In England and Wales, squatting the occupation of a vacant property without the owner's consent has been progressively criminalised since the 1970s. The relative toleration accorded by a common law tradition in which the practice was unlawful but not criminal, was eroded in the wake of a wave of squatting that in the 1970s crested in London. At the end of that decade, there were estimated to be 50,000 squatters in England and Wales, with 30,000 in the capital.

Squatters typically occupied local council owned housing which lay empty awaiting demolition and redevelopment. Having a statutory duty under the 1948 National Assistance Act to house homeless persons, councils were at times willing to tolerate these occupations on a temporary, licensed, basis. On rarer occasions, squatters were able to persuade the authorities to recognise them as a housing association or cooperative with a legitimate claim to permanent accommodation.

There was a much smaller incidence, in London, of organised groups squatting in privately owned city-centre properties. The greater publicity surrounding these higher-profile occupations contributed to an increasingly hostile coverage of squatting in the media focused on left-wing politics, alternative life-styles and drug-taking. Squatting was to draw a range of radical and marginalised groups stigmatised by the tabloid press, including proponents of free collectives, women's liberation, black empowerment, and gay rights.

From the late 1970s, coinciding with a retreat from post-war commitments to public housing, the law surrounding squatting began to tighten. In 1977, the Criminal Law Act defined conditions in which trespass, which has been a tort (that is, a matter for redress in a civil proceeding), could be considered criminal. These were broadened by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to include refusal to leave after being ordered to do so by a person entitled to occupation. Finally, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 made squatting in residential property, in itself, an offence subject to a penalty of up to 6 months in prison, a £5,000 fine or both.

Within this constrictive legal framework, squatting in the 21st century, tends to involve protest actions or pop-up venues in non-residential property where trespass remains a largely civil matter.

Early history

From the 14th century in England and, following its incorporation into the English realm, from the 16th century in Wales, enclosure forced the displaced rural poor onto wasteland and commons. They relied on a customary belief that a shelter erected overnight (a "one-night house" or Tŷ unnos in Wales) gave them a right to undisturbed possession. The Forcible Entry Act of 1381, a statute still cited by squatters to oppose or delay eviction in the 1970s, did establish a presumption against forcible repossession save in the exercise of a court order.

In 1649, at the outset of the Civil War, Gerrard Winstanley and others calling themselves the True Levellers occupied disused common land at St George's Hill, Weybridge in Surrey, and cultivated it collectively. They hoped that the action would inspire other poor people to defy enclosure and follow their lead. In The Law of Freedom (1652), Winstanley famously declared: "the poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the land as the richest man".

Squatting by the rural poor on what was recognised locally as common or waste land continued through to the end of the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s, Herefordshire's commons hosted almost a hundred settlements comprising ten or more dwellings. Commons and wasteland also accommodated workers in mines, ironwork and manufacture. In areas like the Forest of Dean and what became known as the Black Country and the Potteries, their informal settlements served as "nuclei" for new industrial centres.

After the First World War this pattern of self-built housing on marginal land was resumed by ex-servicemen and their families. On plotlands in the English southeast, chalets and sheds were transformed into more permanent accommodation. Although not strictly squatting, as occupiers were paying at least a nominal fee for their site, they fell afoul of tightening local planning bye-laws.

Post World War Two Urban squatting first becomes a major phenomenon in the wake of World War II. Memory of the failure of the Conservative-led coalition after the First World War to deliver on the promise of "homes fit for heroes" may have contributed to Labour's 1945 electoral landslide. But with the housing shortage rendered acute by the destruction of stock in the Blitz, it also encouraged organised direct action.Hinton, James (1988). "Self-help and Socialism The Squatters’ Movement of 1946", History Workshop Journal 25, 100–26.

In July 1945, Time magazine credited a "bowler-hatted chimney sweep, Harry Cowley," with blowing "the lid off Britain's housing problem". In Brighton, at the head of 400 self-styled Vigilantes he moved families of servicemen into three empty houses. As military camps were decommissioned, the example was followed by families across the country.Hinton, J. 'Self-help and Socialism The Squatters' Movement of 1946' in History Workshop Journal (1988) 25(1): 100–126. In October 1946, Aneurin Bevan, the Minister for Health and Housing, reported to the House of Commons that 1,038 camps in England and Wales were occupied by 39,535 people. But unwilling, as he saw it, to divert resources from new-build housing, he refused squatter demands to help patch up the Nissen Huts and improve services.

There was public sympathy. In August 1946, Clementine Churchill, wife of the ex-Prime Minister, protested that the "people are referred to by the ungraceful term 'squatters'" were "respectable citizens whose only desire is to have a home". A month later, in a "Great Sunday Squat" organised by members of the Communist Party, over 100 families assisted by the Women's Voluntary Service and, in some case, by police officers, occupied an hotel and flats at various locations in central London. Five of the leaders were arrested for conspiracy but were merely bound over to good behaviour. The squatters left the properties but did receive temporary accommodation.

Responding to the housing crisis, in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 the Labour government gave local authorities wide-ranging compulsory purchase and planning powers and, scrapping Public Assistance Institutions (a last vestige of the old workhouse system), in Part III of the National Assistance Act (1948) made it their statutory duty to house the homeless.Means, Robin; Smith, Randall (1985), The Development of Welfare Services for Elderly People, Routledge, p. 155. By the mid-1950s the Conservatives could boast an unprecedented 300,000 house completions a year, yet demand continued to outstrip supply and by the end of the decade funding for new developments had slowed.

1960s

The campaign for "family housing" In the sixties, the publication of reports like the Milner-Holland survey on London's housing in 1965, TV dramas like Cathy Come Home (first broadcast in 1966) and the formation of Shelter, a national charity campaigning on housing, helped prepare public opinion for actions that might directly challenge the seeming complacency of the authorities. In November 1968, a group of homeless families and of anarchists, some with experience of direct action in the campaign for nuclear disarmament, launched the London Squatters Campaign "for family housing". This was against a background of the newly established Greater London Council (GLC) leading the city's borough councils in compulsorily purchasing aging private tenements which might then lie empty for years while plans were brought forward to redevelop the sites for new public housing.The campaign's first major test was the occupation of 17 houses in the east London borough of Redbridge. After facing down the forceful efforts of private bailiffs, and with media coverage playing "a major part", the families and their supporters, persuaded the council to concede the use of empty properties under licence.The local authority had had to consider the costs not only of getting squatters out, but also of then having to provide those eligible for homelessness support with temporary accommodation in bed-and-breakfast hotels.

In the same year, 1969, Rastafarians joined in occupying a street of derelict houses in Kennington, south London, St Agnes Place. A High Court injunction prevented the demolition and, after an attempted eviction in 1974, the street was run as a housing cooperative. The squatted street featured a Rastafari temple (visited on occasion during the 1970s by Bob Marley), and a pirate radio station Rasta FM (which was raided by Ofcom in October 2005). Lambeth London Borough Council did not obtain an eviction order for "London's longest running squat" until 2005. Demolition was completed in 2007.

The "hippie menace" What had seemed to be a "tide of public opinion .. . firmly in favour of squatters in Redbridge" (there was sympathetic coverage by the Sunday Times, Thames Television and the BBC), began to turn with the publicity a surrounding the occupation of a number of privately owned buildings in central London. In September 1969, the takeover of 144 Piccadilly, an empty mansion at Hyde Park Corner, by the London Street Commune, triggered an "open season for hippie-hunting and squatter-bashing in the press". Under the front page heading "HIPPIE THUGS: THE SORDID TRUTH", The People reported "drug taking, couples making love while others look on, rule by heavy mob armed with iron bars, foul language, filth and stench". The Times warned of Molotov cocktails being manufactured’ in preparation for a long siege. In the event, after seeing off an assault by Skinheads, "the Dilly dossers" were evicted with little incident.Police storm squat in Piccadilly News On This Day 21 September 1969

1969 had also seen the much quieter occupation by a small group of local anarchists of an hotel on Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham. In its one year of existence, 1970 the Eel Pie Island Commune was the UK's largest "hippie commune". 1970s

"Not a movement"

In 1973, Ron Bailey published The Squatters (Penguin) in which he described what he and other housing activists insisted was "the basic human reason why squatters occupy empty property and challenge the housing authorities".[Temporary] accommodation and hostels were overcrowded, under-funded, and generally in poor condition . . . Welfare departments used the threat of eviction or taking children into care in order to discipline such shelters, booting occupants onto the streets during the day, placing bars on the windows and locking doors at night, as well as refusing husbands and fathers permission to visit. By 1971, there were in excess of 21,000 people living in such conditions, in addition to 1.8m families living in accommodation classified ‘unfit for human habitation’; 3m families living in slums; and 2m families living in accommodation classed as ‘badly in need of repair’.Facing rising court costs when evicting squatters, local housing departments would gut their empty properties, rendering them uninhabitable by pouring concrete into toilets and sinks or smashing the ceilings and staircases. In London, however, it was the assessment of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch in 1976 that the local authorities generally ignored squatters unless eviction was pending, and that they provided "no real channels to help wean people away from the field". The Advisory Service for Squatters reported that they were getting referrals from social services, citizen advice bureaux, and even the police. Squatters recall Hackney Council inviting them to occupy "hard to let" flats.