‘Those two weeks felt how the world should be’: the young single mums who took on the housing crisis – and won

On 23 September 2014, protesters entered a disused block of council flats on the Carpenters estate in Newham, east London. The group, Focus E15, was made up of young single mums who had been evicted from a local homeless hostel a year earlier – and campaigners who had fought the eviction with them. When they entered the flats, they were shocked to find that some had newly installed kitchens and the electricity and water were still on.

“We were very angry,” says Jasmin Stone, one of the single mums, who was 20 at the time. “People would cut off their arm to have a home there, and more than 400 flats were empty in the middle of a housing crisis.”

From the balcony, they unfurled banners reading: “These people need homes, these homes need people.” They didn’t know how long they’d be able to keep the occupation going. They needn’t have worried. Their campaign won the attention of the national media, and it captured the public imagination: a microcosm of the housing crisis steadily engulfing more areas as austerity began to bite.

The occupation had the atmosphere of a street party. The young mums danced and played with their children. People shared their skills, coming down to run clothing swaps and bike-fixing workshops, or to perform comedy and music. “We didn’t realise that that was going to happen,” says Stone. “It was beautiful. Those two weeks felt like how the world should be.”

The almost empty estate was emblematic of the social cleansing taking place all over the capital, with people moved out of council housing to make way for private developments. The mums had been evicted from their own accommodation – a hostel called Focus E15, which became the name of their campaign group – after Newham council cut funding to the building’s mother and baby unit. They had been told they would have to accept private rented accommodation as far away as Birmingham and Manchester as there was nowhere to house them nearby.

Now they wanted to draw attention to the same thing happening elsewhere. Newham council planned to sell the land on the Carpenters estate to a private developer, and had been systematically moving people out for years. By 2014, there were just 36 leaseholders and 21 tenants remaining, with hundreds of homes unoccupied.

The council tried hard to evict the protesters. After a hearing at Bow court, Focus E15 agreed to leave on 7 October. Standing on the steps of the court, Stone and another young mum, Sam Middleton, delivered a statement to a large crowd of journalists and supporters. They held up their fists and declared: “This is the beginning of the end of the housing crisis.”

It has been 10 years since that protest and the housing crisis has only got more acute. Today there are more than a million households on waiting lists for social housing in England, and more than 200,000 trapped in temporary accommodation, often in substandard conditions. The demolition and repurposing of social housing that the occupation highlighted has continued at speed, with a loss of well over 100,000 social homes in the past decade.

I meet Stone and the others who occupied the estate a decade ago. Over giant mugs of tea in the back room of a cafe in Stratford, east London, we talk about their continuing fight for housing justice, and where it all began.

Focus E15 was formed a year before the Carpenters estate occupation, when the 29 young single mums living were served with their eviction notices. When Stone received notice in August 2013, she was 19 and her daughter was one. “We were a little community, so we were scared and angry for each other, not just ourselves,” she remembers. Stone’s entire family was in Newham and she couldn’t imagine leaving. “She was getting depressed. I was getting depressed, worried about her and the baby getting sent miles away,” says Stone’s mother, Janice Graham.

Graham suggested Stone start a petition. They didn’t have a printer, so Stone wrote the petition on a piece of paper, and knocked on the doors of the other mums. They all signed. “We had no political history, and no idea what to do with the petition,” says Stone.

The young women organised a meeting of all the building’s residents, handwriting more than 200 notes to slip through doors. (Along with the 29 mothers, the hostel housed other young people). But they were at a loss for what to do next. Then a group of them came across a street stall outside the Wilko on Stratford Broadway, where the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) was handing out leaflets about the bedroom tax. Hannah Caller was leafletting that day.

“We were doing this quite boring stall, and along came this army of young women with babies, and some were pregnant,” Caller says. “They had a bit of paper with signatures in pencil. We had the resources to campaign so we said: ‘We can get you a petition board, we can print off your demands – and buy some pens.’ It was the power of collaboration.”

The young women realised that their eviction was part of a wider crisis. “It wasn’t just us – it was a systemic problem,” says Stone. Activists from the RCG got the local press to come to the hostel. The group adopted the slogan: “Social housing, not social cleansing”.

The Focus E15 mums started to take part in the street stall (“We made your stall better,” Middleton told the communists) and protested. One day, they took the protest to an Olympic Village show flat – a luxury apartment for prospective buyers – and set up a children’s party. “It was very quiet when we got in, and then so loud with the poppers and all the babies and children,” says Stone. They wore party hats and handed out cake. The police came, but were reluctant to intervene. “They didn’t know what to do with all these young women and babies in buggies,” says Caller. Stone interjects, laughing: “Not just women – teenage women with hormones everywhere, pregnant or who had just had a baby.”

They marched from the flat to the council’s housing office. “Everyone felt so empowered,” says Stone. “It was turning the depression into anger and feeling strong when you felt really, really weak.”

Less than six months after the campaign began, Newham council agreed to rehouse all the young women concerned within the borough – but in private rented accommodation, not council flats. Given their own situation was still tenuous, and with a fresh awareness of the housing crisis, the women wanted to fight on. “You taste victory, and think: we’ve got some power to push it further,” says Saskia O’Hara, another RCG member who got involved with Focus E15. Caller adds: “No one was going to stop there.”

While many of the single mothers have drifted away over time, Stone and her mum remain at the forefront a decade later, as do others who founded the group in 2013. “That campaign grew out of this amazing alliance of mothers and young pregnant women from the hostel, along with communists, anarchists, community groups,” says Caller.

Getting involved was transformative for people beyond the group of young mothers, too. “I was an apprentice and a carpenter, and I hadn’t been able to access political movements,” says Ruth Sutcliffe, who joined Focus E15 in 2013. “To come across this group of people with different life experiences, ideas, knowledge, it felt like something that was really possible to be part of.”

Focus E15 is still entirely run by volunteers. The strategy committee is made up of a group of core campaigners, with people coming and going as availability allows. A few years back they were awarded some funding which they used to rent a corner shop. Named Sylvia’s Corner, in honour of Sylvia Pankhurst, it is used as a community space. Every Saturday, Focus E15 continues to run a street stall to make contact with new people. “Educate, organise – that’s our motto,” says Stone.

People might join Focus E15 because they need support with their own housing situation; the group sometimes tries to get a particular decision about someone’s housing overturned. But they also protest more widely about housing justice, highlighting poor conditions in specific buildings, or unfair local policy. “What connects all our campaigning is the trap of temporary accommodation,” says O’Hara. “It’s essentially replaced council housing, and sustainable housing for working-class people is just not part of the political conversation.”

The Focus E15 hostel – renamed Brimstone House – is today used by the council as temporary accommodation. Stone remembers poor conditions when she lived there in 2013, and they have significantly worsened. Cramped units originally designed for a single person are now occupied by entire families, sometimes for months or years. In 2021, Sadaf Afzal came across Focus E15’s street stall. She was living in the hostel with her son in a small single room, and had been offered accommodation in Manchester. She didn’t want to leave London, her home for more than 20 years. Meeting the group was a lightbulb moment for her.

“I didn’t know how to fight for my rights, or what my rights were,” she says. She got involved with the campaign and, like Stone and her friends had a decade earlier, mobilised other people in the building to join protests about their living conditions.

In May 2022, Afzal attended Newham council’s general meeting with other Focus E15 activists. As the meeting proceeded, the group got up and chanted: “Brimstone House is no place for children!”

Afzal says she had never done anything like this before, and that it was exhilarating. Newham’s mayor, Rokhsana Fiaz, was sympathetic, and promised that all families would be moved out of the building within a year. This has not happened. Afzal and her eight-year-old son Khizar have now been there for two and a half years. Recently, the council offered her a flat. It was 45 minutes from her son’s school, and on the third floor of a building. Afzal struggles with stairs owing to a back problem. The council warned that if she didn’t accept the offer, she would be making herself intentionally homeless.

“People have very little time to make a decision and if they say no, the system becomes extremely harsh, withdrawing offers and discharging all responsibility,” says Ayesha Taylor, a member of Focus E15’s strategy group. She has also been involved since the group’s inception. As a support worker in primary schools, she’d long noticed the impact of insecure housing on children, and the campaign “was an expression of what I was seeing”.

Fired up, Afzal took a risk and refused the offer: “I was worried inside, if they evict me what will happen? But I said to myself: ‘No. I have to stand my ground. I have to fight.’” She submitted medical evidence about her back problems and wrote an email outlining the impact of repeated school moves on her son. After a meeting with Afzal, the council agreed to retract the offer, without deeming her intentionally homeless. Although she does not know how long it will be before the council offers her another flat, it does mean they will offer one eventually. As she tells me this, Afzal’s face breaks into a huge smile, and the women around the table cheer. “We’re not going to sit here and say we’ve solved the housing crisis, because we haven’t, but, my God, do we celebrate victories,” says O’Hara.

The question of what constitutes victory is complicated when the wider context of housing is so disastrous. When the 29 single mums who started the campaign were rehoused in Newham in 2014, they called it a “partial victory”: their privately rented flats were expensive, some of them were grotty, and they only had tenancies for 12 months. When Middleton moved in to hers, she found a mouse skeleton. Stone’s apartment had a sewage leak. “It was disgusting, just completely unsanitary,” she says.

A couple of years later, Stone left London for Colchester in Essex. It was a painful decision, but she didn’t want her daughter to have to keep moving. “It breaks my heart,” she says. “All my family are in Newham. I would have done anything to stay, and I’d do anything to move back.”

Many of the other Focus E15 mums have also left London. Though most are no longer involved with the campaign, they keep in touch; some of them turned 30 this year.

When she thinks back to the occupation of the Carpenters estate, Stone is angry that more than half of the flats are still unoccupied. Newham council did not end up selling the land – not least because of lengthy campaigning by residents. In 2020, the council approved developer Populo Living to carry out “a resident-led planning redesign process to restore the estate”, but progress has been slow. “The estate had green space, parks. Today it’s like working-class people don’t deserve that kind of living, we are put in a little tiny box and told to put up with it,” says Stone. “But there are ways of resisting and fighting back. And we’ll keep fighting.”