police van - outside gaff - sniffing ‘round for feed - pigs in clothes - still eat like pigs - still roll in mud - still takes her life - her parents see - her in every - blue light - pigs in clothes - are just pigs - even when they - drive a van - even when they - shot Chris - once saw one say - ‘I’m going to kill you’ - once heard one say - ‘I can break laws’ - pigs in clothes - are just that - even when they’re - inside gaff - even when you’re - in their van. - “Police Van”, Delilah

Pulling back the gate, going through to the old car park, knocking on the door- there’s an irony walking into a place that was once a public building, a bureaucratic, professional space, now swimming in spray paint, mural, fairy lights and colour. Ever since the government banned squatting in residential properties in 2012, squatters have been forced to take sites such as this, commercial, industrial buildings not designed for living. It is a reincarnated site. We go through a literal hole in the wall (made to connect parts of the building without water to parts with water), arrive in a kind of community space, filled with circus gear, musical instruments- a battered drumkit sits in the corner, juggling clubs litter the floor. From Blairite newbuild architecture comes evocative decoration and illustration, slogan and cartoon interfering with the walls. The whole place feels like an affront to the kind of grey, utilitarian emptiness these buildings used to communicate- migraine inducing strip lights replaced with warm, ornamented lamps; dull, soul crushing office spaces turned into bedrooms, cacophonies of personhood. 

Outside, a maker’s market is in town. Overpriced gin, tray bakes, second hand leather; the world as normal trundles on, the vague, dull excitement, an inoffensive misery of middle class trinkets. It’s not exactly a kind area to squat in; they’re encountering harassment and intimidation from residents on a regular basis. “When we’ve lived in previous buildings we didn’t have people trying to look in our windows as much, we didn’t have people knocking on-” “-pushing cameras throughout windows-” “ yeah, trying to get info as much- people just didn’t care because they had their own shit going on because they’re poor. Round here, people have a lot more time.” It’s an incredibly visible squat, on a main road, with plenty of footfall around it. They feel like something of an attraction, a novelty, a threat, “some kind of exhibition or spectacle,” like animals in a zoo. They describe the experience as “middle class fetishisation of the experience of squatting and by proxy, poverty,” like they’re something off TV. When someone threw a brick at their window, the assailant made it clear how they understood squatting; “they’d been watching videos of squatters on Youtube-” “Bailiff Shows-” “Can’t pay take it away,” these pieces of property mythology designed to turn poor people into scum, the butt of the joke, the deserving subject of violence.

In turn, they “turn it on its head… sometimes you go out for a walk… shouting down the street like “oh yes our dog ate my shit this morning, going on about scabies… people look at us like shit, so” why not- playing with perception, fucking with preconception. It’s not like they fit into the drab, middle aged tech start up/private school English teacher chic the area exudes. Razor and dye play as important a role in the rituals of home life as stove and washbasin, heads half shaved into pattern, horns, a different colour every week, clothes that have survived multiple moves in various states filled with pins and needles, holding the cloth together with sharp, caring devices. 

Hairdressers, Plumbers, Electricians

It’s a space that necessitates experimentation with self, body and building. Everyone there has some expertise in DIY- like some transmasc Malatestas, they’re plumbers, electricians, technicians, engineers. They come round to my house and point out everything that needs doing to it (that I have to ask my landlord to fix for me, who has no engagement with my home beyond paperwork and finance, who could do nothing, steal my deposit, all for £500, £600, £800 a month- a different precarity, a different battle in the same war). The water company (illegally) turns off their water, and so they go out there and fiddle about with the pipes till it turns back on. It’s a reimagining of work- work appears naturally out of life, as opposed to work being imposed upon the human. “It’s a nice headspace to not have to be working 8 hours a day or not working on things I don’t think do anything… Every day I’m thinking of the next thing I wanna do, next thing I wanna make.” Beyond rent, mortgage, wage, commute, nuclear family, so many of the things which bind and define life outside of the squat, relationships with work and love shift. 

Time is absorbed and overrun in other ways. The squat runs clothes swaps, food projects, a library, free parties, festivals, workshops. That’s on top of the day to day struggles of keeping a place like that going- where water is shut off, owners are constantly threatening eviction, police are lurking, surveilling, arresting. “There seems to be individual officers who have a personal vendetta against squatters… like when we got evicted from our last building there was a police officer who had previously come round and harassed everyone and way, way before when we had moved in he was there… and he was threatening to arrest everyone.” Police have stalked squatters going about their day as they leave their home, harassing, intimidating, detaining them. In a FOI request by The Lemming, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) confirmed they’d found “over 1,300 incidents… where the title, details or contact comments contains “Squat” over the past 5 years. Whilst this is unhelpfully imprecise from GMP, it does give us an idea of the scale of their operation against squatters- that’s five incidents a week on average.

Much of the work of the squat is survival and resistance (survival through resistance? resistance as survival? survival as resistance?). Whilst the lifestyle is romanticised as idyllic (or demonised as workshy), the truth is that often “we can’t even think about anything else apart from squatting because we’re just in this survival mode every day.” Time taken back from wage labour (and even then, some do work) is replaced by an intense battle against the forces of private property that demand this way of life be eradicated. The work it takes to turn a commercial building into a residential home is staggering. These things take their toll; “it’s a lot harder to find the energy to do things when you’ve got the police knocking at your door a lot or having the anxiety you’re going to get evicted or having to move from building to building.” These are the shackles that attempt to bind vision and life.

Not Gay as in Happy, but Queer as in Housing for All Trans People Now

About 25% of trans people have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, with 77% giving family rejection as a key reason for this. They’re one of the most vulnerable demographics for homelessness out of any protected characteristic. Issues with names and legal documents, with transphobic landlords, with barriers to employment, with disability- housing is one node in a nexus of violence which trans people exist within. They call themselves “a queer squatting crew in Greater Manchester,”- queer at the forefront. “At least everyone is questioning their gender-” “Even if they’re not changing their pronouns or they’re toying with being nonbinary for example they’re still signed up to gender nonconformity,” a people in shift, recognising their gender as a constant state of flux. Living here, the cognitive dissonance of living queer in a straight society is alleviated: “there’s no element of having to be confronted with a question about your identity, having to explain yourself… I don’t feel like I owe anyone explanations.” There’s a beauty and a bitterness to this; “Why is it always queer people who are forced into these situations?” A desire to live together and against the oppressive society around them, whilst simultaneously a resentment of the society which has forced them into this position. “We want stable housing but we want to squat politically- but we need both.” 

A squat is not an island, but it moves to a different drum to the surrounding society. “We have a rhythm of things that will naturally just happen kinda… you know how people live and what sort of time they’ll wake up and when they’ll go out and stuff so you can kinda plan your lives around people without really asking them.” Time is claustrophobically legalistic- how long they have left in their home, how long before they’re in court, how long it’ll take to sign off the eviction, how long the landlord will take to gather the bailiffs. “It’s just constant- you never feel settled it’s always waiting for the next thing to happen… a month ago we had our notice to quit from the council, and we’ve not heard anything since but it’s just- it’s just in the back of my mind of like at some point we’re gonna come home and there’s going to be a letter in the mail.” A state cannot tolerate a people living free on planet earth, that spit in the face of rent, wage labour, property, these dull pillars of power- “in the morning it’s like- which morning am I going to wake up to have really bad news.” In the short term, however, time is a patchwork of individual ebbs and flows, woven together- “I’d rather sit with my friends in a building than go get a job” they laugh. It’s a kind of simple anti-work statement that makes tabloid Britain squirm; and so what? “The things I do are feeding the people that I live with, which is a good type of work. We’ve been having fights over who cooks dinner- ‘I don’t want to step on your toes but I was thinking about cooking dinner tonight’,” they laugh. “Yeah, it’s really nice.” 

Revolt is the long term. “There’s a crackdown on poverty in general but then there’s the additional of us actively choosing to do something that is against the state- like taking a building. We’re not passive in the same way.” It’s threaded through their every day struggles, it’s a lens with which to understand the present which helps to build the future. The passivity, the powerlessness of poverty must be resisted; “To be homeless you have to just have being homeless done to you and you can’t do anything about it. So when there’s an empty building lying around and you’re homeless…” In Manchester growing homelessness is the result of many forces of the “rentier city”, as rented housing is on the rise and rent is inflating at an ever higher rate, whilst 33.1% of the properties fail to meet the decent home standard. We are expected to sit and cope. 

The “Nursery of Extremists”

There has been a coordinated effort to destroy the squatting movement in the UK. Police infiltrated and followed squatters’ rights activists through the latter half of the 20th century. For example, John Dines, a notorious undercover officer who had a two year intimate relationship with a woman whilst undercover “lived in at least two squats in Hackney, north London.” The police, in a 1974 report, called squats a “nursery of extremists.” When this all came out in the Spycops inquiries from 2014 onwards, it fractured the British political fringe, including the squats, still reeling from the criminalisation of residential squatting in 2012. Who can we trust? Friends, lovers, accomplices, fathers, were police undercover. The new generation, however, are rebuilding; “we were raised in a scene that was already reeling from that. There’s no before and after (spycops), this is just the world we’ve grown up in.” In some ways, it’s a reality they can live with, but it still has an undeniable presence; “at christmas we played- what’s it called- mafia? cops and anarchists- and it got really intense because the game is to question people and to- to make them believe you think they’re a cop and in our circle… people started crying, and had such a traumatic response to it. I don’t think you’re a cop, this is a game!” Nonetheless, for the most part, “I don’t have the fear of my friends being cops. I can’t live like that.” They describe other squats beginning in other parts of the country with the vivacity of a people in the midst of a new spring after a harsh winter.

It’s a heavily politicised life, but it’s also just life. “Some people definitely glamourise squatting,” and this fetishisation will always fall flat on its face when you enter the room. Life is radically different, counterculture even, but it isn’t alien, some fiction, some elsewhere. The struggle for squatters is the struggle for housing, for queer liberation, for rights to protest, right to roam, right to trespass; it’s also just another way of putting a roof over your head when you’re down and out. “I can’t rent because landlords won’t rent to me, because I’m disabled and I can’t work and even if I could rent I don’t have that much money to be going to a landlord.” To say that squatting is a political act is a misnomer; all housing is political. Squatting is politically subversive, that’s true enough; but rent trapping an entire generation is political, crashing the global economy with dodgy mortgages is political, council houses, the “right” to buy, are political. They’re also, like squatting, just another way people try to stay dry and warm.

Baseline Joy

The violent suppression of squatting, a network of bailiffs, courts, cops, politicians, papers, landlords and even communities, must end. As part of the solution to our housing crisis, squats must be supported and enabled to proliferate, spread, grow out. As long as buildings are kept empty, scarcity of housing will be an enforced reality, homelessness a thing imposed upon the people, not an inevitability of population growth or immigration, or a result of not building enough private, unaffordable housing. Squats are incredibly important to communities who rely on them to survive. “People have a lot of patience for each other and support each other and help each other find who they are. It feels really beautiful.” “I feel like I can trust everyone. I don’t think I’ll ever be out on the street or without food or anything like that- I trust everyone to look after each other. That brings me this baseline joy in life.” Squats are the infrastructure of the impoverished, disenfranchised, and radical. They are living works of art; in private property “you can’t paint on the walls”. As I leave the squatters to their sunny winter day, vibrant collages of colour and poetry, ridiculous, clever, evocative etchings release upon each surface. Each wall is an education. In the hubbub of the bland, inoffensive, expensive middle class society outside, poverty lives side by side with wealth. A squat challenges the normality of this.
Poverty is silenced to spare the wealthy the discomfort of facing the violence they perpetuate. Squatting refuses this attempt, with teeth.

Postscript

On my way home, I walked past a street blocked off by police vans. Coming closer, I realised it was outside a squat- and people were being dragged out of their home. Six squatters, from a separate group to the one I interviewed, were put in vans and driven away, their dogs barking in panic, some in floods of tears- “I don’t know what I’ve done”- some panfaced, saying nothing, giving nothing. They were all held under terrorism charges, allowing the police to hold them all for 36 hours, all being released without charges bar one, under unnecessarily strict bail conditions, leading many to presume it was
intimidation tactics. One, humiliatingly, had all their shoes stolen from them. I was chastised for standing there; police jeered at me “is this your home?”, laughing, as if it were a bit of fun, dragging people out of their home at night and arresting them for nothing. I met some of the other squatters; they told me they’d been forced to move on from the building I’d been invited in to speak with them in, a building they’d made beautiful that now stood empty once again.

Later, I came across a tiny zine the squat had made a while ago, adorned in bright crayon and illustration that would put The Lemming to shame. It involved stories of squatters working with local builders against United Utilities to get their water turned back on, a bouncer stealing a hunt sabber’s whip at gay village (“In a German accent, the Bouncer exclaimed “This isn’t a fetish night” before snatching it out of their poor, party craving hands”) an in depth investigative piece into whether their dog had shat in the toilet or not. It also detailed a birthday party/gig they’d put together; “the crowd responded as an amorphous mosh that sang along word for word, so much love in the room, topped off by an amazing set by DJ Girldick, + the hallway became a living climbing frame with people stacked to the ceiling, + will be a night I’ll always remember.” Fond memories woven through evictions and cop cars; silly love that refuses to die.