Preliminary Programme

In October 1953 Belfast Corporation established an inquiry into the allocation of council houses. The Inquiry was chaired by Bradley McCall QC. He called 82 witnesses and the Inquiry sat for 27 days. The shortage of adequate public housing had been well known since at least the 1930s and the German air-raid of 1941 exacerbated the issue. The Inquiry raised issues relating to the efficacy of the Corporation's housing policy; the conduct of officials in the housing and estates department; and the conduct of members of the medical profession. At the centre of a corruption ring sat Ann Copeland whose string of contacts enabled her to procure bribes for securing a council house. The falsification of medical certificates signified collusion with the medical profession. The Inquiry reveals that the housing crisis of the 1950s provided an opportunity for renewed ethnic-religious sorting in the housing market. Was this scam an attempt to avoid the consequences of another religious riot so that people could be with their own 'persuasion'? The reaction of the City Corporation was extreme revealing a strident Protestant patriarchy in response to the wrong doing of a network of women orhanised by a resourceful leader. (Show less)

This paper presents testimonies from an oral history project aiming to record the memories of women who squatted and created a vibrant community of over a hundred women in Hackney throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was part of the wider historical phenomenon of the London squatting movement, which by the mid-70s was estimated at over 30,000 people. The majority of squats were located in substandard housing owned by local authorities and earmarked either for demolition or rehabilitation, but which became vacant during prolonged planning and funding negotiations. Many houses were inhabited and restored by women and this unusual access to housing enabled radical experiments in collective living and alternative urban communities. Extracts from oral recordings reveal not only a multiplicity of views and memories of the intensity of political arguments around how to live as a lesbian and feminist, but also the desperate need for housing caused by the failure of both private rented and public sector in providing homes for young lesbian women and lesbian mothers. Photographs and maps were integral to the interviews as a focus for recalling houses, some of which are now demolished and internal domestic spaces that no longer exist.
However this is not merely a descriptive account, for all of us as oral history practitioners working within our own communities there are particular problems, as well as benefits, that arise in the oral history encounter. In this case revisiting streets once squatted, now gentrified and a cohort of former squatters after thirty years resulted in an acute awareness of intersubjectivity, the creation of singular and collective identities through narrative, and the transient but powerful interactions of the oral history interview. (Show less)