In the 1970s, hundreds of Bengali families in Spitalfields, east London, responded to discrimination and racism in housing and on the streets by forming a squatters’ movement and occupying empty homes.
Although Abdul Kadir had lived in London since 1957 and his father before him had worked on English ships, when he applied for social housing for his young family in the early 1970s, he was kept waiting for years. In the mid ’70s, desperate, he decided to take matters into his own hands: he broke in and squatted an empty flat on a council estate in Spitalfields.
