Lost lesbian spaces: memories of an urban community in 1970s London

This paper uses testimonies from an oral history project aiming to record the memories of women who squatted and created a small community of over a hundred women in Hackney throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was part of the wider historical phenonomen of the London squatting movement, which by the mid-70s was estimated at over 30,000 people. The majority of squats were located in substandard housing owned by local authorities and earmarked either for demolition or rehabilitation, but which became vacant during prolonged planning and funding negotiations. Many houses were inhabited and restored by women and this unusual access to housing enabled radical experiments in collective living and alternative urban communities. This paper uses women’s testimonies to reveal not only a multiplicity of views and memories of the intensity of political arguments around how to live as a lesbian and feminist, but also the desperate need for housing caused by the failure of both private rented and public sector in providing homes for young lesbian women and lesbian mothers. However this is not merely a descriptive account, for all of us as oral history practitioners working within our own communities there are particular problems, as well as benefits, that arise in the oral history encounter. In this case revisiting streets once squatted, now gentrified and a cohort of former squatters after thirty years creates an acute awareness of intersubjectivity, the creation of singular and collective identities through narrative, and the transient but powerful interactions of the oral history interview