Photographs of 1970s East London Squatters Found After 50 Years

 

For two years in the 1970s, Joyce Edwards (1925-2024) took pictures of the everyday life inside London squats. After she died in 2003, her friend Derek Smith found the rolls of film. He realised that many of the people in Joyce’s photos were still living on the same streets in East London close to Victoria Park. Smith contacted animator and filmmaker Pete Bishop, a housing co-op member since 1978.

Working with the arts charity Four Corners, they secured National Lottery Heritage Fund support for an oral history project, a film, and an exhibition.

 

Joyce began taking pictures in her own North London property on Haverstock Hill that runs from Hampstead to Chalk Farm in Camden, capturing the tenants that included British actor and director Henry Woolf and Polish actor Vladek Sheybal (From Russia with Love, Smiley’s People).

She then went to east London, towards Bethnal Green, where three streets known as ‘The Triangle’ had been left empty after plans for a major motorway – one of the roads that would have destroyed London – were abandoned.

 

The original Triangle squatters went on to form the Grand Union Housing Co-operative, persuading the Greater London Council to allow them to restore their homes and purchase the freeholds of 63 properties in 1981. The community continues today.

 

 “The co-op survives because of the involvement of the members, because we are fully mutual and, crucially, because our 1981 constitution includes a no right to buy clause.”

– Pete Bishop

 

 

Joyce Edwards: A Story of Squatters opens at Four Corners in Bethnal Green on Friday 13 February and runs until Saturday 20 March.