Squatters take over west London
On 8 September 1946, property owners across England’s capital were in a state of panic as around 1,500 squatters descended on empty buildings across west London. It was the culmination of a year’s worth of squatting by families desperate for a home in postwar Britain.
After the end of World War II, the British housing market was in crisis. The war had halted the construction of new houses and thousands of homes and businesses had been damaged or destroyed beyond repair in the bombing raids of the Blitz. Many families still lived in cramped slums, far outdated for the modern age in which they were living. Families were moving to new areas for work, such as the steelworks in Scunthorpe, to find there was nowhere for them to live. A
