ABSTRACT
Squatting is largely absent from policy and academic debate and is rarely conceptualised, as a problem, as a symptom, or as a social or housing movement. Drawing on available literature about squatting in England immediately after the end of the Second World War,1 primary research examining squatting in London from 1968 through the 1970s,2 and primary research into squatting in three English case study locations in 2002,3 this chapter explicates the link between squatting and the housing policy context in which it exists.4 It shows that in each of these periods squatting provided a means through which individuals – in particular those excluded from housing consumption through traditional channels – responded to their positions of material need and inequality, rooted in those housing policies and practices of which unmet housing needs, disadvantage and exclusion are a consequence.
