by Oren Harman
Life among the destitute, as the “Monthly Message” of the London Healing Mission newsletter admitted, was “certainly never dull.”20 There was an alcoholic woman beater whose partner George had hid from him and who was demanding to know where she was. Increasingly he would come around the Galton, insisting to see George, and, when refused entry by the guard, would yell from the pavement up to his office. George refused to divulge the woman’s whereabouts and soon was keeping his own whereabouts secret, too. “The reason for the secrecy,” he explained to Kathleen after half apologizing for smoking the reefer,
is mainly one very difficult man who has been coming around where I work to look for me and causing trouble. A week ago Monday he pissed publically on the front steps of the genetics building, smashed a bicycle lamp, scattered the contents of some student’s satchel around, and shouted his best obscenities.21
The people he was living among and helping weren’t always as friendly as he was, but, having been enveloped in a halo of serenity, George wouldn’t allow this to dampen his mood. “I expect that one cover-illustrated article in Nature compensates for one urination at the front entrance to the building,” he joked to Kathleen, his sense of humor still very much alive.
The administrators at the Galton weren’t happy about the down-and-outs who were showing up, still less for their urinations and assaults on students. Late in the fall, George had met a young IBM programmer from America at the Russell Square Underground Station who turned out to share his liking for Proust plus his total lack of sense of direction and great inability in pronouncing unfamiliar names. Excited, George took him back to his office and they spent the evening talking about Proust and computer programming. As it happened, the young American was wearing blue jeans, leather boots, a green poncho, and had about a three-day stubble. Wary of George’s exploits, the beadle immediately pegged him as an alcoholic and pressured Harry Harris into introducing a new rule against late-night and weekend working without special permission. CABS tried to help by sneaking George a key to the statistics library, but he was discovered. Soon he was no longer coming in to his office at UCL. Too quickly his colleagues at the department were losing contact with him. Most thought he had gone off the deep end. “He certainly flipped,” one of them recalled.22
Then, in mid-November, Al Somit arrived in London for a visit. The UCL photo may have made George look healthy and chipper, but that was only a head shot and after a rare shower to boot; the professional photographer hired by the Galton had obviously done some magic. In reality things were very different. Al hadn’t seen George for about eight years and was dismayed and appalled at what he now found: He’d first met him in the weight room at the University of Chicago, offbeat perhaps but handsome and muscular and hard; now George was as sinewy and gaunt as an old man, the spring in his step all but vanished. He was grungy and oily and shabbily dressed, his teeth were beginning to rot, his outgrown hair was as brittle as hay, his fingers yellow from smoking. They joked together like in the old times at the co-op before Al shifted, inevitably, to a more serious tone: “I’m not going to give you money for the new pair of shoes you obviously need unless you promise not to give it to these two leeches,” he said to him in a coffee shop, eyeballing two alcoholics who had been on George’s tail. George thanked him but said he couldn’t make such a promise, and that no amount of convincing would help. It was the same old George, he thought, always contrary, always at the extreme. Holding his hand out with a smile to say good-bye, Al walked away from his old friend with the pound notes still deep in his pocket.23
“It was nice to see you again though, in all honesty, I think I would have preferred finding you in somewhat other circumstances,” he wrote upon his return to Buffalo, suddenly feeling worried and regretful.
It occurred to me, as I reflected on our discussion, that you may be confusing the notion of serving your fellow man with loving your fellow man. If the former, surely there are more effective ways than the one which you have adopted.24
Then he added, with a candor far removed from their usual wisecracking: “The latter may, in fact, be quite beyond your capacity—or mine.”
When he left their meeting, George literally had nowhere to go. It was cold out. At Euston Station he met an alcoholic who told him about the headquarters of the Tolmers Village Association, just down the road. The address was 102 Drummond Street, and, the man said, it was one of the few places around with a hot bath.
The Tolmers Village Association had been born in the summer of 1973, the fruit of community action to help save the neighborhood from Stock Conversion, a property developing company, and its owner, Mr. Joe Levy. Levy had become rich in the sixties, having obtained planning permission to build offices on a one-acre site on the corner of Euston and Hampstead roads in Camden. Demolition began in 1963, and within a short few years the run-down shops and houses west of Hampstead Road had all been bulldozed and replaced by “millions of pounds worth of windswept glass, concrete and steel, full to the brim with office workers.” The first of the big property bonanzas, the Euston Centre whetted Levy’s appetite. And as the conscientious members of the Tolmers Square Tenants Association were busy fighting in the Camden Council for the tenants down the road who were being displaced by the new massive high-rise tower, Levy and Stock Conversion were buying up their houses, literally under their noses, to do to Tolmers Square what they had done with Euston Centre.25
Levy hadn’t gotten rich because he was lucky, and now the same acute developer’s nose had led him once again to a practically assured gold mine. Tolmers Square had originally been built in the nineteenth century for the middle class, an almost complete, oblong circle of dark brick four-tiered Victorian terraced houses surrounding a church. Soon, however, it was taken over by the working classes, and when the main-line terminals of St. Pancras and Euston displaced thousands of residents toward the end of the nineteenth century, overcrowding and prostitution turned the area into one of London’s worst residential slums. Heavy bombing during World War II, though, combined with rising health standards and—with the expansion of Euston Station—the encroachment of industry, commerce and offices, led to a population drop from an 1870s level of more than five thousand to just above one thousand in 1970. It was then that the Tory government attempted to stimulate the economy by letting the bank rate fall from 8 precent to less than 5 percent, resulting in a flood of capital into property. By the beginning of 1973 the market valuation of property companies in Britain was £3.6 billion, more than the entire gold and dollar reserves of the United Kingdom. With its run-down porticos and leaky pipes, Tolmers Square had little present value, but Levy’s nose didn’t fail him: Just half a mile to the north of Oxford Street, with Soho and the theater district just beyond, east of fashionable Primrose Hill, and only a few minutes walk from Regent’s Park, Tolmers Square and its North Gower, Drummond, and Euston Street environs would fetch at least three times the rent for office rather than residential space, and considerably higher than for office space in other parts of London. It was a speculator’s jackpot.26
But if the population had dwindled, there were still people living in the neighborhood. Attracted by the cheap rents and proximity of employment, besides a core of longtime English working-class homeowners, a constantly changing population from many nationalities had turned Tolmers Square into a colorful pageant. There were Cypriots and Maltese, Irish, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Ceylonese. The Italians were especially proud that the former resident of 187 North Gower Street, Giuseppe “the Patriot” Mazzini, had once lived there; the Muslim Asians were proud of the newly built mosque, and the Indians were proud of the five Indian restaurants and the neighborhood’s new nickname, “Little India.” There were chickens in some small backyards, pecking beside the many outhouses. There were old Georgian terraces and quaint Victorian pubs. Amid the tumult and hustle and bustle of Euston Road and the station, Tolmers had sewed the human patchwork into a living community. “It was a place of atmosphere, a
lways alive,” one resident remembered. “Everyone knew each other.”27
Except that no one was properly equipped to deal with the below-the-belt tactics of the wily new developers. By 1973 Stock Conversion had bought up almost five of the twelve-acre environs, a swath that came to be known as “Levy triangle.” The overall strategy for future purchases, the boss determined, could be summed up in one word: neglect. With no particular reason to rush, since every passing day only served to raise the value, Levy enacted a deliberate policy of leaving his properties to decay. When a pipe burst or a terrace cracked, Stock Conversion–employed handymen and builders were instructed to botch repairs, and in any case not to spend more than £5, lest “the boss would kill me.” That the company’s net tangible assets stood at £62 million at the time was of no consequence; soon, enough demoralized tenants would leave to allow Levy to begin carrying out his plan. A few house collapses aided in the psychological warfare. Other abandoned properties were summarily boarded up, and before long many began to stud the square. What had once been a thriving piece of London was quickly turning into a decaying shell: More than fifty houses and a number of commercial buildings had been demolished, more than 10 percent of the land lay vacant, and a growing number of homes and shops were in varying stages of dereliction. Vandalism and rot soon followed; an empty shop on Drummond Street was nicknamed the “the pet shop” because people could watch rats playing behind the glass. The population had been cut by almost half; those remaining included a high proportion of pensioners, immigrants, and the poor. A council report from from the end of 1973 found that of the 213 tenancies in the development area, 30 percent had no access to a cooker with an oven, 70 percent had no access to a sink with hot and cold water, 57 percent had no access to a bath, and 79 percent shared a WC. Everything was going according to plan: “Anyone who observes a beatific smile playing over the features of Mr. Joe Levy of Stock Conversion,” Private Eye reported, “may be sure that what is occupying his mind is not the recent disappointments over plans to knock down three streets near Piccadilly, but the two magic words ‘Tolmers Square.’”28
But if private interest was trampling community living, if this was some kind of twisted revenge against an imagined tragedy of the commons, not everyone was going to stand idly by. Once again, as in T. H. Huxley’s day, the winds of reform blew from “the godless institution of Gower Street.” The School of Environmental Studies was the new name of the faculty housing the old architecture department, and student life at UCL was still spinning from May 1968 and the residual counterculture of the sixties. Passing Dan the beadle, uniformed bastion of the college traditions at the entrance in the corner of the quadrangle, one entered a wide hallway daubed with revolutionary graffiti:
THE TYGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN
THE HORSES OF INSTRUCTION
(William Blake)
PROPERTY IS THEFT
(Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
SOULS BROUGHT AND SOILED
(anon.)
The first year curriculum included semiology, social history, Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. In short, though most of the students were only dimly aware of it, the dominant intellectual tone was antiestablishment neo-Marxism. And so, when a group of students in May 1973 embarked on a five-week planning project, it was only natural that they chose adjacent Tolmers Square. After all, they wanted to be involved in “reality,” to break down the barriers between academe and the populace. The neighborhood was in flux, and yet the local council seemed to know next to nothing about the people who lived and worked there, or, in all honesty, to care. The students were outraged: “Unless Camden’s planners can show that the redevelopment of Tolmers Square will have advantages for the people who live and work there at present, as well as those who might live there in the future, they should reconsider their plans,” they wrote in their survey. “Merely satisfying property speculators is not good enough.”29
Just before leaving for their summer vacation, they held a meeting in an office on North Gower Street. A community town planner and a councillor were invited, and joined nine neighborhood locals—a couple who ran a geological information center, two shopkeepers, and five tenants—in agreeing that some form of opposition had to be mounted against the council’s pro-Levy proposals. Before long membership had grown to two hundred, and a group of students had started a community newspaper, the Tolmers News. The Tolmers Village Association (TVA) had come into being. Then, in October 1973, the association took over a shop on the first floor of 102 Drummond Street, turning it into the effective headquarters of the TVA. A local artist designed a letterhead, a rubber stamp, and painted a geranium on the window. It was there, four weeks before Christmas 1973, that George showed up asking for a bath.30
Whether it was his profoundly gentle sad eyes, his worn-out green cord jacket, straggly sandy hair and beard, or the fact that he mentioned that he worked on genetics at UCL, the good people at 102 Drummond invited him to stay. There was an empty room up two flights of stairs, the third-year architecture student, Ches Chesney, told him. Ches and his friends Tim Davies and Carla Drayton were squatting in the room below, and wouldn’t at all mind George’s company.31
He hardly spoke and was exceedingly retiring. They knew nothing of his background, and nothing of his present. At the very headquarters of a community battle against the interests of a selfish millionaire and his minions, no one had a clue that the strange middle-aged American had authored the equation that specified the exact mathematical conditions under which the interest of the group trumps the interests of individuals. What they did know was that he loved taking long, hot tubs, using dishwashing liquid to make bubble baths. Paul Nicholson, a first-year architecture student, remembered seeing George only on occasion, coming down from his room to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, “a flicker of a faint distracted smile passing over his pale features.”32
Squatting, in fact, had become a major part of the battle against Mr. Levy, not to mention a national phenomenon. In London there were close to 30,000 squatters who had taken matters into their own hands: 12,000 people living in temporary hostels added to 200,000 on council waiting lists while 100,000 houses lay empty meant that the housing crisis was real. In Camden alone close to 5,000 dwellings lay unused, an increase of nearly 150 percent in a just a decade. The population in and around Tolmers Square had dwindled significantly owing to Stock Conversion’s policy of neglect, and the remaining tenants were demoralized and weak. Squatters, the people of the TVA soon grasped, could bring with them new energy to fight the battle.33
In the beginning it was the winos who climbed through windows and broke through doors, finding refuge in often dilapidated abodes. But as the social movement grew, more and more activists found themselves doing the same: students, community organizers, Marxists, anarchists. There were artists, too, and drifters; young and old, men and women, families with toddlers, opportunists and ideologues. Of the 180 squatters, 16 were white-collar workers, 12 manual laborers, 12 skilled laborers, 13 artists, 11 children, 4 bakers, 3 travelers, 2 pensioners, 8 housewives, 8 teachers, 25 unemployed, 40 students, and 6 “unknowns.” Even the daughter of the celebrated pop art/technophile–inflected professor of architectural history, Peter Reyner Banham from UCL, had joined a squat on Euston Street, a fact that made an impression on his reverential students at the TVA.34
The conditions in most squats were difficult. Water had to be carried from nearby taps in buckets, lighting was provided by paraffin and candles, and open fires were the only form of heating. Besides the outhouses the “superloos” at Euston Station or the ones at the university provided necessary outlets. But a new spirit had come to the neighborhood.
To Squat or not to Squat
That is the question.
The slings and arrows of outrageous speculation
Or taking courage ’gainst a sea of troubles, end them;
To sleep perchance to dream
Of plans existent
and plans yet to come
Conversions dream’d of to improve our Stock
And contracts social which with conscience limned
Shall bring us peace that we may have a home
—From J.S. with apologies to W.S.
(Tolmers News, No. 15)
Soon roofs were being repaired, windows were being painted, bricks mended, even flower plants installed. A local furniture store chipped in, providing free secondhand sofas, tables, and chairs. A fruit and vegetable co-op was set up in the basement of Drummond 117–119; a print shop at Tolmers 19; a motorbike repair shop in the adjacent house. A big carnival with inflatable stalls; a theater show titled Seeing It All Come Down, about property speculation; a steel band, Indian food, and a tug-o-war, enlivened the square in the summer. Derelict houses were turning into homes. And Tolmers Square, once again, was becoming a community.
Which is why when George arrived one day at 102 Drummond with a rather raucous and intimidating redhead walking on one leg, no one objected that he join the squat as George’s roommate. Soon Ches, Paul, Tim, and Carla learned that the man’s name was Peg Leg Pete; it was the same Peg Leg Pete who had stayed with George at Little Titchfield, and whom he now ran into again in Soho Square. Paul remembered the occasion:
They seemed from the first sight of them together the most unlikely companions—Peter being as loud and profane as George was quiet and studious. A battered wide brimmed hat hung down his back attached to a cord around his neck. He was wearing threadbare donkey jacket, greasy jumper and open necked shirt and a pair of dirty brown canvas trousers. A crutch lay propped against the wall behind him, and one of his legs was missing below the knee. He drank frequently from a bottle of cider, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before squeezing some blues from a harmonica or speaking with some fervour about Leadbelly. From time to time he reached for a tin containing a quantity of stale tobacco accumulated from butts retrieved from the pavements, and rolled a cigarette. Hands and stubble beard orange streaked with the stain of nicotine and tar.35