Cotters and Squatters: housing's hidden history, by Colin Ward

A nice little place in the country for a revolution

Rural squatters are now only a footnote in social history. These families built themselves a house on some unregarded patch of land, perhaps a moor or a highway verge. For years, the environmental humanist Colin Ward has tried to rescue such people from the mythology of heritage museums, the indulgences of romantic novelists and the dust of local archives; and to draw lessons from them for today. Cotters and Squatters is the latest vivid instalment of his campaign.

As he points out, the countryside, especially in southern England, is so gentrified that – where any of these DIY houses survive – they have been fitted with the latest kitchenware and electronics. The owner can sip a cup of good coffee while e-mailing his latest protest about the threat posed by new building.

Meanwhile, the village's better council housing has been sold off for weekend cottages. Any residual industry (brewery, slaughterhouse, flour mill) has been killed off by takeover or ultra-regulation; the farming consists mainly of subsidy-reaping. The present-day equivalent of the squatter is the man in the local mobile-home park, doing his best to make something permanent out of something temporary, in the teeth of hostile authority and the better-off's disparagement.

At least, that is the rural story. In a town-centre square in Brighton this month, I found myself musing on Ward's paean of praise to self-help as I watched urban squatters leap over iron railings into a semi-derelict flat.

The planning system we invented was, as Ward notes, driven largely by the desire to stop people making homes for themselves. But it has widely failed to provide modest homes for people who need them. Delving back into the 16th century, and beyond, he chronicles the attempt by the enterprising poor (often the working poor) to shake off the legal shackles of landowners.

Houses, it was sometimes thought, gave their builder a right to permanent ownership if built between sunset and sunrise. This seems to have been one of the subject's many myths. But even a myth tells you something about the reality of what people would have liked. They preferred, as Ward wisely says, a "landscape of busyness", not today's regulatory park-like countryside.

It was from such shabby, marginal places that the industrial revolution sprang. People who made their homes at the moor edge could not easily make a living from a single source. In their self-build cottage they grew vegetables and kept a pig, but also did a bit of spinning and weaving, and maybe mining or quarrying.

Sometimes it wasn't even a cottage. On a hill outside the Pennine village I grew up in – a heartland of the industrial revolution – there was a hole in some rocks known as "Tom Bell's Cave". As children, we were told it was named after an outlaw, a local Robin Hood. I realise now that he was probably a squatter. These are the kinds of insight Ward specialises in giving us.

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