Mapping London & Berlin's Squatting History

The London Squats Archive is a Leaflet map dedicated to archiving evicted squats in London. The project is not a map of current squats, to minimize visibility concerns for currently occupied spaces, but is solely concerned with documenting squats which no longer exist.

If you select a squat's marker on the map you can view details about when the building was squatted, for what purpose and the duration of the squat. However data for a lot of the squats is a little sparse. This is a shame because if the dates for most of the squats were recorded a timeline could be added to the map. This would help to provide an interesting history of squatting in London over the years, similar to the history of Berlin squatting provided by Berlin Besetzt.


Berlin Besetzt is a map showing the locations of squats in Berlin from 1970 to the present day. You can view all the houses that have been squatted in this period or you can use the date slide control to view the history of squatting in Berlin over the last few decades.

Using the date control it appears that 1981 was the golden age for squatters in Berlin. It is also interesting to note the rise of squatting in east Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The map also reveals that Kreuzberg has remained a very popular area for Berlin squatters for more that thirty years.