In the summer of 1974, my girlfriend, my sister and myself were faced with eviction from the squat in Stepney where we had been living for the previous year. Visiting my old university friends Patrick and Colin, who were living in squats in Drummond Street, they pointed out a house just around the corner on North Gower Street (217) which had been vacant for some time. We had some experience of squatting houses in East London and had acquired a crowbar which was particularly effective in removing the corrugated iron sheets commonly used to secure empty houses.

My girlfriend Mary and a group of friends had recently used this tool to squat a former GP’s house in Limehouse which had been identified by the local women’s group as suitable for a refuge. The house was subsequently taken over by the council and is still, in 2020, in use for this purpose.

The procedure, briskly accomplished at 217, was to remove the corrugated iron, change the lock and establish occupation before the police arrived. We stayed for over two years. 

Our derelict three-storey house, in an elegant early Victorian townhouse terrace, had been used intermittently by rough sleepers. The first two floors were ankle deep in old cans and bottles and other detritus. There was a hole in the roof which allowed rainwater to cascade through the house, bringing down plaster ceilings. We set about clearing the rubbish and making basic repairs. Local building sites and skips provided a ready source of building materials and useful domestic items. We repaired the roof with heavy duty plywood and plastic sheets which allowed the house to dry out. We secured a patio and toilet at the back that had collapsed using an ‘Acro’ pit-prop type device and some heavy timbers. Access to the water supply was achieved by running a plastic pipe from the house two doors down, adjacent to Mr Shah’s Indian restaurant, occupied by John and Vera, who had established what they called a ‘community house’. They were bohemian spirits of an older generation who subsequently supplied the neighbourhood with excellent muesli. 

Mains electricity was restored by replacing a defunct fuse and wiring a ring main circuit using cable from skips. I also managed to connect a gas pipe to the mains using copper tubing, supplying a gas cooker and an ‘Ascot’ hot water heater, an arrangement which terrified a visitor who had some experience as a gas fitter. We improvised an outdoor shower at the back, but this was only usable in the summer. We never had a bathroom but customarily used the swimming pool at the nurses’ home at the nearby Middlesex Hospital, where security was then much looser than it is today. We wallpapered the communal ground floor rooms with hand-printed paper from a West End supplier where one of our early housemates worked temporarily. We renovated the old window shutters, repaired the balcony and plastered and painted the front of the house, restoring some semblance of its Victorian splendour. We used wooden pallets as beds and acquired serviceable table and chairs abandoned by the old furniture warehouse further south on the same street.

Our household included myself, a medical student at the Middlesex Hospital (a 10 minute walk away), my girlfriend Mary, a social worker in Tower Hamlets, my sister Maggie, a medical student at the Royal Free. Joanna, a friend of Patrick’s, a student at the Royal College of Music, moved in to the attic. Other housemates at different times included Chris, another Tower Hamlets social worker, Fiona, another medical student, and Pat, a tapestry weaver who set up a loom in the basement using old scaffolding poles. Various old mates from Sheffield came and went, including Dave, Seamus and two Kevins. At the front the house looked across North Gower Street to a hostel for predominantly Filipino hotel workers, the surgery of Dr David Pitt (a Labour politician originally from Grenada and subsequently Baron Pitt of Hampstead), and a mosque serving the local Asian community. At the back was a yard used by a factory on Hampstead Road producing mannequins for shop window displays – lined up along the wall, these could be an alarming sight late at night, especially for visitors. 

We enjoyed the flourishing social scene centred in Tolmers Square, where a derelict bank was the scene of orgiastic gigs and periodic carnivalesque celebrations. We drank at the Lord Palmerston (surviving as a local theatre despite the collapse of the adjacent house during dubious renovations) and at the Exmouth on Starcross Street, favoured by trade unionists from the nearby NUM, NUR and TGWU offices. We shared in the activities of the food coop – driving to Covent Garden at the crack of dawn for supplies. A West Indian man regularly brought quality cuts of meat at bargain prices, said to come direct from Smithfield market. 

The squatting community was youthful and energetic and engaged in a wide range of radical political and cultural activities. While some in Tolmers Square were devotees of the sectarian disputes of the Trotskyist Fourth International, others were engaged in the women’s and gay movements and in solidarity activity in relation to Chile, Portugal and Ireland. Events nearby included the Balcombe Street Siege in December 1975 and the Notting Hill Carnival Riot in August 1976. Piers Corbyn brought regular news of squatting struggles in other parts of the capital in his samizdat bulletin. 

A series of meetings mobilised resistance to the threat of eviction as houses in the area were taken over by Camden Council from the property speculator Joe Levy. I gave evidence in one case at the High Court in the Strand, testifying that the bailiffs had not sought to identify residents as they had claimed. The case was thrown out, though for a period our house and several others were barricaded with heavy timbers to deter forcible eviction. I recall one early morning patrol (organised in anticipation of bailiffs) when we were alarmed to see a large number of riders on horseback approaching down the Euston Road – but this turned out to be the Household Cavalry on a routine exercise. 

At the close of 1976, the bailiffs closed in on North Gower Street and our household broke up. I qualified as a doctor and moved to another squat in Bow. I look back fondly on my time in the Tolmers area and still occasionally visit, meeting friends in the Exmouth and eating at the Bel Poori House on Drummond Street, the latter little changed over the decades. Unlike Tolmers Square, our old house still stands, though rather shabbily renovated by Camden Council. I keep in touch with people from those days, including some I met in Tolmers, though I resolved never again to engage in domestic renovations. The late Lord Pitt now has a blue plaque, matching that commemorating the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini at the entrance to Tolmers Square, outside a café that has now become famous as a location in a recent Sherlock Holmes TV series. Graffiti at the corner of North Gower Street and Euston Road once quoted William Blake; ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’. Underneath, in a different hand, a caption replied: ‘Mere dupes of phoney teachers’ – signed ‘Joseph’ (suffering from schizophrenia, Joseph contributed several such incisive commentaries in the area). Those were the days! 

Read more about the author Michael Fitzpatrick