The Secret History of Our Streets

[talking about the time in the 1970s when he was in charge of the Greater London Council housing policy and was called upon to evict Bangladeshi squatters from a derelict GLC apartment block in Arnold Circus]

George Tremlett:
I went straight down and there were these sixty families of all ages with lots of children, ragged, clearly very very poor. They didn't have windows or doors: they were just hanging curtains over the apertures. It was Dickensian or worse than that. Under normal GLC policy as it was, we would have gone to court, got an eviction and thrown them out. Do you want to fight sixty homeless families who are living in poverty? For what? Is that what life's about? I didn't take on the GLC housing job to do something like that.

Narrator:
[voiceover] Instead of evicting the squatters, George made a complete U-turn in housing policy. He offered to find council flats for every Bangladeshi in the squat.

Terry Fitzpatrick:
George Tremlett said he admired squatters because we were entrepreneurial, we didn't wait to be housed, we went out and did it for ourselves.

Narrator:
[voiceover] The squatters were even offered a choice of where they might want to live.

Terry Fitzpatrick:
They said "Just draw up a list of estates, wherever you want, wherever you feel safe, and we'll offer you accommodation on them." We were absolutely gobsmacked because they completely capitulated to everything we'd been demanding.

[talking about the GLC policy of rehousing Bengali squatters in existing apartment blocks]

Horace Cutler:
They'll be occupying a building, or perhaps two or three buildings, they'll be together, the language problem is got over, their habits and customs will be acceptable within their own community, and I can't see any reason why this piece of, what I would almost call, "social engineering", but it isn't that because it's not deliberate, it's a unique problem.

Interviewer:
What will happen to the existing families who are already living in these tenement blocks?

Horace Cutler:
Well they have a choice: either they can stay there and live with the Bengalis, or they can go.