Eco Village

Eco Village is the name August Epp gives to the community of anarchists, artists, and musicians with whom he lived on derelict land in Wandsworth. It was a place of collective work and cultural life, but also of conflict with state authority: its residents protested legislation that targeted forms of gathering and music associated with their way of living.

Setting and Community

After his father disappeared and his mother died, August had no place to live in London. While studying history at university, he experienced a nervous breakdown, left his studies, and joined the group squatting near Gargoyle Wharf beside the Thames. The community numbered in the hundreds. August describes its members as living simply and collectively, and as striving to get along; his account presents Eco Village as both a practical home and a shared experiment in community.

Building and Cultural Life

The residents made their own living space from materials taken from old houses that the city had demolished to build a freeway. August built several buildings from this reclaimed material. The community also had gardens and held concerts, joining the work of making shelter to communal cultivation and performance. These details give the settlement a material character: its alternative life was built from what urban redevelopment had discarded, rather than existing only as an abstract political ideal.

Protest and Political Conflict

The community’s way of life brought its residents into conflict with a Criminal Justice bill that allowed the state to impose greater penalties for conduct classified as antisocial. August recalls that the law outlawed raves and gatherings, as well as certain kinds of music defined by their repetitive beats. He and the other residents went to Hyde Park to protest after the bill had passed. The protest places Eco Village within a wider struggle over who could gather, make music, and occupy shared space; the legislation treated practices central to the community’s social life as grounds for state intervention.

August’s Recollection

August recounts Eco Village to Ona Friesen while explaining his past. His account moves from loss and displacement to the practical and collective life he found in Wandsworth, then to the protest that exposed the limits imposed on that life. The remembered community is therefore both a former home and a contrast to the isolated circumstances from which he tells its story.