it’s crystal clear that all those elegant, characterful old houses should have been restored and preserved. Tolmers today is a very poor substitute. 

I eventually got a council house but only because I had a child. Today’s tickets to affordable housing are old age, disability or children, with thousands of council bureaucrats weighing up competing needs – what a waste of human potential. Squatters repaired houses, sold food, organised community events and meeting our own needs was satisfying. Please could someone design a model for young people to access affordable housing in exchange for house restoration. 

I don’t remember precisely how I came to Tolmers – probably by knocking at 12 Tolmers Square or 102 Drummond Street (The Dairy). I was 23, flat-sharing in north London and always broke after paying rent.  

An empty commercial building at 142 Drummond Street was being squatted and I moved in with a couple of suitcases, the first – and only – resident.  As soon as it rained, cascades of water streamed down. I moved my bed to the only dry spot on the first floor. Luckily, a few days later news came of a new squat – 58-66 Euston Street, starting with number 64. 

The windows had been breeze-blocked up, but the window frames and glazing were inside and intact. The two windows in the living room on the first floor also had their original wooden shutters. Every room had a simple fireplace. Although small, the houses had lovely proportions. 

Alex Smith writes that nine of us slept in the same bed (see Rebirth through fire). Was it really that many? It wasn’t as cramped as he implies – the bed was several mattresses laid together in the top front room. Numbers varied nightly as people made the adjoining houses habitable. I stayed at no. 64 with Ruth Ingham and Taddeo, a calm monk whose order had told him to live in the outside world for a year. 

I painted the kitchen in gloss white and pale yellow, but it didn’t look right. Ruth, always blunt, said, ‘You’re trying to make it look clean but these colours don’t work in an old house.’ We mixed in some dark stains and in off-cream and muddy pink the kitchen looked much better. And counter-intuitively, just as bright. Ruth could have designed all today’s historic paint ranges. 

Soon after, Ruth got together with Alex and moved next door; Suzy and Frances lived in one house; Ruth Milburn moved into 70 and the house in worst repair, 68, became a workshop. Then Debby, Al and Oli came over from 6 Tolmers Square. 

Alex put in a ring main for electricity and I took responsibility for the bills. We never got running water, so had to fetch it in containers from a tap at the petrol station on the corner. One day the tap disappeared. After that we filled up at the Dairy. 

Once, queuing for a bath at the Dairy, Peg Leg Pete (see Room at the top) was complaining about his hair, so I shampoo-ed it for him. Pete was happy but someone said,  ‘You really are a cleanness freak’. 

I had a day job as a secretary, then researcher, at the Sunday Times Magazine, which was walking distance away. On the seventh and last floor was the Editor’s Suite that the paper’s then-editor, Harold Evans, the anti-Thalidomide campaigner, never used. I discovered it had a substantial bathroom and started bringing my laundry in to wash in the bath after work. 

One evening, the suite was no longer empty: a  silver-haired gent, the lawyer who checked final copy, was working away at the large desk. He seemed tickled by the bathroom-laundry and never reported me.  

Reading the stories on this website, I’m struck by how much I missed – I never heard Jamie Gough sing ‘All Shook Up’, nor realised how many musicians lived nearby. But I wonder if any Villagers glossed over their bad experiences … mine came from the insecurity. So many people passed through the Euston Street houses, including Scottish Mick who left with my cassette player. After that I hid my 35 mm camera, but one day that also walked. 

The drains in the Euston Street houses were all linked and once developed a terrible blockage. I got home from work to see Frank, an older resident, in Wellington boots wading through the stinky waters wielding a heavy pole. As he lived on another street, it seemed like exceptional community spirit. It wasn’t pure altruism: soon after that Frank and Debby separated from their partners and set up home together.

 In 1975, Frank helped me out of a bind. I was struggling with my first freelance assignment, an interview with Bob Marley. The editor had rejected my first draft for being too reverential. Frank, who wasn’t in awe of anyone, patiently worked through it, asking questions until he’d talked me into the right mental space. 

The Tolmers Village Association (TVA) sometimes sent people round looking for temporary accommodation. A young Irish couple stayed for a month – they’d eloped and needed 3 weeks residence to marry. A mother in recovery stayed several weeks on route to getting rehoused. She had two children at primary school, both cheerful, cheeky and seemingly unscathed by the drug years. They’d just had a stroke of luck – she’d found a large stash of old notes up the chimney in her previous squat.

There was one packed TVA meeting when two Irish solicitors got up to explain that they’d come from Dublin to learn about Tolmers’ difficulties as they were about to launch their own battle and wanted to pre-empt the obstacles. In retrospect, Camden Council seems pretty spineless.

We heated 64 Euston Street with a coal fire in the living room. Delivery was every Thursday. Before going to work, I’d put the back door on the latch and leave money next to the hearth. The delivery man came in through one of the other houses (we’d knocked down the dividing walls between the back yards), carried the coal across the yard and then up the stairs to empty the sack straight into a huge Chinese earthenware pot, which we’d got from outside one of the Drummond Street shops – they were the containers that Chinese eggs were imported in. 

If anyone ever writes ‘Tolmers, the musical’, it should include the coalman scene:  a friend was having an affair with a journalist at work and I loaned her my keys so they could meet at no. 64 during the lunch hour. When they heard the heavy steps coming up the stairs, they were both naked and had just enough time to hide behind the sofa. They heard the coal clattering into the pot, then the steps retreating. They’d just emerged when the sitting room door burst open again. ‘Scuse me’, said the sooty coalman, clomping across to pick up the money he’d forgotten. 

My mother was a nurse, and while expecting me cared for someone in the Croom-Johnson family. David Croom-Johnson and his wife were my godparents. At the Tolmers High Court trial (see The Legal Battle), we waited in line, then went up one by one up to a mahogany table where Croom-Johnson sat in his robes. I don’t think we knew beforehand who the judge would be. Or I didn’t know. Or I did, but kept quiet …memory fails. Anyway, he asked his questions, but neither of us acknowledged the relationship. For a long time, I felt guilty and cowardly for keeping quiet – would they have thrown the case out if I’d shouted, ‘Uncle David, godfather!’? It wasn’t until later that I learnt the case was thrown out anyway.

Squatting enabled me to save for my belated gap year – £2 a week in an Abbey National Build Up Share Account. Perhaps it was Tolmers magic, for no sooner had I decided on Brazil as my destination than two Brazilians moved into Tolmers, one a young artist; the other, Sonia, Pedro’s partner. I still remember the important phrase she taught me in her  Portuguese lessons: ‘Me da uma avelã’ – ‘Give me a hazelnut’. 

ENDS

As told to Patrick Allen

I was born and raised in Cork, Ireland. After finishing my engineering degree there in summer 1969, I moved permanently to London but did not reach Tolmers Square until the winter of 1975/76.

Tolmers via Lexham Gardens, Elgin Avenue and Canfield Gardens

 I first stayed in Lexham Gardens, Earls Court. Two adjacent mid-Victorian townhouses had been converted into a warren of bedsitters. Many friends of mine from Cork were already living there, a few of whom (Donal, Seamus and Dervilla) later lived in Tolmers Square in the late 1970s. A book could be written about the Lexham Gardens days.¹ The caretaker landlady, Olga Solski, had featured in a News of the World article about the house, prominent photo and all. Many of the Cork people living there were thankful that the paper was not available in Ireland at that time!

I had been very involved in left-wing politics during my later years in university. So when I came to London I joined various political groups that campaigned (i) for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland; (ii) against internment of political activists; and (iii) for the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland. I soon got to know Gerry Lawless³, a famous but controversial character who was very active in London Irish émigré politics in the 1960s and 1970s. He later became a Labour Party councillor in Hackney. Gery encouraged me to join a political group and not just confine my involvement in politics to single-issue campaigns. I joined the International Marxist Group (the IMG) in summer 1970 since I was impressed with the Group’s analysis of Irish politics². 

For some reason that I can’t remember, the need to pay rent in Lexham Gardens evaporated a short time after I moved in.  Eventually the landlord’s agent, a Dub called Mervin, emptied the building by summer 1972 using bribery, blackmail and other means. I had got to know Piers Corbyn (Yes! Jeremy’s brother) who was also in the IMG at the time. Piers, then a physics postgraduate student at Imperial College, was opening a squat in Elgin Avenue (at the Harrow Road end) and offered me a room there⁴. Many of the Lexham Gardens people subsequently came to the Elgin Avenue squat. 

My stay at Elgin Avenue lasted until early 1974. Fiona, my new girlfriend, who was also in the IMG, had been offered a room in a more salubrious squat in Canfield Gardens, behind Waitrose in Swiss Cottage and we jumped at the chance of moving there. I had also started working in the IMG bookshop, then situated in the Caledonian Road. 

The IMG and Tolmers

A confession – I don’t remember when exactly I came to live in Tolmers Square. It was sometime in winter 1975 / spring 1976. I knew about the Tolmers Village community well before I came to live there. From the early days many IMG supporters were living in Tolmers Square. From memory – Peter and Halya Gowan, Patrick Camiller, Anna Klein, John and Jackie, and Yarko all lived on the South side, and there were other members and supporters in No 12 on the North side. IMG members participated in the various campaigns run by Tolmers residents but their politics had little appeal. The most influential person then in Tolmers politics was Alan Walter. The IMG was always full of rival factions or tendencies and the IMG people in Tolmers were members of the main opposition tendency. The basement of No 17 Tolmers Square, being both in Central London and near to major railway stations was a regular, semi-secret meeting place for this tendency. 

Peter Gowan⁵ (see New Left Review interview) was later to become Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University, and to become a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and was one of the founders of the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. He was then, in the early 1970s, involved in overseas ‘security work’ with IMG’s fraternal organisations in other countries. He was in touch with a Czech underground dissident group in London. The Czech people in London who were involved in this later became part of the post 1990 government.

The IMG would periodically provide a pair of drivers to drive vans across the Czech border, taking in books and papers hidden in false compartments, and bringing other things out. When living in Swiss Cottage I was asked by Peter to volunteer but had to decline as I did not even have a driving licence! My partner Fiona volunteered. It was arranged that she meet up with her co-driver, Doug Smith, in the IMG bookshop before leaving. I had not met Doug before then – he was a Tolmers Village squatter and then boyfriend of Sacha Craddock. The trip encountered some hitches with drop-offs but they safely crossed the border back into Austria. Fiona and I separated in autumn 1975. She left London sometime in the late 1980s. By chance we met up at the Irish Centre in Camden about 10 years ago. Reminiscing about old times I asked if she remembered Doug Smith from a trip to Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. “Yes!” She said, “Didn’t get on with him at all!” “He’s now my brother-in-law!” I explained. A description of these clandestine trips appears in the Peter Gowan New Left Review interview.

The first time I met Sacha

In the IMG I was in charge of what was called the Central Educational Group, a class that explained IMG’s politics to new members. Sacha was a health worker at University College Hospital. She joined the union National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and became a convenor. She met people in the IMG, probably also Tolmers residents. She joined up and was invited to come along to my group for some induction. It wasn’t just about giving lectures. Being ahead of my time (!), I used role-play frequently in these meetings.  I pretended to be a kind of in-your-face member of another political grouping being very challenging at a union meeting. Sacha found this totally bewildering. Afterwards she was asked about the meeting and said it was terrible! She couldn’t deal with the organiser (me) at all and his very aggressive approach. Prominent IMG members Robin Blackburn and Peter Gowan went and complained to the London regional organiser and said: “Do something about these classes and the people who are running them (i.e. me), otherwise the organisation risks losing young working-class militants like Sacha Craddock”!

Becoming a lifelong Arsenal supporter 

The Villabella Restaurant at 187 North Gower Street did lovely traditional breakfasts and was popular with squatters. While having breakfast there with Sacha and Colin on a Saturday morning in late 1976, they wondered if I would like to come to see the Arsenal v Manchester United game that afternoon. At university I had a very keen interest in football but had let this wane in my early years in London. That was about to change. I witnessed a very entertaining 3 -1 Arsenal victory. I was especially impressed by the number of Irish players on the Arsenal team including the famous Liam Brady. I became a fan for life. I enjoyed going to the Boxing Day derbies often with Patrick Allen, Keith Kirby and Henry Hodge. I remember attending the disappointing 1978 Cup Final defeat to Ipswich and in the following year getting a spare Hodge, Jones and Allen ticket to the 1979 Cup Final win over Manchester United, a match long remembered for the finish with 3 goals in the last six minutes.

The pubs in Tolmers Village

The Lord Palmerston, very popular with the early Tolmers squatters, closed around the time that I came to live in No 16 Tolmers Square. I have dim memories of having a drink there on occasions and being struck by the vibrant atmosphere and the array of clothing styles. Another popular pub was the The Crown and Anchor on the corner of Drummond Street and North Gower Street. A wide range of people used to drink there: staff from The Leveller magazine, Euston Station and Simmonds furniture store all frequented the place. The pool table was very popular. Jeyant Patel, founder of the Diwana Bhel Poori House, was a regular and able pool player. Many of the Simmonds staff, Euston rail workers and Tolmers squatters were keen players. I got to know Ernie and Tony Wordsworth from Simmonds as they were lifelong Arsenal supporters. We travelled to many of the matches during the 1979 winning cup run – to Nottingham for an unexpected win against the famous Brian Clough team and to Birmingham for the semi-final win against Wolves. They were unable to get a Final ticket and they were quite envious when I acquired one from Patrick Allen! I occasionally had a quiet drink at the Jolly Gardiners (later the Bree Louise, now demolished by the HS2 works) where I often watched Match of the Day. A character, working there as a potman, was called Corky. Corky spent most of his evenings slumped in an alcoholic snooze. Occasionally in the evening he would rouse himself, cursing the extreme stress of the job, collect in a few glasses, wipe down a few tables and return to his slumbers. I annoyed him considerably one Saturday evening. Waiting for Match of the Day to start, I was watching the end of a Western on TV. Corky had just finished his arduous round of the tables when I knocked over a beer glass which broke on the floor! Swearing profusely Corky fetched a brush and dustpan and shouted: “I was just about to have a well earned break, when John Wayne shot the glass out of yer man’s hands!” The Exmouth Arms became the most popular pub with Tolmers squatters in the latter years of the 1970s. It was run with a firm hand by landlord ‘Big’ Con McGlynn and his brother-in-law Michael. Con kept his Merc with its personalised number plates ‘CON 500’ parked outside the pub! “Just to show you where your money is going, boys!” was a frequent quip of his. The Exmouth Arms was an informal meeting place of the London branch of the Liverpool FC supporters club. They used to book carriages on the train to all home Liverpool matches. I got to know them well and was invited to travel with them to the annual Liverpool v Arsenal match at Anfield provided I was prepared to watch the match from the Kop! I was pleased to avail of this offer right through the 1980s. In the 1970s / early 1980s the National Union of Miners (NUM) headquarters was based in Euston Road. Laurence Daly⁶ was its national secretary from 1968 to 1984 and a regular at the Exmouth. There was an apocryphal story told about Tolmers Village of a tabloid journalist who had infiltrated the squatting community looking for a scoop. The best the journalist could reveal was a report about a basement party where drugs were being smoked – WOW! The hack did not recognise Laurence Daly who was at the party. There were no claims that Laurence was smoking drugs but the mere report of him being at that type of party would have made national tabloid headlines in those days. There had been two major miners’ strikes in the early 1970s and an anti-NUM headline would easily have been fabricated by the tabloids. In later years Laurence developed ‘a drink problem’. He loved singing including Irish rebel songs. One evening he came into the Exmouth, well inebriated. On enquiring about Big Con (the Landlord), Laurence was told that Con was on holiday. Steadying himself against the counter, Laurence remarked: “Got to admire Big Con. He had a fierce problem with the drink once, you know but now does not touch a drop!” 

The Winter of discontent and the end of Tolmers

Sometime late 1975 early 1976 the Canfield gardens squat came to an end. John and Jackie in No 16 Tolmers Square arranged for me to move into a spare room there. 1977 was a very eventful year with many people from Tolmers participating in the major protests in support of the Grunwick strikers and against National Front marches. Locally the Tolmers initiated campaign, ‘Single People Need Homes Too’, was also gathering pace.

By Spring 1978, I felt it was time to get a substantial, long term job. A friend, a maths teacher who was in the IMG, alerted me to government schemes to train people as maths teachers at secondary school level. I applied for a place on one such course beginning in September 1978 at the North London Polytechnic. There was a special grant for the course, comparable to a first year teaching salary. I was accepted on the course. I also resigned from the bookshop and did bar work and flat cleaning which paid better than the bookshop! Gradually I distanced myself from IMG politics. The IMG was a very hermetic lifestyle especially if you were a full-timer like me – talking mainly to IMG people during the day, and later while socialising togther in the evenings. It was commonplace to have optimistic, unrealistic views on the potential for rapid change in popular political attitudes. Once outside the Group, their many analyses and political predictions began to appear as more and more unrealistic.   

Winter 1978 /1979 brought the ‘Winter of Discontent‘ characterised by widespread strikes by trade unions both from the private and public sector. Frequent heavy snowfalls brought the coldest winter in 16 years. This put the Tolmers Square infrastructure under severe stress – virtually testing it to destruction with many frozen and burst water pipes and damaged cables! 

The incapacity of the Labour government to cope with the ‘Winter of Discontent’ contributed to the election of the Tories under Margaret Thatcher on 3^rdMay 1979. On 4^thMay, early morning, the bailiffs arrived at Tolmers Square and evicted all the residents on the south side! While evictions were expected in the short term, it was a surprise when the bailiffs actually arrived.

The centre of the square soon became chaotic – furniture and belongings dumped there; a growing crowd of people  – bailiffs; police; the press; onlookers; officials from the council trying to ensure that there were no children left homeless. Even the newly elected Labour MP for the area, Frank Dobson put in an appearance. Some of us had been offered rooms in the North side. As I was, by now, a good friend of Sacha, Corinne, Colin and Dave I was thankful to be offered a room in No. 12. 

I completed the course in North London Polytechnic in June and got a position as a maths teacher in Haverstock School, Chalk Farm, Camden starting in the beginning of September.

By the summer of 1979 the campaign ‘Single People Need Homes Too’ had had some success. Camden Council offered a number of hard-to-let flats to Tolmers residents during July/ August. Tolmers had its last summer carnival and last round of house parties also in July and August – we had prior information this time that the bailiffs would evict the residents from the North side on a Monday in late August. In the week before the eviction a reporter from The Observer came round. The reporter took a photo of a group of us on the balcony of No 11 & 12 and told us that they intended to have an item on Tolmers in the following Sunday’s edition. On Saturday night many of us were in the Exmouth Arms. Late in the evening, a couple whom we did not know came in with an early edition of The Observer which they acquired in nearby Euston station. I asked them for a quick read. I skimmed though the paper looking for the photo. I could not find it! I was just about to return the paper when I noticed the front page. There the photo was! It was stretching across the top of the front page just under the masthead!

“Wait till your new head teacher sees this” quipped one of my friends. Some of the teachers at the school did see it but I needn’t have worried. It was amazing how many teachers relied on squatting at that time. Six of my new colleagues were squatting in a disused fire station in Hackney!

The Bailiffs dutifully arrived at the Square on Monday.

After leaving Tolmers Square I spent 3 months living with friends in Cricklewood.  Sacha, Jamie, Dave and Corinne moved from No 12 to Blashford, Adelaide Road, a 3-bedroom council flat. But it was obviously not suitable for them and when the lease of a house in Great Russell Street became available they moved there. Vince Hetreed and I moved to Blashford. That was very convenient for me as it was a 5-minute walk to Haverstock School.

Those happy days

I remember:

… the first time I was invited to Sacha’s parents’ house in Oxford, (St Frideswide’s Farmhouse) where I met her parents, John and Sally Craddock, who became very supportive friends of mine. After that I had the privilege of becoming a regular visitor. Sue (Doug’s sister) and I held our wedding reception there in 1997.

… the snowball fight in the Square on New Year’s night which was curtailed when Gerry Lawless began throwing flowerpots instead of snowballs from the balcony of No 12, damaging Patrick’s car in the process!

… the Sunday afternoon football and rounders matches in Regents Park!

… the many parties, dinners and singsongs around the piano in No 12 and the very enjoyable Elvis impersonations by Jamie. 

…. being regularly beaten at chess by both Dave Holden and Patrick Camiller.

… the many tasty breakfasts and leisurely chats in the Villabella Restaurant in North Gower Street. For many years afterwards, ex-Tolmers residents would meet up on Saturday mornings for these events.

However:

It would be very wrong of me to paint too idealistic, too utopian a picture of life in Tolmers Village. The residents were much more diverse than just young students or young professionals. Some lived on the edge of society – in one house there was a 12 year old cat burglar and his father!! There were people with big emotional and mental health problems. Allocation of rooms in houses was not always frictionless…..

Final words

Over 40 years on I still live in Camden with my wife Sue. Our 30-year old son, Alan now teaches in Camden. Sue and I met indirectly through Tolmers Square friends (by all accounts we had met in the 1970s at one of the Tolmers Hampstead Heath picnics but neither of us can remember it!). I am now a retired teacher but I still do A Level exam marking. It’s great to still have and regularly meet several good friends from the Tolmers days but sad to know about those who are now imithe ar slí na fírinne.⁷ 

And finally a song – an Irish song of course! The Parting Glass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eisW0skJ9fU

Notes

¹A literary informed resident asserted that the house at Lexham Gardens resembled the Catacombs, a network of basement rooms in Dublin city centre and described in Anthony Cronin’s memoirs, Dead as Doornails. 

² The IMG was one of the different varieties of Trotskyist groups (not quite 57!)  that existed in Britain at the time. Its best known member was Tariq Ali and the Group was associated with the journals Black Dwarf, Red Mole and, Red Weekly.
Many prominent IMG members were on the Editorial Board of New Left Review.   

³Gerry Lawless made international news in the 1950s when he took the Irish Government to court. Lawless v Ireland (1957–61) was the first international court case filed against a country. An electrician by trade, Gerry went into journalism in the late 1960s. He often wrote for Private Eye until becoming the London correspondent for the Irish newspaper,The Sunday World, in the mid 1970s.  

⁴ Piers started his many years of housing agitation and involvement in the London squatting movement while living in Elgin Avenue. He produced numerous regular duplicated bulletins and posters which regularly submerged his floor mattress! The room became a work of art, worthy of a Turner prize but alas a bit ahead of its time. After Elgin, Piers moved to a South London squat in Rust Square!

⁵ https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii59/articles/peter-gowan-the-ways-of-the-world

⁶  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/may/30/obituary-lawrence-daly

⁷ Irish (Gaelic) speaking people seldom say simply that someone has died – “Fuair sé bás”. Instead they say “Tá sé imithe ar slí na fírinne”: He is gone in the way of truth, or he is walking on the road of truth. 

OR

From inner city experiment to city-region transformation: the unfinished business of co-governance

Experimental zones of East and West

Arriving directly from the Eastern mystic trail, Tolmers was a fantastic experimental zone – a unique vision and orientation, which helped me and many others to make sense and move forward. We tried out many things, by accident or design, which in later decades came under the new banner of ‘sustainability’ – local exchange trading, circular economy, urban ecosystems, etc.. If Tolmers was in some ways a kind of studio extension of University College London, then we should be well equipped for structural analysis of the situation (only later I realized whole sections of urban theory and debate were focused on such things).

Moving to the free state of mind

Escaping the front lines of eviction and fragmentation, I was in search of a place where the seeds of good ideas could grow. As part of the Calder Valley Free State (of mind), we aimed to build on the Tolmers experiments, outwards and upwards. Such experiments were not only material but about cultural empowerment, identity and reason for being. Part of this reflection was to say, ok, this was all great for (relatively) educated and mobile people in central London in the 1970s – how about the unemployed of peripheral Liverpool (1980s), or small town Midlands – or indeed the slums of Asia or Africa? If Tolmers was the seminal time and place as we thought at the time, it could well generate real insights for such challenges.

As to the significance of squatting –

With concepts such as  ‘autonomous cities’, the right to the city, the open city, social justice in the city, social ecology. In later years I began to work in different countries and appreciate some of the complexities and dilemmas of informality in Latin favelas or Indian slums.  For example, colleagues in Cartagena, Colombia had a problem with investing in flood defences for the squatter slums on the periphery – (“they are vagrants and thieves, here today gone tomorrow, why should we send money for them to steal??”). And colleagues in Kolkata, India, observe the autonomous self-organization of the slums and informal settlements, and the brutal reality of mafia gang power, sale of political votes, embedded state corruption, etc.. In the UK this all came to a head in 1980s Liverpool and the classic showdown between state socialism and anarchic co-operativism. Similar frontlines include confrontations with ‘travellers’, illegal raves, and more recently the experience of the lockdown which brought into focus the tension of state order versus self-organization. Setting up the Sustainable City-Region program (City-Region-2020-Integrated-Planning-for-a-Sustainable-Environment) we tried to square the circles but actually it took another decade or more of learning and insight on the human dimensions.   
 

Scrolling to the 2020s….

Much debate and ferment on ‘Urban Living Labs’ and similar zones of experimentation. Countless innovations in socio-eco-enterprise, net-zero value chains, sustainable food places, ‘well-being economy’ and ‘foundational economy’. The digital brings huge opportunities in all this, combined with new models of co-governance, circular economy, etc.. In my journey such opportunities can be framed as ‘Deeper city minds’ and the local collective intelligence – as in the book Deeper-City: Collective-Intelligence-and-the-Pathways-from-Smart-to-Wise. But the challenges are massive and growing – neo-liberal finance, post-truth power grabs, climate change, digital surveillance, to name a few. We are exploring this now in the global Collaboratorium / Laboratory of collective intelligence
 
And if we scrolled forward to the 2050s….

The ‘class of 1975’ is now mainly semi-retired with their book-lined studies. But I still ponder on how to realize these visions and ideas for the pathways to the future….

An edited version of an email to Nick Wates, 25 January 2021

It’s good to know that Tolmers has had and is still having a long and well deserved afterlife and I am proud to see a first edition of ‘The Battle for Tolmers Square’ sitting on my bookshelf. Though I didn’t contribute anything practical to it (apart from a son) Tolmers informed my thinking and teaching for many years, and indeed through Joe it became part of our family history.  

I first got involved in community action through Leeds Civic Trust at a time of rolling slum clearance that was intended to be never-ending, so that, over time, the entire city would be ‘renewed’. As one would have predicted, this programme was to start with demolition of the ‘back-to-backs’ in viable working-class districts. Our successful opposition, with guidance from Robert McKie, actually had a direct impact on government policy, for it helped launch the General Improvement Area. This was on the cusp of the swing from demolition to conservation, and, some years apart, in two different Leeds neighbourhoods I lived in, I filled the (entirely self appointed) role of community planner. Both are now well established Conservation Areas, though of course their various problems didn’t end there.     

I should say that for several years (through the good offices of Howard Liddell) I got huge stimulus from Hull School of Architecture in its seminal years under Michael Lloyd’s leadership, and the AA workbase system he introduced there. After that it was downhill all the way for me as I taught for a number of years at Leeds Polytechnic headed by Patrick Nuttgens, a very disheartening experience in every way, though I did manage to launch quite a few of my students into careers in housing.  

Back in those years the ‘enemy’ were unenlightened and quite possibly corrupt city councillors and their planners. Now the enemy or enemies are more diffuse and alarming; but it’s wonderful to know that all that work and struggle are not relegated to a museum of good ideas, but are still being carried forward by you and Joe in your respective ways, and I hope by others. Your energy is needed more than ever now, and long may you flourish!

Postscript

From an email, 23 April 2022

Being present at the launch zoom (of this website) felt a bit like being a ghost at the feast for me. I did have my hand up for a long time but wasn’t called on – I wanted to tell my own little experience of sleeping on the floor in the dark in Joe’s Tolmers house (but a lot of the floor was missing) hearing (IRA) bombs going off and thinking I was back in the raids of the V1s and V2s in the ‘forties, when we also slept on floors in the dark in north London. In the end I reflected that a series of younger generations has taken over now, and they reflect on and interpret things in their own way.

As told to Patrick Allen

In 1975 I was asked by Patrick Allen of Offenbach & Co Solicitors to advise the Tolmers Square squatters who were threatened with eviction by Stock Conversion. I was a barrister and had been called to the bar in 1972, so at the time I had just three years experience in practice. I was a member of the ground breaking Bowden Street Chambers, Lambeth, the first chambers to be set up in a local area outside of the Inns of Court and the first chambers where members agreed to share their fees with each other.  

Housing law was always part of my practice and eventually became the sole focus of my work from the 1980s. But in 1975 I had quite a broad practice which included employment tribunals, personal injury work and criminal jury trials. I got into squatting law because the court rules governing the procedure for eviction of squatters – Order 113 of the High Court rules and Order 26 of the County Court rules – came into force when I was doing the bar finals course and I became familiar with them.

At that time I had got to know people involved in campaigning on homelessness issues. I acted as a “McKenzie  friend” for some of them who were squatting in Islington and Camden during the court hearings when the property owners were applying for eviction (McKenzie v M was the name of a case in which the Court of Appeal had decided that a litigant who was not represented by a solicitor or barrister was entitled to have someone with him/her to act as his/her note-taker and adviser). One of those involved was Sid Rawle, who was prominent in the squatting and counter culture movement.

So I was involved in squatting cases before I became qualified to represent clients in court (which happens after six months training or “pupillage” with a practising barrister who, in my case, was Lord Anthony (Tony) Gifford, the radical peer who became head of Bowden Street, later Wellington Street, Chambers). When I qualified, people remembered me and asked their solicitors to send me instructions on squatting cases.

Patrick Allen says that I came to a meeting with the Tolmers squatters one Saturday in Tolmers Square wearing a green army great coat. This is very likely although I don’t now  remember this meeting! It  was always my practice to visit the property which was the subject of cases and I lived not far away from Tolmers Square.  I remember fondly the greatcoat which I had bought at Lawrence Corner, the army surplus shop on the corner of Drummond Street and Hampstead Road and a few yards away from Tolmers Square. It was very heavy and its buttons still shone. 

In law, squatters are trespassers and therefore they have no right to be in occupation of the property concerned. But in order to obtain an eviction (possession) order, the landowner had to comply with Court procedure. So in the Tolmers case I advised that we attack the possession summonses on the grounds of procedural deficiencies and failure to comply with Order 113. And Patrick prepared many affidavits from squatters containing evidence of non-compliance which were submitted to the court.

There is a certain irony here as O113/026 were themselves introduced to make it easier for landowners to evict because of problems with the previous procedure.

At the time it was a requirement of those rules that the claimant/landowner (at that time described as the Plaintiff) take ‘reasonable steps’ to identify the occupiers of the property, if unknown, and to file affidavit evidence on what had been done. Judges spoke of O113/026  as a ‘very special procedure’ which must be ‘strictly’ complied with (Re No.9 Open Road 1971 1ALLER 944 Pennycuick V–C). On this we built the whole edifice of the ‘reasonable steps’ defence.

I remember the Tolmers day in court very well. Patrick, Nick Wates and I were sat on the left hand side of the court. On the right hand side were what seemed like about 25 people associated with Stock Conversion – a QC or leading barrister, junior counsel, solicitors, assistants and many others. 

Incidentally there is another irony here. The leading barrister for the Plaintiff had himself acted for squatters a few years earlier in the case of McPhail v Persons Unknown  (1973 Ch 447) (in which despite his arguments, the Court of Appeal had held that the Forcible Entry Act 1381 did not protect squatters from eviction).

At an early stage Counsel for the Plaintiffs objected to Nick Wates sitting with us on the grounds that he was a squatter himself in the contested properties. And indeed he was and he was the Co-ordinator of the Tolmers Village Association which was leading the fight against Stock Conversion. However, he was sitting with the lawyers in court to assist me in his capacity as a clerk employed by Offenbachs, my solicitors. I pointed that out to the judge and added for good measure “My learned friend has a whole army of people to assist him, while I have only my solicitor and a clerk”. The judge allowed Nick to remain in court. 

We spent all day contesting the summonses. We lost the first two cases quite quickly but then we had a longer run on the case involving 217 North Gower Street. The enquiry agent for the Plaintiff told the judge how he had called round to the house to see who was in occupation but no one answered the door despite loud knocking. Two witnesses from the house, Michael Fitzpatrick, a medical student and Joanna Rose-Innis, a music student from the Royal Academy gave evidence that they had been in at the time and no one had called.

Then we had to go outside to await the judgement of Mr Justice Croom-Johnson. After an anxious 30 minutes we were recalled to the courtroom by the usher. The judge gave judgement and dismissed the case with an order for costs in our favour for failure to comply with the ‘reasonable steps’ requirement of Order 113. I can remember rushing out of the court room to give the news to the others waiting for their cases to be heard and the cheers going up as they realised we had won. In his book (‘The Battle for Tolmers Square’,  RKP, 1976, pp 180-183) Nick says I described the whole case as my “victory of the year”. I’m sure I did. It was a great feeling.

This doomed the Plaintiff’s plan to get all their possession orders by the end of that day. [Patrick adds: There was only one day set aside for the hearings at that stage so all the other cases were adjourned and not long after this Camden Council, led by Frank Dobson did the deal with Stock Conversion to buy them out and take over the development. And after that Camden took four years to get the development organised and in the meantime the squatters  were left in peace.]

And yet another irony. A few months later the reasonable steps defence was swept away. In Burston Finance v Wilkins ( “The Times” 16th July 1975), a Chancery Judge said taking  reasonable steps was about identifying the occupiers so that they could be informed about the proceedings and come along and make a defence if they had one. So if they’ve actually turned up and put up a defence then you don’t need to go any further to identify them! That doomed the reasonable steps defence. So we were very lucky with the timing of the Tolmers cases.

We used other defences, for example that the facts amounted to a licence or permission to occupy even if the landowner at the time had not realised or intended to grant a licence (the issue being whether the effect of what had been done or said meant that permission had been granted despite the intention).

Obtaining title to the land by “adverse” possession started to become a defence for those who had been in possession for 12 years or more but the Land Registration Act 2002 made this much more difficult. A book could be written (and has been, not by me) on this topic. 

This was the pattern of squatting defences. One thought of an argument, ran it for a while until it was torpedoed and then developed something else.

The Chambers at Bowden Street came to an end in 1976 and most of us then moved to new offices in Wellington Street, Covent Garden. Then, in 1988, Wellington Street Chambers disbanded. I moved to Garden Court Chambers with some of the others where I remained, becoming Head of that Chambers for a while until I retired at the end of  2012.

When my legal career started, I had been part of the opposition to the Law Commission’s proposals for criminalising trespass on land (in 1973) and, shortly after I retired in 2012,  section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 made squatting in residential property a criminal offence for the first time, although  not for commercial premises. 

I had played a leading role in the Campaign Against a Criminal Trespass Law (CACTL) and in subsequent such campaigns which held the line for a remarkably long time but ultimately failed. Criminalisation of activities associated with occupation of land is now being extended to gypsies, travellers and demonstrators by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021.

It is difficult to overturn a law once it has been passed. New governments always seem to have other priorities than to repeal existing legislation. For example there is still no programme to reverse the damaging restrictions on the scope of legal aid (by the 2012 Act) and there has been no rise in legal aid remuneration since 1996. In my view, the government relies on the goodwill of the people involved not to abandon their clients. It’s the same with the NHS – they rely on the goodwill of doctors and nurses to carry on looking after patients despite poor pay and conditions. 

The Tolmers banquet 

I remember the Tolmers Christmas banquet which took place around Christmas time. My partner, Suzanne Tarlin and I are wearing party hats in the photographs. It was very crowded and cheerful, I can’t remember other details but it was 46 years ago….

After my retirement from the bar, I did a couple of history courses, one on the English Civil War, the other on the Byzantine Empire. I have become an habitué of the British Museum often going to events or exhibitions several times a week .

Then I started learning Ancient Greek in 2013 so I could read Homer in the original  (as I have been doing). I continued with Tai Chi which I started practising in 2006. And, having qualified as a mediator in 2008, I conduct mediations to help parties settle disputes without going to court.

Recently I have become  a member of the housing law group of the Society of Labour Lawyers. We have produced a Labour “Plan for Housing Law  Reform which went round the last Labour Party c\Conference  (2021) and we have presented it to the front bench  shadow housing  ministers Lucy Powell and her successor Matthew Pennycook. 

I have no regrets about giving up practice. 40 years was sufficient and there were other things (as above) I wanted to get on with. 

Also if I had not retired I might not have survived much longer. I was diagnosed with a heart condition in 2014, having been suffering from symptoms of breathlessness and two episodes of near fainting for sometime beforehand. Essentially my aortic valve through which the heart pumps blood to the rest of the body, was closing up. It turned out that this was a chronic condition which had been developing for many years and nothing to do with ‘lifestyle’. So that resulted in open-heart surgery and the insertion of a pig’s aortic valve which was successful. It was diagnosed four days before Suzanne and I were due to fly off to Ethiopia so who knows what might have happened…

As told to Patrick Allen

I came to live in Tolmers Square through Vince (Vincent Hetreed). We had become friends at Corpus Christi College, Oxford where I studied Classics and English, graduating in 1973. I then spent a year in Italy and, following this, enrolled on a postgraduate course at the Warburg Institute called grandly Combined Historical Studies in the Renaissance. Professor Ernst Gombrich was the Institute Director. In his welcoming address to us he said ‘if you want to become art historians leave now and go to the Courtauld: we do cultural and intellectual history here, not art history’.

I was interested in industrial archaeology and spent time wandering around Docklands with a camera watching warehouses being pulled down and taking a lot of photographs to record the process. I recall seeing a toilet in (I think) the East India Docks bearing a chalked sign ‘whites only’, but I cannot find a photograph so perhaps did not have a camera with me at that time.  

Vince had opened up the semi-industrial second floor on the south side of Tolmers Square. Four houses (nos 19, 20, 21, 22) had been converted to horizontal use as offices or light industrial and were now empty. 

Vince was deemed to be in charge of the space and was very happy for me to occupy a room. It was extremely convenient for the Warburg which was a short stroll away across the Euston Road. After ascending the stairs of No 19 to the second floor, one turned right into a kitchen, then a large room which was Vince’s, then a suite of 3 or 4 ‘rooms’, separated by a series of large orange sheets. I had the first of these. It had windows looking out onto Tolmers Square. I became a fixture for 2 years, as others came and went. For much of the time I lived with Christine Burden (now Hall), who later had an eminent career at the British Library.

We had electricity and running water. There weren’t great collective meals at number 19 but Vince and I mostly ate together.

Seeking the legal and moral high ground I attempted to pay some rates to Camden Council which ended disastrously. I sent them a cheque; more than a year later, long after I had left the Square, I was arrested for non-payment of rates on the whole building of four houses. I needed legal help to get me out of trouble and a jail sentence for not paying. 

In 1975, when Joe Levy served eviction notices on 27 houses, I attended meetings about dealing with the press but was not comfortable with the approach and pulled back from activism. We had the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group amongst us vying for position. I was not directly threatened with eviction and did not need to attend court, but I did appear in the group campaign photograph.

The course at the Warburg started in the autumn of 1974 and ran for 2 years. I then went on to an MA in Museum Studies with English Local History at Leicester University but visited London and Christine regularly. 

I then moved to Greenwich where I took a job at the National Maritime Museum. I bought a house there. I moved on to the British Museum where, over ten years, I became a specialist in the ”lesser arts” of the European Renaissance – small sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, enamels, glass… In 1987 the Museum hosted my exhibition `Ceramic Art of the Italian Renaissance’.

I moved to Oxford in 1990 as Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum and I and my family (wife Jane, children Alastair, Julia, David) have been based here ever since. I was a fellow of Balliol College and Professor of the Arts of the Renaissance. I made many visits to Italy and I write interminable books on Renaissance pottery (see Tim’s website). Though now retired from the Ashmolean I keep on with my work and have done two recent exhibitions and others in Vienna and Urbino are (as of March 2022) about to open. These days I concentrate on French and Italian Renaissance ceramics.

Memorable Tolmers moments:

I remember Rastafarians coming round selling sausages which were stained blue – was this because they were designated as dog food? We ate them without ill effects.

It is me in the photograph sitting on a chair in the square surrounded by self sown yellow flowers, reading a book in the sunshine.

Vince brought two high class call girls for supper which was typical Vince. However there was no free service at the end of the dinner.

Nick Wates asked me to write the history chapter for his book ‘The Battle for Tolmers Square’. I was pleased when Simon Jenkins in his review called it ‘the excellent historic chapter of this book’. (See Tim’s local history chapter here). My research was done at Swiss Cottage library. I did not do doorstep history talking to tenants and recording their stories with a tape recorder which I now regret. 

Did Tolmers change my life?

I changed from being a straightforward academic and amateur lefty to being someone who believed that the skills I had could be put at the service of urban communities. If the London dockland museum project had been carried out by the National Maritime Museum, I would have had a big role in that; but in fact the Museum of Docklands in the West India Docks was carried through, brilliantly, by Chris Elmers of the Museum of London. 

But I still managed to be involved in community action. In Oxford I became chair of a group trying to restore the canal basin which Lord Nuffield built over. So far we haven’t succeeded. It is currently a car park.

Living in Tolmers was a big leg up – to live for over two years rent free with a grant for my studies at the Warburg made a huge difference.

Like many of the first squatters in Tolmers, I studied architecture at University College London. I first squatted in Euston Street in 1973, later moving to Hampstead Road and then North Gower Street. When I moved to Tolmers, I was in the final year of my degree. It was a turning point in my life. I was wanting to find an alternative way of living and engaging in community politics. I got involved in All London Squatters, which met at the Roebuck in Tottenham Court Road, and I was active in the Campaign Against the Criminal Trespass Law. I was involved in supporting the campaign against the winkling out of tenants by landlords in Islington, and was arrested at a picket of Prebble’s Estate Agent and charged with obstruction. David Watkinson, who subsequently defended the Tolmers Village squatters against eviction orders, was my barrister. After I gave evidence, the magistrate dismissed the charges against me, but the other three defendants didn’t get off. It was for me, as a middle class white woman, a lesson in class politics. 

I think squatting in Tolmers was special, because the squatters were very embedded in the local community, which was under threat from property speculation. We were friendly with shopkeepers and tenants. We found out about the empty flat that I moved into in Hampstead Road from two retired sisters, who lived in the flat above. I remember being a regular at the Lord Palmerston in Hampstead Road, often calling in at the end of an evening for a glass of port, always being sure to find people I knew there.

Whilst living in Tolmers, I became involved in Essex Road Women’s Centre and in 1976 moved to a squat in Islington with other women from the Centre and their children, and later came out as a lesbian. After being evicted a few times, we moved into licensed short-life property. (Local authorities had bought up street properties, but in the context of further cutbacks in public expenditure in the late 1970s were unable to fund their renovation. Rather than leave them empty they let them on short term licences). 

After leaving university I worked in a building cooperative. Later I trained and worked as a carpenter. With other women working or wanting to work in non-traditional jobs, I set up Women and Manual Trades. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I worked for Solon Cooperative Housing Services helping licensed short life housing groups with making their properties habitable. After a decade out of university I went back and finished off my education as an architect. I was then involved in setting up a feminist architectural practice, Matrix, and was active in the Feminist Architects’ Network. In the early 1990s in the context of cuts to local government funding, I was made redundant from my job as an architect at Islington Council. I then worked in urban regeneration and studied for a PhD comparing the changing relationship between the public and private sectors in development in London and Paris. I spent the last fifteen years of my working life teaching planning and regeneration. I then retired, but continued to do some research and teaching.

In 2013, I moved with my partner and daughter from London to Lewes in Sussex. I became active in Extinction Rebellion locally and was also involved in the Architects Climate Action Network.