The Big Smoke

A fortnight ago I moved into a disused three-story language school on the corner of Oxford Street and Berwick Street. I was one of the Mayfair squatters and now I'm here with Dan Simon who founded The Oubliette Arthouse in Waterloo. On Oxford Street, we've turned the space behind our glass front door into 'The Fifth Plinth', a mock-Gormleyesque affair starting at 9am tomorrow (Friday August 7) involving 24 hour-long performances.

The property company who manage the building – which has meant leaving it empty for two years – weren't thrilled by our arrival. After a week they sent five bailiffs who broke in with sledgehammers and tried to evict us. But they have to beat us in court before they can beat us in person, so we called the police who – to their great credit – sent them packing. We're treating the property with respect and have since had cordial conversations with the owner, but we'll be in court on Tuesday.

I'm 31 years old and have lived in London for thirteen years, but only started squatting last November. I was a cycle courier, a rootless and impoverished master of the city, and could hardly afford to pay rent. Before that I'd been a legal secretary, a terrible poker player and an English literature PhD student. At no point was I in a position to consider buying a property to be life's ultimate goal. I remembered a passage in 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' that equated tramps with aristocrats. Envying the unspeakably rich, I wondered if I might find similar freedom through being unspeakably poor. Could I find a way to live without the need for money?

So last November I arrived unknown at the DA! squat in Mayfair and was eventually allowed to move in. Squats, particularly art squats, are not lawless places, and new arrivals can be rigorously policed. These young artists and activists saw squatting not as a fall from grace but as an elevation which allowed them to live exactly as they wanted to. My cynicism was sometimes at odds with their left-wing earnestness and I had some troubles reconciling myself to eating thrown-away food.

But I soon grew to value communal living above the loss of solititude and meals-for-one. I quit my courier job to help organise the Temporary School of Thought, the programme of talks and workshops we put on in a briefly liberated £22.5 million mansion. After that, the vagaries of squatting saw us spending five months above a Jamaican bakery in Camberwell, with ten to fifteen of us crowded into the three-bedroom flat.

I've never claimed JobSeeker's Allowance and my small income comes from writing. I've been a blogger for two years. Using the pseudonym LuckyJimm has allowed me an honesty I wouldn't have risked under my real name. I wanted an audience but craved the anonymity that Justice Eady recently declared that bloggers can no longer expect.

More confessional writer than whistleblower, early on Saturday morning I'm going to explore my contradictory impulses towards revelation and concealment by writing behind the glass on Oxford Street, my laptop's screen projected against the wall. There's also an echo of a live writing performance I once saw Will Self give at 9 Great Chapel Street, which is now the VHS Video Basement. Other performances scheduled for the Fifth Plinth include one of the school's former teachers giving a final lesson through the letterbox; the Rambling Restaurant hosting a ten-person banquet in the five-by-four space; a ringleader from Camden circus; assorted actors and painters; and a woman from a childcare charity who wants to spend an hour in the window trying to keep her young children occupied.

I predict chaos, but better that than an empty door.

Fifth Plinth, Fri-Sat, 9am-9am, 146 Oxford St, W1.

LuckyJimm's excellent blog can be read here.