A referendum was held in London on this date, and as a result, on the following day, The Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia was declared.
Freston Road was in Notting Dale, neighbour of the better-known Notting Hill, and historically one of west London’s poorest parts. By the 1970s, neglectful landlords had overseen such a deterioration in the housing stock that the whole neighbourhood had gradually been rehoused elsewhere by the council. And into the ruins moved the squatters.
Squatting on unused land or in unoccupied buildings has been part of British life for many centuries, going back at least as far as Anglo-Saxon days. At times (the mid-17th century, for instance) it has been a movement of social and political significance. During and after World War Two it was an essential – and at times officially sanctioned – method of ameliorating a homelessness crisis caused by German bombs, much used by ex-servicemen and their families.
The squatters in the Freston Road area were, by all accounts, a mixture of the desperate and the dreamers: homeless people unable to find any other roof to sleep under, seekers of alternative lifestyles, addicts, utopians and artists. Life in the Freston squats was tough: at first there was no electricity, no plumbing, though the properties gradually improved under the squatters’ care.
In autumn 1977 the council announced that it was planning to redevelop the area; the squats would have to go. The squatters would be rehoused, where possible, in hard-to-let properties scattered across Greater London. To Nicholas Albery – Freston squatter, and one of the legendary pioneers of the alternative scene until his early death in 2001 – the solution was obvious. Thinking of Christiania, the self-declared autonomous commune in Copenhagen, and especially of the Ealing film Passport to Pimlico, Albery suggested a declaration of independence from the United Kingdom. Two hundred residents of Freston Road, Bramley Road and Shalfleet Drive attended a meting at which the referendum was agreed.
If the residents were eventually to be re-homed by the council, they wanted to be housed together so as to retain the community they’d created. To this end, they all added the word Bramley to their surnames: if they were kin, they reckoned, then the council was obliged to try and keep them together. Thus, charismatic young actor David Rappaport-Bramley became Foreign Minister (he went on to be even more famous, minus the Bramley, as one of the stars of Time Bandits), and he was interviewed by news outlets around the world as journalists found the story and its teller irresistible. (The Secretary of State for Education was Francesco Bogina-Bramley, aged two.)
The Republic applied for membership of the United Nations, and asked for peace-keeping troops to protect it from the council. It welcomed tourists, who were eager to have their passports stamped with Frestonia’s visa (including the state’s Latin motto, Nos Sumus Una Familia – We are all one family), and to get some Frestonia postage stamps (which, sportingly, postal services treated as legit) and a copy of the national newspaper, The Tribal Messenger. The flag was a rather nice daisy on a green background.
The National Theatre of Frestonia staged the London premier of Heathcote Williams’s play, The Immortalist – fair enough, since Williams, a pal of Albery, was the Republic’s ambassador to the UK.
All the jokiness and larking about paid off: its actions spotlit by the mass media, the council lost its nerve and began negotiations with, if not the Republic as such, certainly the leaders of the squatters in the shape of the newly formed Bramleys Housing Co-operative. Eventually, after several years of Frestonian independence, it was agreed that the old, unsafe houses would be demolished to be replaced with new homes, of a design acceptable to the Bramleys, and those already living there would get first refusal. As one veteran put it, Frestonia was rebuilt with foreign aid from Britain. The same co-op runs the place today, and many of the houses are occupied by the grandchildren of the original Republicans.
(The UN never replied. No doubt they’ll get around to it one day.)
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Sources:
www.theoldie.co.uk/article/olden-life-what-was-frestonia
The Big Issue 8 February 1999
https://hidden-london.com/gazetteer/notting-dale/
www.vice.com/en/article/4w7pxq/republic-of-frestonia-tony-sleep-032
www.kensingtonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-2015-2016.pdf