About the project
Led by Christine Wall, this project is part of ProBE’s history theme, and it received £1,000 seed funding from Architecture and Cities Research Fund 2016–2017.
London in the mid-1970s was home to around 30,000 squatters, many of them women. This unusual access to housing enabled radical experiments in collective living and this project examines one such community. Using oral histories of former members, contextualised with archive documents, photographs and plans, this project uncovers the experience of building, both literally and figuratively, a community, which lasted for over twenty years. It provides new insights into the origins of feminist architecture in London and wider processes of urban change.
Contact
For further information, email Prof Emerita Christine Wall at [email protected].
Outputs
- Wall, C. 2017. Sisterhood and Squatting in the 1970s: Feminism, Housing and Urban Change in Hackney. History Workshop Journal. 83 (1), pp. 79-97. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbx024
- Wall, C. 2017. “We don’t have leaders! We’re doing it ourselves!”: squatting, feminism and built environment activism in 1970s London. field: Journal. 7 (1), pp. 129-140.
- Public Lecture at Bishopsgate Institute titled, 'From gentlemen traders to feminist squatters: housing and urban change in London Fields 1830-1980', February 2018, by Christine Wall
- Lesbian History Group, 30th April, 2016, Sisterhood, Sawdust and Squatting: radical lesbian lives in 1970s Hackney talk by Christine Wall
- Sisterhood and squatting: London Fields in the 1970s and 80s, Conference Paper to Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference in memory of Raphael Samuels, July 2016.