Completely off topic - Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer's sudden demise is a bit of a shocker. No we didn't know each other. But there was a common interest and location, one of those where you wonder how you didn't in fact encounter the other.

Joe Strummer was part of the Elgin Avenue squatter community in west London. Back in the 70s, when I was a student, I squatted in Carlton Vale (just off Elgin Avenue) and then co-led a squat in south London, with 'Mr' Elgin Avenue, Piers Corbyn (brother of Member of Parliament Jeremy). The large squat that Piers and I and a couple of others later led - Kilner House - reared its head in the national news as we summonsed George Tremlett (as a rock press journalist perhaps the unlikeliest ever Conservative head of housing at the Greater London Council) to appear in the High Court. We also got a pat on the back from safari-suited opposition leader Ken Livingstone (later to abandon the safari suits, as part of his GLC leadership bid), for trying to stop wholesale sell-offs of public housing.

Meanwhile we ran the London Squatters' Union office - apparently funded by Joe Strummer - which was great fun. Others around the scene in those days included Eric Mattocks (who sadly died three years ago). My own experience was to include the crazed millionnaire owners of the closed-down Swiss Girls' Hostel in Belsize Grove - Virgil Berti was the head honcho's name, if I remember rightly, a man who tried to prevent squatting white rabbits from roaming the verdant Belsize gardens listening to Eric Satie's Trois Gymnopedies; various joist-less properties in Vauxhall Grove - where the bleach-wielding neighbours complained to the police when a coconut was cracked one day; and the concreted-up toilets and bricked-up windows of Bonnington Square - courtesy of Labour-controlled Lambeth Council, an organisation ever keen to prevent dozens of homes that had been empty for many years from being occupied by the homeless and the low-waged. I will never forget connecting the water supply in the basement of 11 Vauxhall Grove - the present-day Bonnington Cafe or Bonnington Centre - with garden hoses, butterfly clips and a fairly high-pressure horizonal water supply (we wore head-to-toe waterproofs to connect the water, as we were unable to switch off the supply in the street). Many of these Bonnington Square and Vauxhall Grove houses were later to form part of Vine Housing Co-op and similar ventures. There's some early squatter history here, but there's also quite a bit waiting to be written.

Perhaps the craziest thing was that we sublet our tiny LSU office (in William IV Street, just off Trafalgar Square), a room next to St Mungo's hostel for the homeless, from the Family Housing Association, who in turn rented from London's Metropolitan Police. That is to say, the Met were simultaneously trying to get us out of properties across London and subsidising our squatting advisory activities. I always liked that. It seemed fair ;-).

These days, of course, Piers leads a highly respectable meteorological organisation, not a squatting one. We all grow up and move on, but I hope we never moved too far from our ideals.