The Price of Altruism (40 page)

But if the population had dwindled, there were still people living in the neighborhood. Attracted by the cheap rents and proximity of employment, besides a core of longtime English working-class homeowners, a constantly changing population from many nationalities had turned Tolmers Square into a colorful pageant. There were Cypriots and Maltese, Irish, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Ceylonese. The Italians were especially proud that the former resident of 187 North Gower Street, Giuseppe “the Patriot” Mazzini, had once lived there; the Muslim Asians were proud of the newly built mosque, and the Indians were proud of the five Indian restaurants and the neighborhood’s new nickname, “Little India.” There were chickens in some small backyards, pecking beside the many outhouses. There were old Georgian terraces and quaint Victorian pubs. Amid the tumult and hustle and bustle of Euston Road and the station, Tolmers had sewed the human patchwork into a living community. “It was a place of atmosphere, always alive,” one resident remembered. “Everyone knew each other.”
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Except that no one was properly equipped to deal with the below-the-belt tactics of the wily new developers. By 1973 Stock Conversion had bought up almost five of the twelve-acre environs, a swath that came to be known as “Levy triangle.” The overall strategy for future purchases, the boss determined, could be summed up in one word: neglect. With no particular reason to rush, since every passing day only served to raise the value, Levy enacted a deliberate policy of leaving his properties to decay. When a pipe burst or a terrace cracked, Stock Conversion–employed handymen and builders were instructed to botch repairs, and in any case not to spend more than £5, lest “the boss would kill me.” That the company’s net tangible assets stood at £62 million at the time was of no consequence; soon, enough demoralized tenants would leave to allow Levy to begin carrying out his plan. A few house collapses aided in the psychological warfare. Other abandoned properties were summarily boarded up, and before long many began to stud the square. What had once been a thriving piece of London was quickly turning into a decaying shell: More than fifty houses and a number of commercial buildings had been demolished, more than 10 percent of the land lay vacant, and a growing number of homes and shops were in varying stages of dereliction. Vandalism and rot soon followed; an empty shop on Drummond Street was nicknamed the “the pet shop” because people could watch rats playing behind the glass. The population had been cut by almost half; those remaining included a high proportion of pensioners, immigrants, and the poor. A council report from from the end of 1973 found that of the 213 tenancies in the development area, 30 percent had no access to a cooker with an oven, 70 percent had no access to a sink with hot and cold water, 57 percent had no access to a bath, and 79 percent shared a WC. Everything was going according to plan: “Anyone who observes a beatific smile playing over the features of Mr. Joe Levy of Stock Conversion,”
Private Eye
reported, “may be sure that what is occupying his mind is not the recent disappointments over plans to knock down three streets near Piccadilly, but the two magic words ‘Tolmers Square.’”
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But if private interest was trampling community living, if this was some kind of twisted revenge against an imagined tragedy of the commons, not everyone was going to stand idly by. Once again, as in T. H. Huxley’s day, the winds of reform blew from “the godless institution of Gower Street.” The School of Environmental Studies was the new name of the faculty housing the old architecture department, and student life at UCL was still spinning from May 1968 and the residual counterculture of the sixties. Passing Dan the beadle, uniformed bastion of the college traditions at the entrance in the corner of the quadrangle, one entered a wide hallway daubed with revolutionary graffiti:

The first year curriculum included semiology, social history, Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes’
Mythologies
and John Berger’s
Ways of Seeing
. In short, though most of the students were only dimly aware of it, the dominant intellectual tone was antiestablishment neo-Marxism. And so, when a group of students in May 1973 embarked on a five-week planning project, it was only natural that they chose adjacent Tolmers Square. After all, they wanted to be involved in “reality,” to break down the barriers between academe and the populace. The neighborhood was in flux, and yet the local council seemed to know next to nothing about the people who lived and worked there, or, in all honesty, to care. The students were outraged: “Unless Camden’s planners can show that the redevelopment of Tolmers Square will have advantages for the people who live and work there at present, as well as those who might live there in the future, they should reconsider their plans,” they wrote in their survey. “Merely satisfying property speculators is not good enough.”
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Just before leaving for their summer vacation, they held a meeting in an office on North Gower Street. A community town planner and a councillor were invited, and joined nine neighborhood locals—a couple who ran a geological information center, two shopkeepers, and five tenants—in agreeing that some form of opposition had to be mounted against the council’s pro-Levy proposals. Before long membership had grown to two hundred, and a group of students had started a community newspaper, the
Tolmers News
. The Tolmers Village Association (TVA) had come into being. Then, in October 1973, the association took over a shop on the first floor of 102 Drummond Street, turning it into the effective headquarters of the TVA. A local artist designed a letterhead, a rubber stamp, and painted a geranium on the window. It was there, four weeks before Christmas 1973, that George showed up asking for a bath.
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Whether it was his profoundly gentle sad eyes, his worn-out green cord jacket, straggly sandy hair and beard, or the fact that he mentioned that he worked on genetics at UCL, the good people at 102 Drummond invited him to stay. There was an empty room up two flights of stairs, the third-year architecture student, Ches Chesney, told him. Ches and his friends Tim Davies and Carla Drayton were squatting in the room below, and wouldn’t at all mind George’s company.
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He hardly spoke and was exceedingly retiring. They knew nothing of his background, and nothing of his present. At the very headquarters of a community battle against the interests of a selfish millionaire and his minions, no one had a clue that the strange middle-aged American had authored the equation that specified the exact mathematical conditions under which the interest of the group trumps the interests of individuals. What they did know was that he loved taking long, hot tubs, using dishwashing liquid to make bubble baths. Paul Nicholson, a first-year architecture student, remembered seeing George only on occasion, coming down from his room to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, “a flicker of a faint distracted smile passing over his pale features.”
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Squatting, in fact, had become a major part of the battle against Mr. Levy, not to mention a national phenomenon. In London there were close to 30,000 squatters who had taken matters into their own hands: 12,000 people living in temporary hostels added to 200,000 on council waiting lists while 100,000 houses lay empty meant that the housing crisis was real. In Camden alone close to 5,000 dwellings lay unused, an increase of nearly 150 percent in a just a decade. The population in and around Tolmers Square had dwindled significantly owing to Stock Conversion’s policy of neglect, and the remaining tenants were demoralized and weak. Squatters, the people of the TVA soon grasped, could bring with them new energy to fight the battle.
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In the beginning it was the winos who climbed through windows and broke through doors, finding refuge in often dilapidated abodes. But as the social movement grew, more and more activists found themselves doing the same: students, community organizers, Marxists, anarchists. There were artists, too, and drifters; young and old, men and women, families with toddlers, opportunists and ideologues. Of the 180 squatters, 16 were white-collar workers, 12 manual laborers, 12 skilled laborers, 13 artists, 11 children, 4 bakers, 3 travelers, 2 pensioners, 8 housewives, 8 teachers, 25 unemployed, 40 students, and 6 “unknowns.” Even the daughter of the celebrated pop art/technophile–inflected professor of architectural history, Peter Reyner Banham from UCL, had joined a squat on Euston Street, a fact that made an impression on his reverential students at the TVA.
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The conditions in most squats were difficult. Water had to be carried from nearby taps in buckets, lighting was provided by paraffin and candles, and open fires were the only form of heating. Besides the outhouses the “superloos” at Euston Station or the ones at the university provided necessary outlets. But a new spirit had come to the neighborhood.

Soon roofs were being repaired, windows were being painted, bricks mended, even flower plants installed. A local furniture store chipped in, providing free secondhand sofas, tables, and chairs. A fruit and vegetable co-op was set up in the basement of Drummond 117–119; a print shop at Tolmers 19; a motorbike repair shop in the adjacent house. A big carnival with inflatable stalls; a theater show titled
Seeing It All Come Down
, about property speculation; a steel band, Indian food, and a tug-o-war, enlivened the square in the summer. Derelict houses were turning into homes. And Tolmers Square, once again, was becoming a community.

Which is why when George arrived one day at 102 Drummond with a rather raucous and intimidating redhead walking on one leg, no one objected that he join the squat as George’s roommate. Soon Ches, Paul, Tim, and Carla learned that the man’s name was Peg Leg Pete; it was the same Peg Leg Pete who had stayed with George at Little Titchfield, and whom he now ran into again in Soho Square. Paul remembered the occasion:

This was George’s new roommate, and he was set on weaning him from his bottle. It was an impossible task. Often Peg Leg Pete would return from a night in the pub—the Exmouth or the Jolly Gardeners—drunk after closing time and having lost or unable to find his key. Shouldering the door, he’d break the lock and wake up all the gang, who, fearing the worst—police eviction—would run down the stairs only to find Pete sprawled on the floor in the hallway, cussing and oblivious. Sometimes George would discover him comatose halfway up the stairs in a pool of urine. At other times Pete would simply come crashing through the door in the middle of the day, collapsing in a heap. “Sorry, lads. Lost my balance. Got a snout?” Up in their shared room, he made a habit of pissing in bottles and throwing them out the window into the backyard; the bathroom was an outhouse and too tricky for a handicapped alcoholic. George tried to talk gently to him about changing his ways as they walked together in the neighborhood, or journeyed to the pub, or went to bed at night. But this only got Pete riled and abusive.
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He was doing his best to help anyone he could. Harry Robson was another tenant at 102 Drummond Street, a sixty-two-year-old former junk dealer whom Ches had found sleeping rough near the station. George was worried about him. He was suffering from chronic bronchitis and vomiting after every meal. “What I’m concerned about is diagnosis and treatment,” George wrote in a letter addressed from the Department of Human Genetics to a Dr. Heaf at the University College Hospital. “I remember you as an excellent, conscientious and sympathetic doctor, so I wish that Harry could go to your clinic and receive examination and treatment under your supervision.” Then he added: “I am concerned about Harry because he is kind and generous.”
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