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What Brick Lane’s squatters teach us about gentrification [1]
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Date: 2023-03
In the 1970s, hundreds of Bengali families in Spitalfields, east London, responded to discrimination and racism in housing and on the streets by forming a squatters’ movement and occupying empty homes.
Although Abdul Kadir had lived in London since 1957 and his father before him had worked on English ships, when he applied for social housing for his young family in the early 1970s, he was kept waiting for years. In the mid ’70s, desperate, he decided to take matters into his own hands: he broke in and squatted an empty flat on a council estate in Spitalfields.
Within minutes of entering the building, Kadir and his wife were pelted with bricks and rocks thrown through their windows. When the police eventually arrived, it was not to defend them against the violence, but to try and force them out – even though squatting was not a criminal offence at that point.
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Kadir remembers arguing back: “Where have I got to go to? If you gave me somewhere, we wouldn’t need to do this. Until I have somewhere else, I have to stay here.” He and his wife refused to be moved.
At the time, ideas in the UK around housing, belonging and access to social resources were deeply and overtly racialised. Popular and political narratives erased the long history of the Bengali community in east London, instead depicting them as alien, inferior and encroachers on white territory. Local government housing rules disadvantaged Bengali applicants, while housing officers used their discretion to direct any Bengalis offered a tenancy to the worst estates.
The fight for homes that started with squatting by a few individual families snowballed into a wider movement when Black Power activists from the Race Today anti-racist collective decided to add their support. Activists such as Darcus Howe, Farrukh Dhondy and Mala Sen brought their campaigning and organising expertise and helped Bengali (and white) squatters in the area to form the Bengali Housing Action Group (BHAG).
“We had to do something together for the Bangladeshi community,” says Khosru Miah, a former squatter now in his seventies. Like many others, Miah connected his fight for housing to the wider struggles of migrants and the Black working class in the UK.
The movement that developed was not just about securing a ‘home’ in the domestic sense, but establishing a sense of safety and belonging. As Bengali squatter Helal Abbas explains, vigilante patrols were set up to resist the National Front, reacting to police indifference with “low-level guerilla warfare”.
The Greater London Council, one of the main housing providers in Tower Hamlets, eventually capitulated to the squatters’ demands following a campaign by the BHAG. By the end of 1978, an amnesty was announced: Squatters were either rehoused or given tenancies in the properties they had occupied. For most Bengali migrants there was a sense that their ambition to make home had been won.
Problems of gentrification
Almost 50 years later, many of that same community face another, less tangible pressure. The stealthy violence of gentrification is not new, but in the wake of Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis, the inequalities are hard to disguise. The displacement of working-class and minority ethnic communities feels almost unswervable.
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