dozens of sup­port­ers arrived this morn­ing to ensure that no ille­gal evic­tion could take place at the occu­pied social squat in the build­ing that used to host the vor­tex jazz club in stoke new­ing­ton church street.

there was much local sup­port as res­i­dents don’t want more lux­u­ry flats, a tesco, or a star­bucks, all of which are pos­si­ble plans for the site under own­er richard mid­da’s stew­ard­ship.

mid­da is so unpop­u­lar in the area that a pho­tog­ra­phy stu­dio was sold to alex ross (the present own­er of the spence bak­ery) at under mar­ket val­ue, rather than allow mid­da to buy it, even although he was offer­ing far more.

a woman police offi­cer who attend­ed the scene was clear­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to the squat­ters, and after seek­ing advice and clar­i­fi­ca­tion, report­ed that the bailiffs would have to return once they had writ­ten clar­i­fi­ca­tion from the court (which may take up to two weeks).

one inde­pen­dent pho­tog­ra­ph­er was so tak­en with the offi­cer that he asked if she had a boyfriend — his hopes were dashed when she told him she was mar­ried.

quick­time — video/mp4 6.5M
flip4mac/wmv — video/x‑ms-wmv 7.1M

films attached in wmv and mp4 for­mats

if you can’t see the film just by click­ing on it (and wait­ing awhile, as these are sev­er­al megabytes of data), then right-clik-hold (ctrl-clik on mac) instead and ‘down­load linked file’ before watch­ing it on your view­er of choice
on mac or pc, i rec­om­mend down­load­ing vlc which is a free view­er from viedolan, or also mplay­er (free too)
on a mac, if you insist on watch­ing the wmv, then down­load ‘flip4mac’ so you can watch it on quick­time, as the win­dows media view­er itself puts all sorts of nas­ties on your sys­tem.

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Ear­li­er report:

From 8.30am around 70–80 peo­ple, the major­i­ty local res­i­dents, turned out to sup­port the resis­tance to the threat­ened evic­tion of the Vor­tex Occu­pied Social Cen­tre. The own­er, Richard Mid­da, a well known thug and prop­er­ty devel­op­er threat­ened to use force to evict the occu­piers if they did not leave by 9.00am.

But like the say­ing goes “they make plans we make his­to­ry”! After see­ing such a response, com­posed of all age ranges and faced with no few­er than 15 film and video cam­eras the police inter­vened and there­by start­ing a debate on the fin­er points of law. With the cops in the mid­dle of this legal debate a deci­sion was made to send one per­son from the Social cen­tre and the own­er, mid­da, to Stoke New­ing­ton Police sta­tion where inde­pen­dent legal advise is now being sort.

This is cur­rent as of 9.50am.

This occu­pa­tion has its roots in both the tra­jec­to­ry of occu­pa­tions from the Rad­i­cal Dairy (Stoke New­ing­ton) in 2002 and the sub­se­quent spaces (Occu­pied Social Cen­tre — Ken­tish Town,Ex-Grandbanks — Tufnell Park, Insti­tute of Auton­o­my — Blooms­bury, The Square — Blooms­bury), BUT also in last years occu­pa­tion of “Francesca’s Cafe” on Broad­way Mar­ket — Hack­ney and Daslton the­atre in Dal­ston.

It shows that rad­i­cal polit­i­cal inter­ven­tions in the form of occu­pied social cen­tres can res­onate with pre-exisit­ing social ten­sions and anto­gan­isms, espe­cial­ly around gen­tri­fi­ca­tion and “com­mu­ni­ty” issues and acti­vate peo­ple to self-organ­ise and take some con­trol on how their environment(and qual­i­ty of life) are shaped.
If your in the area come down, we have now occu­pied both sides of the pave­ment due to num­bers.
one of the Vor­tex Anar­chists

occupiedsocialcentre@hushmail.com
http://www.londonsocialcentre.org.uk