The Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia

Tuesday, May 26 7:30-9:00

The Odd One Out, Colchester

In 1977, on a short stretch of Freston Road in Notting Hill, 120 squatters declared independence from the UK and formed The Republic of Frestonia. It was political theatre with real stakes. The area, acquired and neglected by the Greater London Council, had been allowed to fall into disrepair, with families rehoused to towers such as Trellick Tower and Grenfell Tower, dismantling an existing community. When redevelopment plans were announced, residents refused to disappear quietly.

Inspired by experiments in communal living such as Christiania in Copenhagen, social activist Nicholas Albery and others proposed secession. They used media spectacle, legal argument and disciplined solidarity to force negotiations with the government. The result was the Bramleys Housing Co-operative, working with Notting Hill Housing Trust to secure decent homes. It was a working class experiment in collective power that won tangible gains.

Fifty years on, Frestonia’s lesson for activists is clear: solidarity can be imaginative, strategic and joyful. Faced with eviction and inequality, a community declared itself a family, and made the state listen.

Clare Reeve has worked across London and Middlesex in varied roles with children and families from diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, including with the Pre-school Learning Alliance, Sure Start programmes, primary schools, Ealing children’s social services, and schools’ library services. She has been active in campaigns and politics for over twenty-five years. Between 2017 and 2022, she served as Media Officer and Women’s Officer for her local Labour Party branch in Suffolk, where she now lives. She maintains a strong interest in working-class politics, art and culture in North Kensington, particularly around Latimer Road and Ladbroke Grove in Notting Dale and Notting Hill, where her Irish grandparents settled in the 1950s.

Clare spent a lot of her childhood at her grandparents' house a stone’s throw from Frestonia. Her uncle was a Frestonia tenant between the ages of sixteen and twenty years old. As a child, she wandered with him through the community's jumble sales in the People’s Hall, absorbing the music drifting from commune windows. He told her how they rewired derelict houses, grew food together and barricaded the road when the police came to try and evict them. The legacy of Frestonia continues to inspire her.

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