The Rastafarian singer had played football in the Kennington street back in the 1970s, one of thousands of visitors who passed through the squat before its demolition in 2005 through 2007.
“It was very known; it had thousands of people going through it over the years,” said Wiedel, a photojournalist who documented the squat’s final years. “They [the squatters] formed a really extraordinary community, and a refuge in many ways.”
Squatting – occupying empty properties without the owner’s consent – was huge in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, an estimated 50,000 squatters lived in England and Wales, with 30,000 in the capital alone.
It has been incrementally criminalised ever since. In 2012, it was banned entirely.
Wiedel’s photographs, which will be published in a new book in…
