Its two weeks today since we, a ragged band, moved into the gardens surrounding the old, disused Brunel University Runnymede Campus.
In the past it was a thriving university campus where sciences, design and technology, theatre and sport were taught and enjoyed until the site was sold to private property developers in 2007. For over five years it has remained largely vacant and disused (with the occassional film shoot or police dog training taking place in the buildings).
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So it’s been a week already! Thanks to everyone who has helped so far and to the owners who have been kind enough to let us stay and carry on with our work. The Pebble Mill Social Centre is looking a lot better already and the building has been repaired up to a great standard.
Please come by and visit us. We can be found on Pershore Road, just up from Selly Oak Tavern on the other side of the road just before the bus stop.
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The lead up to the Olympics has seen a rapid increase of police brutality against migrant communities in Calais and their supporters. Calais is an ‘Olympic village’ during the Games and in preparation the authorities have begun cleaning up the streets to make Calais ‘migrant free’.
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At 1am this morning, 14th June 2012, over a dozen police vans raced down City Road, towards Finsbury Square. Accompanied by two or three coaches of bailiffs in orange jackets. They quickly formed a line round the site and dragged those asleep out of their tents. Some being aware of the police coming climbed into the barricade built over three of the wooden pallet houses, with one masked protester at the top of a tree in the square.
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By Our man in Amsterdam
A new documentary on the squatters’ movement by João Romão, a Portuguese economist and activist living in Amsterdam, has just been released. Squatted Freedom, a one-hour limited-budget film, combines archival footage and interviews with current and former squatters to examine the history and politics of the movement as well as the wave of recent, violent evictions of squats in Amsterdam.
Squatted Freedom is a fascinating film. The story of the squatters’ movement, past and present, is both captivating and inspiring. Violent confrontations between police and squatters have been taking place since the 1980s and continue into the present. Squatted Freedom reaches its climax during an intense standoff and eventual confrontation between squatters and riot police attempting to evict a prominent Amsterdam squat, a scene which Romão and his colleagues were lucky enough to capture on film. [Read More]
Squatting is on the rise again in these times of austerity (see for example the recent occupations of flats in Southern Spain, mostly carried out by housewives and families). An Italian project that’s caught my attention since its beginning is in Pisa, where last year’s Occupy protests evolved into the reappropriation and transformation of abandoned buildings for the benefit of the local community.
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Activists in London have a tradition of reclaiming abandoned buildings, sometimes to use them as social centers, sometimes for definite periods of mobilization. On the last weekend in May, the latest such center was opened, but this time with a very singular focus.
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Letter from La Casika C.S.O.A. – Call for international support
La Casika is a squatted, self-managed social center in existence for 14 years. During these years, numerous collectives of various types (ecologist, feminist, collectives that defend animal rights, antifascist, anticapitalist, neighborhood movements, educational, cultural…) have felt that this space is theirs, forming part of it, using and developing a range of activities: lectures, educational workshops, music, film, and theater festivals, art expositions, debates….the diversity and quantity of activities developed at La Casika, have made it into a cultural, social, and political reference point not only for Mostoles, but also for the rest of Madrid and the State, and has provided our town with a meeting point for reflection and alternative action, where the values of the capitalist system have been overcome by self-management. [Read More]
