On the Sunday morning of September 21 1969, Chief Inspector Michael Rowling spoke to squatters guarding a vast mansion at the western end of Piccadilly and inhabited by hundreds of hippies. A doctor, he said, was needed inside to help a pregnant woman and after some persuading an improvised plywood drawbridge was slowly lowered. Rowling flung himself across the opening and a police sergeant blew his whistle. Suddenly dozens of policemen, seemingly from nowhere, charged over the bridge and straight into the property.

Police storm 144 Piccadilly Credit: GETTY

Missiles were hurled down on to the invading policemen including roofing slates and, rather oddly, hundreds of water-filled plastic boules, boxes of which had been found in a small room in the basement. But it was to no avail, and after only a few minutes, a policeman was seen at the top of the mansion raising his truncheon in triumph. Not long after, and to cheers from the thousands of onlookers on the street below, many of whom had been there overnight, a London Street Commune flag on the roof was taken down. As he was being led outside by the police, Dr John, the leader of the hippies, screamed at the press and the crowds in the street:

“They conned us! They tricked us!”

The huge five-storey house at 144 Piccadilly stood where the large InterContinental London Park Lane now stands on Hyde Park Corner. It was a particularly prestigious address. Built at the end of the 1790s by Sir Drummond Smith “without regard for expense”, it was once the home of Lord Palmerston - he was living there when he first became Prime Minister in 1855. Next door (number 145, and built at the same time) was the childhood home of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret before the Second World War. After the war Alexander Korda’s film company moved into 144 and what was left of 145 which during the Blitz had been all but destroyed. Around 1960 the London branch of the Arts Educational School moved in to the property and this was where Liza Goddard, Jane Seymour and Nigel Havers learnt their trade. The school moved out in the mid-sixties and the old Piccadilly mansion remained empty for several years.

From around 1967 about 20 hippies (although at the time they would have called themselves “freaks”) had made the area around Piccadilly Circus their home. Richard Gardner, one of the original “Dilly Dossers” and known as Richie, remembered that time: “We didn't live in squats in those days, we lived in derrys - slang for a derelict house of which there were thousands in the sixties. They had a certain short life and when the bulldozers moved in we moved on.”

"Dilly Dossers" Credit: GETTY

At one point a man called Phil Cohen arrived on the ‘Dilly’. He called himself Dr John although no one remembers why. While the rest of the hippies wore ‘loons’, cheesecloth and beads, he wore an old suit jacket and mismatched trousers and, according to Gardner, was into “Agitprop, Tariq Ali, Che and all that stuff. Whereas we were more inclined to skin up and see if we could get the Dilly record shop to play the new Jefferson Airplane on its outdoor speakers”. It was Dr John’s idea to start the London Street Commune and he made himself in charge of “Bread, the Fuzz, the Press, and the High Court”. Their first squat was a corner building on Broad Court next to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court.

After squatting several other properties including a rambling old church school at Endell Street opposite the Oasis public baths they managed to get inside the old disused mansion at 144 Piccadilly. The entire property was surrounded by a sort of deep dry moat so a reception room was established with a plywood drawbridge to the right of the main doors. Gloria Lovatt, one of the early squatters and 18 at the time, remembered in her autobiography, the first day at 144: “We ran through the whole building, yelling with delight like kids at what we found. Not only did it have running water but also all the main electricity switches were connected. There were even elevators that worked. In the back garden there was a gold fish pond and from the top-floor windows you could look right over Hyde Park. In the morning we were able to do the laundry and hang our clothes over the balcony rail to dry”.

"We ran through the whole building, yelling with delight like kids at what we found." Credit: getty

Interviewed a few days later inside the building the press were now dubbing ‘Hippy-Dilly’, Dr John insisted that the squatters were all “socialists in the old sense. Not in the Wilson way. He’s not a socialist at all. Put this down: ‘We are determined to keep the lavatories clean and flushed. After all, it is Piccadilly’.”

After the police raid at 144 about 100 people were taken into custody. There were no serious casualties from either side although many of the occupants complained of being badly treated by the police. The raid so impressed the Mayfair property developer Ronnie Lyon (“Business is just like driving a car - of which I have four, by the way,” he once observed. “I moved up in stages, like changing gears.”) that he walked into the West End Central police station and wrote a cheque for £1,000 for the Police Benevolent Fund. Lyon said: “I feel that these hippies had no legal or moral right to be in that building. One is very ready to criticise the police when parking and speeding, but when there is a real problem you run to the British bobby and he is pretty good at his job.”

A London bobby takes down the flag Credit: GETTY

Eleven months after the occupation of Hippy-Dilly was over the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd spoke at a public enquiry. It was looking into a proposal to replace the run-down mansion with a large luxury hotel and Gibberd stated: “It would be totally unreasonable to leave this site underdeveloped. That there is pressing demand for luxury hotels is incontrovertible.” Westminster Council agreed and plans were made for number 144 to be demolished. It is worth being reminded that at that time large amounts of Piccadilly were due to be razed to the ground including, incredibly, most of the area around Piccadilly Circus.

Lord Holford, acting for both the Greater London Council and Westminster Council, had several years previously proposed a “double-decker” scheme at Piccadilly Circus. Its aim was to segregate pedestrians on elevated concrete concourses 60 feet above the ground while several lanes of traffic roared past below. There was also to be a ring of office towers all overshadowed by a 132m tower block on the Criterion Theatre site to the south of the Circus.

In 1972, despite the plans changing several times, the wholesale destruction of Piccadilly Circus was more than still on the cards. Hugh Cubitt, Westminster Council’s planning chairman, let it be known that he hoped the scheme could be started as soon as possible, so as to combat the decay of Piccadilly and what he called: “little more than a down-at-heel, neon-lit slum.”

It wasn’t until May 1979, the month Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, that all the grand projects featuring massive office blocks and “pedestrian walkways in the sky” were rejected. It meant that the area was to remain roughly how it was, and close to what we see at Piccadilly Circus today.

Number 144 remained empty for three years after the end of the hippy squat and demolished in 1972. Sir Frederick Gibberd got his wish, and his large luxury hotel was completed two years later.

The views are still good but the rates have gone up

The amazing view over the Royal Parks is still the same but it’s slightly more expensive to stay at the InterContinental London Park Lane hotel than at ‘Hippy-Dilly’ back in 1969. There is hot water now, however, and there’s no need to hang your laundry over the balcony railings to dry. The room rate starts at £299.

Rob Baker is the author of Beautiful Idiots and Brilliant Lunatics: A Sideways Look at Twentieth-Century London, and High Buildings, Low Morals: Another Sideways Look at Twentieth Century London.

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