City Is Ours by Geronimo; Bart van der Steen; Ask Katzeff; Leendert van Hoogenhuijze; George Katsiaficas

Author:Geronimo; Bart van der Steen; Ask Katzeff; Leendert van Hoogenhuijze; George Katsiaficas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2014-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Masthead for the Brighton Voice, 1987.

An invaluable resource for the subsequent era is the Brighton Voice, an alternative newspaper published from 1973 to 1989, describing itself as ‘the only community paper serving the whole of the Brighton area, with a readership of three to four thousand people.’ The very first issue had a cover story concerning the saving of six hundred houses which had been proposed for demolition to make way for a road scheme.

In 1975, a Brighton Squatters Association was set up, with an estimated eighty members. The association had two aims: to provide instant accommodation for homeless people in Brighton and to publicise the generally dire housing situation. The latter was deemed necessary because squatting had become (not for the first or the last time) a controversial issue in the media:

All over Britain in the last month, the squatting movement has been under attack. Not from the armed bailiffs of five years ago but from the worthless inarticulate hacks of many newspapers. The Sunday People [newspaper] recently carried out a four week group-probe into the London squatters, during which [time] reporters infiltrated squats and then wrote stories portraying them as the next cell of the revolution.4

There were to be more shows of force. Later on in 1975, a squat at 2 Temple Gardens withstood six attempts at illegal eviction, with three squatters arrested and charged. They were later fined between £25 and £50, as well as being given a conditional discharge. The Brighton Voice commented ‘as the week long trial dragged on it became obvious that … the men were really standing trial for being squatters.’

Yet squatting continued, with the Brighton Voice reporting both evictions and successes. Most likely it was only the tip to the iceberg of what was really going on. In Squatting: The Real Story Steve Platt estimates that Brighton had 150 squats in the mid-1970s.5 While it is impossible to say what sort of politics (if any) drove these squats, clearly there was a politically motivated element. One activist wrote:

Of course squatting is an attack on private property: it should be. Not an attack on the houses themselves or destruction of walls, windows or floors, but a principled attack on the iron law of property which rules our society, making it lawful for some people to have two, three or twenty houses and others to have none at all. It may be the law but it is not justice. Squatting is one way of bringing a little bit of justice into this ruthless society. More people should squat.

Certainly, some degree of success was achieved by the squatters: various families were eventually rehoused by the council after first squatting properties. And in 1978, Michael Elbro (Brighton and Hove Council Housing Manager) commented in the Voice: ‘I think that squatting is a symptom of the problem, it’s not a problem in itself…. As squatting becomes more vociferous then we need to sit up and think that there’s a lot wrong with the housing situation as it is.

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