Property is Theft Lefties

This programme contains very strong language

Hello, how are you? Here we are, talking about Villa Road.

Hello, hello.

MUSIC: Come The Morning by Sol Invictus

# The world and all its angels Are talking in my head

# The world and all its angels... #

SHE SCREAMS

# ..The world and all its angels Set table for a feast

# The world and all its angels Come to toast the suckling beast

-# Come the morning

-Come the morning

-# By the dawning light

-By the dawning light

-# Such crimes and stories

-Such crimes and stories

# Behold the wondrous sights... #

Power to the...biosphere!

In the 1970s, Villa Road in south London was a squatted street.

Behind these doors, anarchists mixed with hippies and feminists.

A primal therapy commune established itself across the street from a wholefood cafe.

And homeless single mothers rubbed shoulders with Marxist revolutionaries.

This was a generation that wanted to change the world.

Squatting was in its idealistic heyday in the mid-'70s.

In London alone, there were over 30,000 squatters, often occupying whole streets of abandoned houses,

with hundreds of squatters living together in communities.

In Brixton, the town planners' futuristic '60s blueprint for a new town centre had been shelved,

and streets like Villa Road lay empty, stranded between the past and the future.

Into this vacuum came the squatters. They were politicised, and they were on the left.

They believed in collective living and collective action, and they chose to live by their beliefs.

We actually thought that we could produce a revolution.

We could produce very radical change in the way things were organised.

We could increase the power of ordinary people, of working people,

we could reduce oppression, all those sorts of things.

We thought all those things could be done at that time, we were trying to do them.

It was a politicised generation.

I mean, we were Marxists, I suppose. Dialectical materialism

and historical materialism

were phrases that tripped off the tongue.

What would your ideal goal have been?

My goal is always revolution.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

The idea was that people would organise and would rise up against capitalism,

and there would be a revolution.

One was always a little big vague about exactly what form that might take in Britain,

but, you know, a general strike, whatever.

It sounds and it was wildly Utopian.

-But you believed it?

-Yeah.

Practically everybody I knew was political in one way or another, and you know, it was a moment in time

where we thought we knew everything, we had incredible energy, there were things happening.

There'd been the miners' strikes, there were factory occupations,

there were things like...the Black Power movement in the States,

there was the anti...and so on, so there was something positive which was that people were optimistic.

People thought they could change the world, and wanted to,

and so there was a lot of activism around and obviously one of the areas was housing.

So would you personally get the crowbar and be...?

Yeah. Yes, I would.

We would go along perhaps late at night and get in the houses and get the electricity

sorted out and then help the people to clear out the houses and make them habitable really.

When we moved into the houses, they had had council wreckers

in them who had broken a lot of the fabric of the houses.

They broke the toilets and they poured concrete down them.

The broke a lot of the windows, they tore up floorboards and pulled down ceilings.

And we all set to fix them, and when I look back on it, the sort of things we did were quite astounding.

Because they had poured concrete down the drains,

it meant that you had to dig up the connection to the main sewers out in the street.

We just used to dig up the whole lot and connect it up to the mains.

What do you remember about that house, 39, when you got there?

-How terribly filthy... it was, and...

-No floorboards...

-No, no floorboards.

-There was an old guy who had shell-shock, caught him living there.

-That's right.

-The basement was full of excrement,

-because he had mental health problems.

-It needed a lot of cleaning up.

We went out skipping -

skipping was going round and looking in the skips

that were on the streets and...

collecting whatever it was you needed.

So that was, you know... There were two activities, skipping and wooding.

Wooding was going out and reclaiming all the wood from the houses that were being demolished,

and, you know, you basically built your environment.

In winter, the ice was on the inside of the windows.

Heating was like one bar,

one of those long fires mainly for bathrooms, I think.

We used to cook on that as well, beans on toast - total fire hazard.

The wiring was totally bent and, you know, illegal, the gas was.

It was, you know... I remember seeing a huge rat coming up from the basement at one time.

Yeah, it was pretty rough.

Perhaps surprisingly, in the middle of a black community in Brixton,

the core group that colonised Villa Road were white, middle class graduates,

mainly from Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Xander Fraser arrived in 1974 with a fire in his belly

and a degree in architecture from Cambridge University.

Were you rich?

No, from the day I left Cambridge,

I never took or asked for money off my parents but, yes, am I from a relatively well off family? Yes.

But again, we go back to the spirit of the times.

I felt it didn't make any sense for me to be ultra critical of my parents

and their view of the world, and then sit there taking money off them.

The people that I became friendly with and spent most of my time with

were university graduates who found themselves on Villa Road.

You know, Oxbridge, very educated,

very committed, political, leftist kids.

Well, I was working class and not very well educated and I didn't know much

about Marx's theory of blah, blah, blah, you know, and I do now, I have to say.

So it was an education for me really.

I was from a very typically middle class background.

I'd had a private education

and then I'd gone to university.

So...

and I probably sounded a bit posh.

# In 1649 to St George's Hill

# A ragged band they call the Diggers

# Came to show the people's will

# They defied the landlords

# They defied the laws

# They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs

# "We come in peace" they said... #

Pete Cooper was a graduate from Oxford who chose to squat for political reasons.

He lived at number 31, the most rigorously political household on the street.

What were you doing, signing on?

Signing on and I got a job briefly as a road sweeper,

which was great, because I got the blue council jacket, you know,

which was sort of a workers' uniform, it was great, you know.

I hadn't any career plan at all, I didn't really think in those terms.

I think actually people seriously thought that the revolution was coming.

We were certainly a student, ex-student house.

I would say we were one of the sort of lefty houses rather than the sort of hippy houses.

I wouldn't say that I was particularly taken by the politics

of it all, involved in the politics of it, before I went to Villa Road.

It was only really after I got there that that started to develop.

Before Cambridge, I went to Eton. It was a bit of an education in class consciousness for me, if you like.

And I remember the second day I got there, when I started, I was 12 -

1965 or '6 -

and there was a speech from the headmaster to all the new boys

who explained that we were going to be running the country and that we were at Eton

to learn how to do that.

It seemed absurd, and so I'm sure I wasn't the only person

who went to Eton who got pushed or went in a different direction.

# ..The sale of property we do disdain

# No man has any right to buy and sell the Earth

# The private gain by theft and murder

# They took the land

# Now everywhere, the walls spring up at their command. #

There were two influences on us. One was obviously Marx.

We were Marxists, we saw ourselves as Marxists.

We were in things like Marxist reading groups and we studied Marx.

But we were also influenced by people like Laing

and Cooper

and were into the death of the nuclear family.

This rejection of the nuclear family was born of an intellectual analysis

which saw the family as an essential unit of a capitalist society.

We felt it was necessary - or should be possible -

to have supportive, economically viable,

emotionally rewarding relationships, familial sexual relationships,

with people without creating, or commodifying as we like to call it, commodifying the family unit.

We had a lot of theories around the family unit being the building block of capitalism.

These beliefs made life complicated at the squatters' resource centre that Paul helped to run.

If people within a sexual relationship had or wanted...

to have an intimate physical relationship,

whether it was sexual or not, with other people,

then that had to be acknowledged and it had to both be acknowledged

by both partners, but also allowed to happen.

It was agonising, because you were supposed to say it before you do it,

not just come back and say, "Oh, by the way, I've bonked Bill."

You would...have to explore

the feelings you had,

the pressures - emotional and sexual - on you and the other person

with the group or with the people it directly impacted on

before you did the deed.

I mean, I don't know anybody

who like thought they want to get married.

I certainly didn't think I wanted to get married

and I consider myself proud never to have got married.

And it is quite different again now, but, yeah, I mean,

nuclear family... a lot of us had come from pretty unpleasant nuclear families.

And that does open up ideas for how you might live.

It seemed that the nuclear family was really in crisis.

And...you know, the idea of a stable couple having children

was not really part of most people's experience in that particular kind of sub society, you know.

And it also implied a degree of isolation from others.

I mean, there was a great collectivist vibe at that time.

How you live together was very much open to question,

and I think we...partly just out of necessity, but we tended to live in communes,

and that seemed as if that was the way that that could work more generally in society.

By the mid-'70s, there were about 5,000 squatters in Lambeth, more than in any other London borough.

Down the road from Villa Road was St Agnes Place, another squatted street, populated by Rastafarians

and many members of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Jane Halsall-Dixon has squatted here since she was three years old

and is one of very few squatters left in Lambeth.

We're going up.

This is the very small bathroom,

which is used by about 15 people at the minute.

This is kind of a bicycle room.

'There' been, you know, a transient community of people who have moved in here

'and sorted their lives out a bit, got themselves together and possibly moved on, possibly not.

'In my case, not! But, you know, it's provided housing for a hell of a lot of people in 30 years.'

There's probably about 12 people, and what I remember about it was I didn't have to cook.

Probably once every 12 days, because everyone had to cook.

There was a rota system, so I didn't have to do the housework every day, I didn't have to cook every day,

I didn't have to shop every day, I had to do it like once every so often,

and it was fantastic, I liked that.

Cos I'm not really a domesticised person, to be quite honest.

There was this Polish girl and, God, I was just in a fury at her the whole time!

We pooled all our money, and then we would each take turn making dinner.

She was always really going for THE most bargain basement bargains she could.

So one day she comes home with like...

I don't know, 4 lbs of pork chops, right, that just stank, you know.

And she said, "Don't worry, I'm going to soak them in vinegar."

So she soaks these pork chops in vinegar and I said, "I'm not going to eat these pork chops

"that have been soaked in vinegar and they're rotten. Where are you buying rotten food?"

Anyway, after I left, she started sleeping with my boyfriend! Then I was mad at her for another reason.

I do remember in the first house that I visited before I moved onto Villa Road, I'd be in the kitchen.

You'd have people wandering in and out of this kitchen. There were teacups everywhere.

Someone might take a teacup and just go rinse it for half a second in the sink.

You'd be drinking out of these incredibly - to my mind now and even then - grotty cups.

You know, we were young, it didn't matter. We just sort of did it.

The house that I moved into,

number 20, was much more tidy.

Things like toilet paper instead of newspapers, things like that.

It was like, "OK, I can live here, we have toilet roll."

And we washed our glasses, we washed our mugs.

Hi, Pim!

What you're looking at is a very first experiment

of a...system of...

well, nomadic living, perhaps you could call it.

Or perhaps retractable housing systems.

Pim, originally from Holland, came to Villa Road in the early '70s.

Having lived in a teepee in California,

he believed that the environmental way forward was for people to build their own dwellings.

'For a long time, he lived in a handmade hut in the garden of 31 Villa Road.

'He now squats a few doors down, living in a domed tent inside his house.'

Often...it sort of strikes me, when I wake up in the morning...

the moment of opening your eyes, and what is it that you see?

And it often sort of strikes me, how delightful it is

when you open your eyes and just look up at the ceiling.

It is not the ceiling. You look up at the sky.

'How I see from the bottom down and then have this...view.

'It's a beautiful start of the day.

'It is something that could be available to anyone.'

In the '70s, all aspects of living were being called into question.

These were the early days of feminism, and women on Villa Road

were as keen to end male domination as to overthrow capitalism.

I think over time we had several different Marxist reading groups going on.

The one I remember in Villa Road, the one I remember going to,

was an all women's Marxist reading group.

Through that, I think we started to think about redefining our role as women.

We were doing consciousness raising. We would go away for weekends and have weekends away and stuff.

We did things like...we had a book called Our Body Ourselves, which was fantastic.

Women learned about how to have orgasms

through Spare Rib and vibrators, which was absolutely fantastic.

And, um, I think, yeah, that was brilliant.

We read books, sort of Marxist books, I suppose.

We did self-examination, which was quite popular in those days.

-What does that mean?

-You know, when you examine...

I remember one meeting that we had a speculum, because Maureen's a doctor.

So she could have them, and we examined ourselves and learnt about our bodies.

Which bit of your body?

You're getting me so embarrassed!

We, you know, we tried to find out where our cervixes were,

which was a journey in itself.

Do you remember examining your cervix?

No, I didn't do any of that.

But, yes, that was going on. Lots of use of mirrors.

I realised that it is perhaps a useful exercise for human beings

to try and live at the lowest possible level of a standard of living

rather than always trying to get to the higher...up the ladder and getting more and more and more.

Maybe perhaps less is perhaps also beautiful.

The Villa Road community governed itself.

Villa Roaders were antagonistic to the police,

who they viewed as an embodiment of their enemy, the state.

Would you ever have called the police?

-No.

-What did you do instead?

Well, where there were instances of theft and so on within the street,

then those were dealt with at street meetings.

One incident I remember, we jailed the guy for a week, I believe.

Everyone was losing their stereos

and, um...

we eventually managed to catch this young, black guy,

who was, I think, 15 at the time.

And, um, so...he said that he had been thrown out of home,

that he had nowhere to go and he was stealing all this stuff so that he could survive.

And so in typical Villa Road fashion,

we held a street meeting, emergency street meeting, what to do about him.

And we decided that we would give him a home, give him somewhere to live and we would give him money.

And so he lived with us then.

Villa Roaders identified politically with the working class.

They supported striking workers. They had a Villa Road banner and travelled en masse

to march in support of the striking firemen and the Grunwick workers.

They wanted to link the squatting struggle to other anti-capitalist struggles.

Can you explain why, as squatters,

you thought it was important to join ranks with workers?

Because the general atmosphere of the time was, we were all...believed in, you know, everybody getting together

and the only way to change the world was for everybody to get together

to recognise that we all had interests in common, and so on - a sort of general leftism.

There was a strike on by the tarmac workers.

And I went along on behalf of the squatters and spoke with a megaphone,

just explaining that we supported their struggle

and inviting them to take part in a joint march on the town hall.

The workers were going to be the ruling class of the future.

'Xander Fraser even became a squatters' representative in the Transport and General Workers Union,

'allowed in as a mark of their solidarity with the Villa Road struggle.'

They should be organised. We are anxious that they should join forces...

Were you the only squatter who was a member of the T&G?

Well, I have to say, I did find it slightly unusual, yeah.

Because, technically...

I was a building worker, so on that level,

I assume I was entitled to be there.

But yeah, really, I was in that branch as a representative

of Villa Road, not because I was working in the building trade.

Oh, no. Watch out for this telephone...thing.

Just step over it.

This room is...

problems with the flooring.

It is a...

a kind of communal work space.

Um, and it functions quite well like that for us.

Some on the left had more ambitious political goals

and were explicitly focused on building a revolution to overthrow the state.

Piers Corbyn was an astrophysicist,

a full-time squatting activist in West London and a revolutionary.

He was well-known in squatting circles and always present at protests and demonstrations.

Everybody seems to remember you charging round London with a carrier bag,

containing peanut butter sandwiches that was your sole sustenance.

-Is that right?

-Er, I used to eat a lot of peanut butter sandwiches.

I believe there's a jar of peanut butter over there still!

Mainly the bags contained leaflets.

In those days, I was a remember of the International Marxist Group.

I'd been so for two years.

I joined the IMG and I was excited about being in this political organisation.

The IMG was a Trotskyist-derived group,

and the initials stand for the International Marxist Group.

There is a very complex genealogy of the IMG's relationship to the Fourth International,

which was, as you may know, the alternative to the Stalinist International.

What the IMG was...it called itself the British section of the Fourth International,

the Trotskyist Fourth International, which was like a liaison

or an alliance of revolutionary groups around the world.

Their general activity was to build Labour movement support, activity and trade unions and so on.

They saw this type of stuff as possibly peripheral, possibly not.

There was ambiguity.

Some hardline Trotskyist groups were unenthusiastic about getting involved in a political issue

as woolly and vegetarian as squatting. They preferred to focus on workers' struggles,

hoping to build a disciplined vanguard that would bring on the revolution.

But some revolutionaries did take squatting seriously.

-Was the IMG the only revolutionary party?

-PHONE RINGS

Oh, there's your phone.

Er...

Weather Action.

Oh, magic! How are you?

Oh, fine. I'm just... It's all right. Carry on.

I'm being interviewed by some...

The BBC are here interviewing me about squatting and housing.

But it doesn't matter. Carry on. Carry on, tell me.

Bye.

Sorry. Yep, someone just wanted something.

Um... I should have ignored that really, shouldn't I?

Was the IMG the only revolutionary organisation to get behind squatting?

Um, yes, in a serious way, anyway.

The IMG, fanatical about correct Marxist terminology, nitpicked about whether or not

squatting could strictly speaking be defined as a revolutionary act.

On Villa Road, Pete Cooper had joined the party.

Was squatting in and of itself a revolutionary act?

Oh, God, I can't remember.

From the Trotskyist point of view, I think it would have been foolish

not to engage the energies of these people who were clearly very willing to take part in direct action.

For you in the IMG, would you have said that squatting itself was a revolutionary act?

Well, some of us did, yes,

because it was expropriation of property, and we said it had a dynamic of revolutionary act.

But for the IMG, the real point of demanding housing

was not to GET housing, but to expose the weaknesses of capitalism.

Those demands for housing...

What was it? Housing and jobs...

Not evictions and lay-offs, yeah.

They were, in kind of...

Trotskyist terms, those are transitional demands, are they?

That's right. Transitional demands were demands that couldn't really be met within the terms of the system.

So transitional demand is a demand

-that sounds like a reasonable demand...

-Yeah.

..but that will expose the shortcomings of the capitalist state in their inability to deliver it.

Yeah, like housing for all. It seemed reasonable. Why shouldn't everyone have somewhere to live?

But the system probably couldn't deliver without fundamentally changing.

Could housing for all be achieved?

Well, they would say, the IMG would say, no, it couldn't be achieved

under capitalism, so this was therefore an anti-capitalist demand,

a transitional demand,

which is something everybody wants, but can only be achieved if capitalism is destroyed,

so the dynamic of the movement will lead to the destruction of capitalism

along with other sort of demands, other transitional demands,

if support in a united front gets wide enough.

That is, I think, how Trotskyist method works.

That really made a lot of sense to me.

I have a bit of a...compulsion.

Particularly when I keep passing by a particular spot,

and there is every time the same kind of items there,

and then this process of thinking..."What can I do with it?"

Particularly with these items, and, um...

..here is a nice example.

For the first few weeks or months, I just didn't think I should pick it up.

Then at some point, I thought, "Well, I'll start picking up just a few pieces

"and take them home and see what I can do with it."

Some on Villa Road saw their inner world as the route to changing society.

Luise Eichenbaum had come to London from New York as a trained psychotherapist,

attracted by British feminist writing.

From her squat in Villa Road,

she set up the Women's Therapy Centre with Susie Orbach,

believing that therapy could be harnessed to left-wing goals.

For me, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

absolutely came right out of my political activity,

because, as a feminist,

we really understood that in order to change one's self, you couldn't just say,

"I no longer want to be this person, the person I was raised to be,

"the little girl raised to be a certain kind of feminine character,

"who defers to people, who is submissive, who feels insecure, who doesn't feel entitled and so on."

We knew that we no longer wanted to be that person, and so,

if one wanted to change deeply, we had to look to the unconscious.

I think people came to see that

bringing change wasn't just about

changing physical social aspects of society.

I think people started to recognise

that change actually maybe has a psychological dimension, an internal dimension, as well.

-What could you do?

-Why should I...?

What could you do if you let go, Jimmy baby?

What could YOU do if YOU let go, Jimmy?

'I was very political, right from my teenage.'

I come from a very political family.

I spent a very intensive ten years from the age of 17 on,

utterly involved in outward politics.

But I was also engaging in a lot of personal relationships.

A girlfriend of mine, a German girl, who was also very active in politics, committed suicide.

And I just thought, I could go that way so easily, because I so often felt suicidal.

I started to think, "Just a minute, we're in a very radical left-wing movement

"with very radical left-wing boyfriends, and she was unhappy enough to do that,

"and I'm unhappy enough nearly to do that."

So, I thought, "Hmm, it's not all out there, it's also inside."

Having decided to devote her life to therapy,

Jenny James became a follower of Wilhelm Reich, an associate of Sigmund Freud's.

Significantly, Reich was a communist whose left-wing goal

was to adapt therapy to make it available to the working class.

More controversially, Jenny also followed Californian psychotherapist Arthur Janov.

He had developed a therapy known as primal scream, in the course of which

patients relived the trauma of their own birth.

-It's the only place I had.

-That's right.

It was mine. It was safe.

Despite having no formal training, Jenny set up a primal therapy commune in Donegal in Ireland.

At the same time, she established a sister commune in a squat at number 12 Villa Road.

The idea was that therapy should not be the preserve of the moneyed bourgeoisie,

but should be available free of charge to anybody.

I was called the black sheep of the... Oh, I'd brought the therapy movement into disrepute.

This came from the big, posh therapy centres. What it boiled down to was I wasn't asking money.

Anyone can do therapy if they go through things themselves. They don't need some posh training.

It was just a question of human empathy and, of course, knowing yourself really well,

being honest with yourself. And so I just opened the doors.

It was primal scream and it did involve...screaming.

Letting... Which was... Sorry, I'm not laughing at that.

It was very genuinely felt.

It was about letting out your inner anguish.

Um, it was noisy.

SHE SCREAMS

That's what I say to you! Ah...!

It is extremely organic and well worked out. Nothing's false. It is something that comes out.

When things do really come out from very far down in the body, they can sound quite animal-like.

They can be quite scary.

What wasn't nice was that they were all naked while they were doing it.

When you're six, and there's a big group of people rolling round the floor naked,

you're thinking, "What is going on here?"

There was my friend's mum - she was the one that did it - Babs.

You just think, "It's so strange,"

cos you're playing out in the garden, you pop in for a drink, and someone's in the kitchen naked.

Helen Russell joined the primal scream commune in Villa Road in 1976.

Jenny...Jenny is very charismatic and very, very strong.

Her personality is very, very strong.

It's like she has an aura... like this, you know.

Our one-to-one sessions were extraordinary and incredibly valuable.

I wouldn't ever regret any of that or want it to be any different.

Um, but the downside was the group. Living...

The thing was, we're all there, we're all feeling really vulnerable.

We're all looking for ourselves.

We're all looking for friends and support and home and family and answers.

So everybody was vulnerable and everybody was at different stages of this exploration, this journey.

And there was no account taken of that in any structured way

or in any way really.

Throughout the years, what would happen is, now and then, some of the stronger characters would

actually cross the metaphorical line. They'd cross the line, come in, get involved.

We had a lot of lovely-looking women in our commune.

-They'd form relationships. They'd start to look at it.

-So was that what drew them in?

-The women?

-I would say that was probably obviously a first hook, if you like.

But then they'd see and it was very interesting what we do.

They'd see that and they'd see that it worked.

They'd get interested. It was a deeper way of living.

I remember that, um,

the primal screamers...

The story was... I think it was probably true, too.

..that the primal screamers sort of sent vixens out onto the street

to seduce the handsome boys who were on the left,

and to get them to scream instead of, you know, agitate or something.

I don't think it was that organised. It sounds a bit of a conspiracy theory to me.

You weren't lured in by a woman?

I was lured in by a woman, actually. So, you never know, do you?

I don't think she was acting on orders. I think she just fancied me.

It always reminded me of that film, The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,

in that one would wake up and discover

that somebody else from the street had been captured by the primal scream.

INDISTINCT SCREAMING AND SHOUTING

In May 1976, Pete Cooper crossed the road

and went to live at number 12.

There was a view that the personal is political,

and that the way you have relationships with other people is actually as significant as...

as significant a part of social transformation as the actual...

the institutions of the state, and what have you.

So I'd sort of resigned from this sort of leadership position in the street,

in favour of a kind of inward journey. It seems strange now.

It seems one was Marx, one was Freud,

but actually Reich seemed to offer a position to...

I didn't think of it as being as less revolutionary.

I thought of it as possibly more a further step in a revolutionary direction.

Was he lost to the IMG at that point?

I would say so, yeah. Yeah, yeah...

It took me by surprise, it really did...

cos you spend some time railing against these personal or politics people, you know,

and then he became one.

In a sense, I felt he joined it in rather a similar...

um, with a rather similar impulse that he joined the IMG,

and that was that he was looking for something that would engage him.

This continuing search for a belief system led Pete Cooper

to embrace ideas that were far removed from his rigorous left-wing analysis.

Along with the therapy, there was a whole ragbag of kind of new age, humanistic ideas.

For example, better eyesight without glasses.

So I stopped wearing me glasses for a while,

believing that my short-sightedness would go, as my energy flowed more, um, freely.

What I wanted was my hands to grow...

..because I'm a piano player.

And so what I wanted, was my hands to grow.

I got this idea that my hands had stopped growing,

when I was about nine, which was when my little sister was born.

You know, you put these twos and twos together, and you come up with 79!

And so I have no idea of the truth of this or not, really,

but it was something that Janov wrote about in his books,

that people had gone through such deep, therapeutic healing,

that parts of their bodies which had been stunted...

unstunted themselves, and they kind of picked up your life where it had got stopped.

So I had this daft idea...

To me, it was a really real idea. ..that my hands would grow. My hands didn't grow!

Helen Russell left the screamers and crossed the road in the opposite direction.

Embracing the political fervour of her fellow Villa Roaders,

she became passionately involved in the politics of defending the street.

There's another bedroom upstairs, but the person whose room it is isn't here,

and I don't really want to go up and invade their space, cos it's not really like that.

Do you want to come out?

So...this is my room.

Yeah, it's all right, this room. Although nowadays the pigeons keep me awake.

PIGEONS COO

By 1976, there were at least 200 squatters living on Villa Road.

As temperatures rose during the exceptionally hot summer of that year,

the confrontation between squatters and the council intensified.

Under threat of eviction, the squatters on Villa Road

decided to defend the houses by barricading themselves in.

They were now living behind their own iron curtain in a state of siege.

The barricades came about because... the, um,

Lambeth Council wanted to demolish the whole of Villa Road.

This had been their long-term plan.

They couldn't do it because we were living in the houses.

But they, I think, probably served eviction orders on us

and we decided that we were going to stay,

and so, we thought, "Well, we'll barricade ourselves in.

"The bailiffs will come, but if they can't get into the houses, they can't evict us."

So that was another form of direct action.

We would scour Lambeth, looking for wood,

sheets of corrugated iron, barbed wire.

There were a lot of building sites that went short of things in those days!

And the ingenuity of people to get all these materials together was phenomenal.

The barricade in front of 7 and 9 Villa Road was very beautiful,

because we painted it. It was a carefully tended barricade.

"Victory Villa" was the big sort of slogan.

"Property is theft." That was another

of the slogans on the barricades. We were all into that.

There was an anarchist tinge to the Villa Road collective political will.

New arrival on the street was committed anarchist Tony Cook, who became Helen Russell's boyfriend.

He believed in continual struggle, and built his barricades accordingly.

The first thing I and the two chaps who moved in with me

began to do was to sort out the barricades

on our house. We had, um...

It was like triple barricades

of corrugated sheets and joists, and then more corrugated sheets,

then joists and props, all put together with six-inch nails.

Then on top of the barricade was barbed wire

and a gutter,

the plan being that we would fill the gutter with petrol

and have bits of burning tyre,

so we would have a sheet of flame to meet the bailiffs,

before they could even get to the house itself.

And we also had this huge, great, big wooden ball, like, um,

on the ball and chain, but this was made of wood with big six-inch nails stuck in it,

on the end of a rope, that you could swing and it would lazily move in front of the house

as another disincentive to come anywhere near us.

Sitting at a piano in a basement behind the barricades,

Helen Russell worked through the night composing music,

deeply affected by the threat to the street.

It was the most special time of my life, actually.

It crossed my mind that I should do a setting of the Requiem Mass.

I'd learned Latin at school. I was very bad at it,

but I loved the poetry of it, I loved the sound of it.

And, um...there's a line in the offertorium -

tantus labor non sit cassus...

..which, um...

It just means "let not this great work be in vain".

PIANO MUSIC

And that's everything. That is everything.

The great work.

In January '77, the council decided to destroy squatters' homes.

They targeted St Agnes Place, and came to demolish it, bringing with them an army of 250 policemen.

Villa Roaders rushed to the rescue.

Very early in the morning, we found out that the council were moving in bulldozers,

there were large busloads of police turning up at the end of the street, and all the rest of it.

We all shot off down there. Quite a lot of the residents had already climbed up onto the roofs,

basically saying, "If you're going to knock the house down, you'll have to knock us down with them!"

Got all the council workers digging up the pipes, down at the front.

They filled the drains with cement, and took out water and gas pipes.

They really went to town to make sure they were uninhabitable.

In this picture, you can see a protester.

He's one of the squatters who tied a rope round his waist...

There was a few of them. ..and actually walked across the top of this, what's left

of the main framework of the house.

We, together with the lawyers from the Law Centre,

managed to get an emergency High Court injunction

by midday or one o'clock that day,

forcing the council to withdraw their equipment,

'and to leave us alone.'

St Agnes Place was saved, and the council was publicly and humiliatingly defeated.

Lambeth Council had to rethink its approach.

But Villa Road was still under threat,

and the barricades remained in place there for another two years.

In 1977, Tony Wakeford was living at number 15.

He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party

and wrote anti-police songs for his punk band, Crisis.

# ..To keep you silent

# And he can poke And he'll punch you

# With a 3ft bloody truncheon

# PC, what are they for?

# PC, what are they for?

# PC, what are they for?

# PC, what are they for?

# PC, what are they for?

# He's got sanitational violence

# To keep you silent

# And he can poke And he'll punch you

# With a 3ft bloody truncheon

# PC, what are they for?

# PC, what are they for?

# PC, what are they for?

# PC, what are they for? #

-Were you doing a lot of drugs at Villa Road?

-Yeah.

And before. And after.

Yeah, mainly, um, lots of speed

and some acid.

Terrible.

HE LAUGHS

I'm a fat git now, but then I was, like, nine stone.

And it got to the stage where I woke up one morning,

looked in the mirror, pushed my teeth, and all my teeth just went...

They sort of bent inwards. Yeah, terrible. Lots of speed.

-Are they your teeth now?

-They're capped. Awful.

That decade, things did seem very black and white.

People really took sides

and made decisions over what they were going to do.

It was a very, you know, um,

no-middle-ground type of thing. At the time, we were all very committed.

Despite their committed struggle, the outcome for the Villa Roaders was only a partial victory.

In 1978, the council came up with a deal.

They would preserve the north side of the street on condition that the south side was destroyed.

This was agreed. The squatters took down their barricades,

and in the summer of '78,

the south side of Villa Road was demolished to make a small patch of green alongside the A23.

Most of the houses on the north side became a housing co-op.

A few squats remained, including Pim's house,

where he continues to live by his ideals.

Actually, I never use this bathroom.

I have a composting toilet.

I have a lifestyle which does not require running water.

I've been doing that ever since I lived in a tepee and I also was doing that in the little hut out there.

So where's your toilet, Pim?

It is a composting toilet.

As a matter of fact,

next to the branches, that is where the toilet and the kitchen waste and everything...

and it is a beautiful, um, compost there.

Fertility.

The street became much less of a cohesive, exciting place to be.

There were a few houses that still now have people in them

who were in them at that time.

But a lot of people went away to different parts of the world.

I left, eventually.

I feel really proud of what we achieved, actually.

The revolution didn't happen, but the houses were saved.

St Agnes Place refused to compromise and continued to battle for survival for the next 30 years.

It became one of the only '70s squatting communities to survive until now.

But the council have recently taken action to repossess the street once and for all.

All the remaining squatters have now received eviction notices.

I love living here, you know. It is my home. I've thought about the fact that...

you know, if Lambeth weren't coming to evict me, would I just live here for my entire life?

From the age of three years old till I peg it, whatever age that would be, you know what I mean?

To be honest with you, I probably would.

Some part of me sort of thinks, "That's really sad,"

you know what I mean? God, get a life, go out. Go and live somewhere else.

But it's my home. And, um...

You know, the idea of not having it

is...is...is a difficult thought.

But, um...

Sorry, can I stop?

# From the men of property the orders came

# They sent their hired men and troopers to wipe out the diggers' claim

# Tear down their cottages Destroy their corn

# They were dispersed but their vision lingers on

# You poor take courage

# You rich take care

# This earth was made a common treasury

# For everyone to share

# All things in common

# All people one

# You diggers all stand up for glory Stand up now! #

-Do you live as a nuclear family now?

-Yep.

And what are your political ideals now?

Would you still like to see the end of capitalism?

Yeah, I would, really. Yeah.

I don't care about capitalism.

I get a pension out of the tax... pay taxes off everybody,

so it would be counter-productive to be anti-capitalist, right?

You don't slap the hand that feeds you.

-Do you live in a nuclear family now?

-Yes, I got married, um...

I'm supposed to know that! ..about seven years ago.

Do you still hold the same left-wing beliefs that you did?

Absolutely.

I feel quite strongly about the environment, um, and certainly, I support things like...

There were people at Crystal Palace who were trying to save it.

They were living in trees. I very much supported those tree people.

How would you describe your politics now?

Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep green!

Extremely green. I, for example, have never had a fridge in my life.

If I'm ever in a house where there is one, I switch it off immediately.

What do you do now, Sue?

I'm going to work on a llama farm. I'm going to have some time in the country.

Sue, what do you do now?

Um, well, I paint and, um, I like to spend some time in India.

I teach and I practise psychotherapy.

I'm the America's editor of the Economist.

I still see myself as a...

you know, as a left-wing anti-capitalist,

but it's of no consequence to anybody,

because I'm not doing anything about it.

What I do now is, I'm Professor of Romantic Poetry, Queen Mary University of London.

Did you go on to live in a nuclear family?

Yes.

More or less. Yes.

not particularly successfully!

Would you still see yourself as someone who was hoping for the overthrow of capitalism?

Um, I think that's a very long shot now.

Would you still welcome the overthrow of capitalism?

Probably not. It's not really an option, is it?

You have to be really strong to keep on fighting.

You know.

Um...

I am fighting. And we all are.

Those of us who are still doing what we're doing in this way. We are still fighting.

You know, I'm doing my bit for the housing co-operative movement.

I think capitalism

has got a dynamic which will have to end.

The internal conflicts of capitalism are quite horrendous.

What do you do now?

I do long-range weather forecasting.

# The world and all its angels

# Are talking in my head

# The world and all its angels

# They lay upon my bed.

# The world and all its angels

# Set table for the feast

# The world and all its angels

# Come to toast the suckling beast

-# Come the morning

-Come the morning

-# By the dawning light

-By the dawning light

-# Such crimes and stories

-Such crimes and stories

# Behold the wondrous sights

-# Come the morning

-Come the morning

-# By the dawning light

-By the dawning light

-# Such crimes and stories

-Such crimes and stories... #