When hippy squatters took over a multi-million pound Piccadilly mansion

It was the summer of ’69, and just like the Bryan Adams song, Richie Garnder, 17, thought the summer would last forever.

Richie was a hippy. That counter-culture of mushroom-munching, ‘peace not war’, shower-avoiding people – at least, to the tabloids.

The busker and musician spent the summer squatting at derelict buildings on Endell Street and Broad Court in central London. He and his fellow occupiers were among the founding members of the London Street Commune.

But Richie, now 72, way prefers being called a ‘freak’, a word not too far off from what he was called when he and hundreds more hunkered at the long-empty mansion, 144 Piccadilly, on Hyde Park Corner for nearly a week that September.

‘Life in 144 was busy for us,’ Richie said of the six-day occupation that ended within minutes after dozens of officers raided it on September 21, 1969.

‘We had daily supplies delivered from the one film company we let inside. Many newspaper interviews, although we refused to speak to The Sun, News of The World or The People.

‘Planning meetings too, usually around breakfast time. Also dealing with an increasing number of runaways who had heard of our squat. Also, for us who actually lived on “the Dilly”, the need to make our daily living. In my case busking.’

A squatter is someone who occupies an uninhabited building unlawfully. For years after World War Two, it was one of the few options some people had to have a roof over their heads. Many homes had been damaged during the war, while some parts of London were ghost towns. Flats, estates and hotels sat empty as owners waited for their value to spike, even as homelessness rates rose.

Enter the London Street Commune. Looking at the post-war squatters’ playbook for inspiration, a 20-strong group started squatting around Piccadilly Circus, London’s well-heeled business district, in 1967.

‘We formed the London Street Commune to initially empower ourselves against what we saw as police harassment and tabloid accusations,’ Richie said.

The commune was less a movement than a loose network of, hippies, misfits, ‘freaks’, unsheltered people, revolutionaries, anarchists, fed-up youth, young offenders, runaways, sex workers and sympathisers or all of the above who believed that homelessness, funnily enough, is not a good thing, especially in a place like Piccadilly. And a gigantic mansion standing empty captured that.

Hundreds moved into 114 Piccadilly after the commune broke in, barricaded the doors and jerry-rigged a bridge over the dry moat around the building.

They rolled out beds and banners, hung out in the ballrooms and smoked weed in the servant’s quarters. Life was good in ‘Hippydilly’, a place packed with ‘drop-outs’, ‘scroungers’ and ‘hell-raisers’, as newsreel outlet Pathé News put it.

Chris Faiers, a now 76-year-old poet who wrote about his day-long stay in 144 for his memoir, Eel Pie Island Dharma, said that ‘the Squat’ had some rather unlikely members; the Hell’s Angels (HA), the club of leather-clad, Harley-Davidson motorcycle-riding outlaws and bike enthusiasts.

‘There were bikers wearing HA patches in the 144 Squat, and over the years I’ve bragged once or twice that I fought alongside the UK Angels in the Squat,’ Chris, a Canadian living in the rural Ontario village Marmora, said. ‘I don’t think anyone considers the HA a progressive force decades later – more the pity! ‘

John Bernard, a 72-year-old now living in Spain, was an 18-year-old messenger boy working for the Sunday People newspaper during the 144 squat. While in the office, he spotted a journalist trying to ‘disguise himself as a hippy’, so he let his friend, also called John, staying in 114 know.

John Bernard warned the 144 occupiers that a journalist was going to sneak into the building (Picture: John Bernard)[/caption]“]

Half an hour later, the ‘p****d-off looking’ journalist was back in the office; the commune had chucked him out.

Up to 500 people occupied 144 yet only 200 remained when officers ransacked. Most squatters had remained at the property even after the High Court ordered them to leave four days prior, forcing the police to evict them.

When the police came, squatters lobbed, among other things, plastic balls, stones, iron bars, wooden planks and roof tiles. About 50 officers stormed the janky drawbridge before a second wave followed – 200 officers were involved.

Scotland Yard said that there was little resistance from the squatters. Most arrested were released, with some sneaking into other abandoned homes in Endell Street, Covent Garden.

‘The police raid was inevitable. It was unfortunate it happened so soon but none of us who were the original members of the London Street Commune were surprised,’ recalled Richie.

Some historians say that the 144 Piccadilly occupation ignited the squatters movement of the next two decades. ‘Houses (indeed streets and communities) once earmarked for demolition to make way for roads or blocks of flats are still standing today because squatters occupied them in the 1960s and 1970s,’ wrote one.

But John doubts such an occupation could ever happen again, even if all the reasons London Street Commune occupied abandoned buildings to begin with are still relevant today.

‘Sadly some 55 years on from 144 Piccadilly, the UK appears to be in a much more dangerous place and could not to my mind be further removed from the more tolerant Britain of the “post-war consensus” I grew up in,’ he said.

Nearly 88,000 houses stood empty across London in 2023, according to Estate Agent Today.  One-hundred-fourteen Piccadilly is no longer one of them – the block was demolished three years later.

‘Central London no longer has those kind of derelict properties, but also because the political landscape is so very different,’ John added. ‘I doubt very much that 144 Piccadilly could happen now precisely because of how much economic conditions have changed.’

‘These days, dissent is being stifled,’ he added, pointing to Tory government legislation that handed police new powers to curb protests.

Chris feels the same. ‘I don’t know if another culture-changing epoch like the late sixties will happen again in my lifetime,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure glad I was a part of the one back then!

‘So many societal changes were internationally birthed in the ’60s: feminism, gay rights, Aboriginal rights, even seemingly unimportant things like clothing and hairstyles. Too bad the music and revolutionary fervour have faded.’

Like London, life has changed a fair bit for those who once called Hippydilly home. Chris wound up back in Canada, having lived in Marmora for 35 years while clocking hours at a library the next town over.

John never saw his friend John again. ‘We were both from lower middle-class families, both went to the same private school and both of us were into the hippy counterculture including at that time lots of hashish,’ he recalled, adding: ‘I suspect like a lot of that generation, he thrived later in some entrepreneurial capacity.’

Richie, meanwhile, said the police raid was a a ‘catalyst’ that some commune members needed to ‘actually leave the Dilly’ – himself included. ‘After several adventures, I found myself in west Wales where I learned the value of decent work,’ he recalled.

‘I worked on several local projects which in ’77 led me to Kerry Eire where my partner and I raised a family of four kids, worked hard and purchased several acres of land where one of my daughters now resides.’

Heading back to London in ’83, Richie worked at a tour bus company specialising in musicians and bands – think music titans like Jimmy Ruffin and Nina Simone -before becoming a backline technician for acts such as Madonna, George Michael and Cilla Black.

Some 55 years since the 144 Squat, Richie, now living in Bronllys, a village by the Black Mountains, spends his days learning local archaeology.

‘I, Jude and Goliath have spoken often of those Dilly days,’ Richie said, referring to two other London Street Commune founders. ‘What has surprised us is that so many people are interested in that time of our lives.

‘We were kids just having fun… All in all, life has been a pretty fantastic adventure.’

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