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I live on the Aylesbury Estate where squatters have taken over one of the blocks (Chartridge I believe) that is ready for demolition. They are calling themselves the community occupation.
They had a film and free dinner night last Friday, it's all very civilised.
Their twitter is here https://twitter.com/fight4aylesbury
and their blog is here https://fightfortheaylesbury.wordpress.com/
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I spent about 2 years regularly cutting across the Aylesbury Estate. I've always felt that the whole lot needs to be knocked the fuck down and properly rebuilt with some decent quality sustainable housing and better allocation and maintenance of public space. But, and this is an important condition, whatever is put in that space still needs to be appropriate social housing for the people and communities that live there.
I hope the occupation manages to focus the public perception on that.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Are the buildings themselves something that local residents generally want to see preseved?
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I live in a brick building and the residents of my block feel there is no need to demolish it. My building is in the last phase of the development and so is not being demolished for at least another 20 years yet they have already served a demolition order on us.
I feel the concrete blocks are not fit for purpose and could be torn down and redesigned but I agree with you that it needs to be appropriate for housing the people that currently live there which, if the Heygate is anything to go by, it will not be. A two bed flat in the new development on Heygate will set you back £737k and a studio is £415k! The money offered to Heygate leaseholders by the council through compulsory purchase was abysmal.
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The place is a monstrosity (in aesthetic terms). However this shouldn't be assumed as a reflection of the kind of people who reside there, as there are clearly some strong characters with a genuine sense of community in the area. Level the place and guarantee re-housing of current residents once construction is complete! (...yea right)
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I think the Love collective mentioned here may be the same, or similar people who briefly squatted the building on Charing Cross Road before Christmas:
Either way, there's another current London squat, on Ingestre Place, in Soho. NB I'm not posting this to draw attention to Ken Loach's party-political broadcast, but because of the info on the squat.
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More on this very high-profile squat:
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So, they get high court orders these days.
Maybe they've always done that when big money was involved, but my memory doesn't go that far back. It was always very unlikely that this one was going to last in such a high-profile location.
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Fat chance of this happening in London:
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About
Squats and squatting / London housing
Posted by
@Oliver Schick
Before you get too excited, I'm not talking about what you do in a gym, unless you want to squat the building. Searching for 'squatting' brings up a thread about Robert
Förstemann. :)
Years ago, there usually used to be one or two largeish community squats on the go in London, that is, fairly substantial buildings that were squatted which had quite a large population and which were open by doing lots of events and supporting various initiatives.
That was when the London property market still had many more empty buildings (as opposed to 'buy-to-leave' and that sort of thing) and squatting residential properties was still relatively easy. Since then, of course, the Government has introduced new rules against squatting residential buildings with the aim, most likely, of eventually making squatting illegal entirely; for the time being, non-residential buildings are still somewhat squattable, and there have been a few high-profile squattings recently, such as this one:
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/fivestar-squatters-take-over-historic-office-block-near-buckingham-palace-10112490.html
As high-profile goes, this is pretty audacious and undoubtedly they won't last long, like the squatters who recently took over a building in Charing Cross Road:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/23/love-activists-rbs-office-trafalgar-square-squat-protest-homeless
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2014/dec/31/christmas-soup-kitchen-eviction-rbs-love-activists-video
The high-profile squatters these days know that they won't be able to establish themselves in there and usually seem to aim at raising the profile of certain issues, e.g. the Charing Cross Road people wanted to feed homeless people at Christmas, although the main focus of action right now seems to be on other forms of protest, like the work of Focus E15 ...
http://focuse15.org/
... or Russell Brand's work first with the New Era Estate (which was successful and probably gave these protests a lease of life (no pun intended) and now in Barnet ...
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/russell-brand-leads-sleepover-housing-protest-against-barnet-estate-evictions-10114990.html
... and Eddie Izzard has also recently weighed in:
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/05/eddie-izzard-locks-horns-landlords-chelsea-social-housing-estate
All very different kinds of protest and who knows if their collective momentum will be critical enough to bring about lasting and effective change, but what is certain is that what is currently going on in the London property market is not right. Many more people are becoming homeless:
standard.co.uk/news/london/number-of-people-sleeping-rough-in-london-goes-up-by-a-third-official-figures-show-10074245.html
Some commentators see echos of the late eighties/early nineties.
Previous forum thread on squatting:
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/169912/