Spirit of Broadway Market

It’s not often you get a Conservative councillor lining up with the Advisory Service for Squatters, the London Coalition Against Poverty, assorted anarchists and a variety of other protesters in support of a Rasta shopkeeper facing eviction by Bahamas-registered property speculators. When the councillor concerned invites you to gather outside the shop to ‘share breakfast [and show] support and solidarity’ on the day that the bailiffs are due to arrive, it’s clear that this is a cause with a wider-than-usual range of local support.

As a Conservative London Assembly member, former Hackney councillor and twice-defeated candidate for Hackney mayor (he’s also failed three times to get the Tory nomination as London mayor), Andrew Boff has his own angle on the eviction of Lowell ‘Spirit’ Grant. But you can’t fault his commitment to the campaign in Spirit’s defence, which saw him mobilising supporters for this morning’s protest breakfast to greet the bailiffs.

Since 1993, when he took over a derelict building on a cheap lease from Hackney council, Spirit has made his home and livelihood at the Nutritious Food Gallery, a Caribbean fresh fish, fruit and veg shop at 71 Broadway Market. When the council decided to sell off the Broadway Market properties in its ownership to property developers a few years ago, Spirit was one of a number of people who stood to lose their shops and homes. The campaign against the sales and the gentrification of the area has involved well-publicised occupations and other protests.

In Spirit’s case, his property was sold at auction – for £15,000 less than he had been prepared to pay for it – two hours after a council official accepted a £10,000 cheque from him as a deposit. Allegations of corruption, made by Andrew Boff and others, led to a formal investigation, which came to no conclusions for lack of any firm evidence. The Bahamas-registered company that bought this and other properties in the area put up the rent by 1200 per cent and then, when Spirit withheld payment in protest (he has since repaid most of it), proceeded to evict him.

The bailiffs were turned away by protesters when they turned up at 9.20 this morning. But Spirit, after years of fighting for his home and business, has agreed to hand in the keys to the property on another occasion. He couldn’t face any more today, and issued a statement to supporters in his absence:

‘Although there is still an enduring determination in me to continue my fight for justice, it has become aware to me that my physical and financial strength will no longer allow me to actively participate in this final act of defiance to keep my beloved property.

From the time I acquired this property back in 1993, it has been a long, hard struggle … At times I have felt completely discriminated against, robbed of my self-worth and dignity and feel as though I am being whipped.

I would like to let you all know that if it was not for the support and strength of the people like yourselves, who have actually given me the determination to physically last until now, particularly the people of Hackney, especially the people of the Broadway Market community who I know are the true defenders of humanity. To you all I give much thanks.

We have tried to keep my home and my shop. However, corrupted forces have prevailed by way of taking it from us for now. My situation at this moment in time is that I have no home and my possessions are scattered all over the city but I still have life and where there is life there is hope. I am very sorry that I am not able to be with you today in person to join in this last act of defiance against this eviction. I feel that this is just too much emotionally for me to witness. I am continually thankful for the support during this distressing time but I ask that your support should only be of peace, love and unity and not to be of any form of violence or intimidation toward the authority ...

I am still fighting the Battle of Broadway along with your continual and much needed support and together we can show the whole of London that we care about our communities and each other and it is what makes us unique and real.’

Nostalgia, squatting and 1968

Nostalgia was the order of the day at the ‘1968 and all that’ conference at London’s Conway Hall yesterday. Not so much ‘the fire next time’ as slippers by the fire. Here was some of the radical cream of ’68 reminiscing for the grandchildren with not much sense of a movement going anywhere in the present day.

Piers Corbyn’s talk on ‘Squatting and 1968’ caught the mood. ‘I was sent to assassinate you in 1975,’ one unreconstructed and oddly youthful-looking anarchist told him ‘in a spirit of friendship and joviality’ (it may have been ‘solidarity’ – it was too hot to hear properly). Piers, then in the International Marxist Group, used to polarise squatter opinion in much the way that Socialist Workers Party activists polarise people today. But his old talk of transitional demands and the international proletariat now just seems an anachronism - and he knows it. Piers kept to the reminiscences and the anecdotes (the police spies who were set to work collecting corrugate iron for barricades, pouring a bucket of water over the sheriff of London, cutting a deal with Ken Livingstone when he was first elected to the GLC). He said himself that the younger people in his audience – a good third of whom hadn’t even been born in 1968 – must feel as he used to when he was listening to his dad talking about the second world war.

Some of the ex-squatters who turned up sounded even more like that war generation. One woman spoke of how there used to be a saying among squatters that you were never more than two streets away from friends (i.e. another squat) in London. ‘I would walk down Commercial Road in east London in those days,’ she said, ‘wearing a thin summer dress and very little else, and I would feel completely safe.’ She didn’t add how the squatters always used to leave their back doors open and pop in and out of each other’s houses all day long borrowing cups of sugar when they needed them, but you get the picture.

What she was talking about, of course, was a sense of common cause and community. People were brought together in adversity through squatting, and through the struggles that have come to be identified with 1968, in the same way that an earlier generation of people were brought together, in greater adversity, during the 1939-45 war. It is one of the great tragedies of recent history – and one of the great failings of ’68 – that those different generations were too often so painfully divided from each other.

1968 and all that

As the official historian of the British squatting movement, and the only person who has ever had pro-squatting op-ed features published in the Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard, I'm intrigued by erstwhile squatting activist Piers Corbyn's planned talk at the 1968 and all that conference and bookfair on 10 May.

Piers now makes a living as a long-term weather forecaster and occasional climate-change denier, but for much of the 1970s and early 1980s he was one of the best-known squatting activists in London. His talk on 10 May is entitled 'The Squatting Movement in 1968' and the publicity is illustrated by a photo of squatters from Huntley Street, in central London.

It promises to be a short talk. The London Squatters Campaign may have been set up by a meeting of 15 people at the house of Ron Bailey on 18 November 1968, but the only organised 'squats' during that year involved three token occupations of empty buildings in the run-up to Christmas. Squatting didn't take off in the sense of people occupying empty properties to live in until the following year and it wasn't until February 1977 that the five blocks of flats in Huntley Street were occupied (they were evicted by 650 police in riot gear in July 1978).

Still, Piers is an old mate and I hope to catch up with him at the conference, if only to see whether he still carries around his trademark plastic carrier bag stuffed full of badly designed leaflets. I was a bit too young to be a '68er myself; my formative political years came later. But anything that has Piers, Hilary Wainwright and class warrior Ian Bone on the same bill has to be worth a look in.