CLASS DESCRIPTION

In urban centres across the UK, once-thriving pockets of grassroots LGBTQ+ and feminist activism have been all but eradicated, replaced with generic new-build apartments, artisanal bakeries, and craft beer pubs aplenty. These radical spaces may be barely perceptible today – either demolished, redeveloped, or gentrified beyond recognition – but in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist and queer squats and housing co-operatives provided the material and spatial infrastructures for homegrown community-building, political organising, and collective resistance.

From the late 1960s onward, derelict Victorian terraces scheduled for demolition in major cities like London, Glasgow and Manchester were reclaimed as communal homes for artists, activists, intellectuals and countercultural figures who, either by necessity or by choice, embraced collective living in the face of landlordism, years-long social housing waiting lists, and the heteropatriarchal curve of private home ownership. In these spaces, there was no distinct boundary between the personal and the political: in the course of a day, what was originally a dining room might serve as a banner-making workshop, a crèche, and an impromptu women’s centre. For lesbian feminists, marginalised within both the Women’s Liberation Movement and the broader gay rights movement, squats provided much-needed spaces to build their own communities on their own terms. In meting out domestic labour, caring duties and building maintenance equally, squatters and co-op tenants also forged new possibilities for reimagining conventional hierarchies of gender and the family.

Taking as its starting point the women-only squats that proliferated around East and Central London, this lecture will trace a longer history of feminist and queer housing struggles around the UK, locating collective housing arrangements as key sites of community organising. It will explore the social and political forces that turned these informal squats into legitimate, registered housing co-operatives in the 1980s and 1990s, and the afterlives of these co-operatives today. Drawing extensively from archival materials and the testimonies of women and queer people who choose to live collectively and intentionally today, this talk aims to connect intentional, collective housing to reproductive labour, grassroots educational campaigns, the abolition of the 'traditional' family, and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

Many DIY feminist housing spaces have long since been swept away by the aggressive landlordism and gentrification that now define our cityscapes – so where do their legacies reside? And how have some collective housing projects survived, and even thrived under late capitalism? This talk concludes with a consideration of the lessons to be taken from the history of queer and feminist communal living in Britain, including the radical possibilities and anticapitalist, abolitionist imaginaries that they represent.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Lucy Brownson is a researcher, feminist community organiser, and writer based in Sheffield. Taking Chatsworth House as its site of investigation, Lucy’s doctoral thesis explores the history of archival practices at the intersection of gender and class. She is a co-organiser of Sheffield Feminist Archive, a community archive documenting feminist histories and grassroots activism. Lucy works at UCL as a Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies. In the past she has worked as a project coordinator at the V&A Research Institute, where she lead a collaborative project exploring National Trust properties as sites of public history and public benefit. She has also previously undertaken research residencies at Glasgow Women’s Library and the British School at Rome.

Matilde Manicardi is an Italian-born cultural writer and arts professional based in London. She holds an MSc in media, communications & cultural studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she researched contemporary examples of intentional communal living in the UK and the role of archival mediation in reshaping social imaginaries around housing.

X: @lucy_brownson and @matildemanicar2

This is a recording of a live session hosted by The Feminist Lecture Program in May 2024. The reading list for the class can be found alongside this rental.

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