The Lockon is a vegan squat based in the building of the former Hopbine bar in the centre of Cambridge. The squat formed in the beginning of 2020 and, following intense legal battles with the landlord, won the right to continue using the premises as a living and organising space. Today, The Lockon serves as a home for its residents and a mutual aid resource for locals who need food, clothing, or other materials — no questions asked.
The Commoner sat down with Glade, a long-time resident at The Lockon, to get their perspective on how the project started, how it builds community in a non-hierarchical manner, and how it fits into the broader Cambridge landscape.
This interview has been edited for clarity. You can register to volunteer with Cambridge Community Kitchen or donate directly to the project. You can follow The Lockon and CCK on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Søren Hough
Cambridge is the most disparate city in the UK in terms of income gap, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a radical (much less libertarian socialist) scene in Cambridge. So it’s interesting to see a community like The Lockon exist here. Is that a niche you wanted to fill when the squat first got started?
Glade
Absolutely. I mean, from my personal perspective, Cambridge is quite unique in the sense that it has a large community of students, which are constantly moving through, constantly expanding, and are very open to new ideas, and to exploration. And it’s also got this kind of academic-level society, you know, people affiliated with the University of Cambridge who also have quite radical ideas and are open to exploration. So when those two forces meet, I think it’s really beautiful. The barriers to Cambridge are obviously that it’s really expensive and incredibly hostile to homeless people and those that are perceived as not ‘Cambridge types.’
So The Lockon was not a deliberate intention to try to radicalise Cambridge, but I had a little background with squatting and radical movements before and this has been one of the more enduring projects. So yeah, it’s just that the stars aligned for me. I’ve gotten to learn more about people in the city and the kind of energy or vibes that people bring with them when they come through the door. Cambridge was radical once, in the 90s — early days — but Cambridge has absolute potential to be a radical city and the forefront of anarchism. (Anarchism is my personal belief, not to say that every person has to subscribe to that.) I’m hopeful that Cambridge can be something special in that way. I don’t know what to compare it to, maybe something along the lines of Prague in the sense that it’s affluent, but also there’s an undercurrent of rebellion and a constant challenging of ideas.
Søren Hough
What’s your involvement with The Lockon? And how did it get started?
Glade
I was studying nursing, which I’ve had to drop out of for various reasons. And the people that cracked it I knew from previous actions around Cambridge — mainly via XR (Extinction Rebellion), strangely enough. It was two particularly young, vulnerable people threatened with homelessness and desperately needing somewhere to live, and they later recruited a third person. There was an open window at the former Hopbine pub, so they took a ladder one day and went up through the window. This place was absolutely trashed. There was faeces and remains of rats and needles everywhere, and those three just popped through and began the cleaning process. Then I was brought in after a week. I was just a known safe contact.
Søren Hough
So early on, then.
Glade
Yeah, absolutely. We did a lot of cleaning and recruited a few more people. We thought it was great having a space. The landlady would come round everyday with a hammer and smash the building and scream at us. We were as peaceable to her as possible out of tactical necessity. ‘Take us through court, there’s a process.’
Søren Hough
As if she was using the building herself!
Glade
Oh, yes. This building became abandoned and was closed over a year before occupation. The landlady drove the managers who were running the bar [out] — she just kept raising the prices, and she wouldn’t agree to a fixed term contract, which just didn’t work for the bar. So they had to close. I don’t have a relationship with them but a lot of people in the community expressed how much The Hopbine meant to them. It was a great place and space for them when it was a pub. It was really, really sad.
So we’ve had a lot of spotlight. The previous managers and workers came around during that first initial period, just to say, ‘Hello, love what you’re doing! Stick it to the landlady!’ We felt kind of galvanised with that kind of support. I can’t remember why, but we started to serve chilli on Tuesday. I think we just had a hot pot, put the stove on, and opened the doors to anybody that wanted to come in. Also, because the bar still had all the furniture and things, anybody who wanted to come sit and have chilli and chat with us, meet us — they were more than welcome to do so. The landlady never took us up on that offer.
So yes, ‘Chilli Tuesday’ is a thing, and then we have vegan Sunday brunch, which is a little bit more popular. People came and donated directly to fund the ingredients for that because we couldn’t afford it. We just loved that people were coming into our space. You had students sitting next to somebody who’s from the hostel across the road having chats. Youngsters would come play movies and things like that. It was just a really great time between the lockdown periods — everything felt like it was returning to normal. We felt really galvanised and held by the community.
Then the second lockdown came, which severely hampered everything. We were worried about inviting people into the space. We had Badger join us, who worked for a long time with RCK — Refugee Community Kitchen. They serve free food to refugees in Calais and Badger effectively brought that model here to help people because a lot of the people coming on Tuesdays and Sundays were poor, broke, and couldn’t afford to eat — that was one of their meals for the week. So Badger brought us this model for CCK, Cambridge Community Kitchen, and it was absolutely brilliant: ‘This is what you need to do. This is how we get a hygiene rating. This is how we do it safely. This is how we get volunteers and people onboard.’ And then a lot of other people joined in on the project. Spruce was a key person in driving that and maintaining it. I was doing delivery shifts [for an app] to try and earn a little bit of income on the side and so this idea came up: we could cycle the food through to you [on a bike], if you want it. We’re not gonna ask questions. Doesn’t matter if you’re a high earner, low earner, poor, homeless... if you tell us the location, we’ll take the food to you. That’s the ethos that’s been carried through, and as more volunteers came in, as people brought in their own takes on it, things changed, things evolved. I think they’re up to serving at least 300 portions on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. [Editor’s Note: Cambridge Community Kitchen recently cut down its service to two days per week due to staffing shortages.]
Søren Hough
Oh wow. On each of those days?
Glade
Yeah, it’s been amazing. People will happily donate money knowing that you are just putting food in someone’s mouth. There’s no real politics behind it. We’re not making any demands of anyone. We’re not pushing an agenda. CCK is quite separate from the radical Lockon space. They operate side by side and in mutual agreement. It’s amazing making the space for them as well, because they’re donating their labour and time to help and have that relationship with people they don’t know. And so as CCK grew, The Lockon also grew at the same time.
Søren Hough
So you said that they’re sort of separate from each other. How does that work? I’d assumed that The Lockon was sort of an umbrella group, and then CCK was part of that — is that not really accurate?
Glade
There are people at The Lockon who are more involved with the Kitchen, and certainly the people who are team leads and kitchen managers. There’s a training process, and these people know this stuff. They’re brilliant. So liaison people operate in both spaces. For example, Spruce is very active with The Lockon and very active with CCK, and they bridge that gap. There’s also steering meetings every month, from which we then get feedback from the Kitchen saying [things like], ‘Oh, you left it a mess, can you do better?’ Or coming from us, ‘You left the doors unbolted. This is a security risk, please don’t do that.’ So there’s an informal dialogue. There’s no processes or anything. It’s just humans talking to humans.
So people here volunteer in the kitchen, but it might only just be a kitchen shift every now and then. CCK also has external volunteers and its own structures and organisational methods, and the Lockon has lovely bridges in between. So CCK are also a lot of the driving force, and they do a lot of the organising and database administration, etc. It’s not just The Lockon, but it’s also held by people at the Lockon.
Søren Hough
A question that I’ve been thinking about through my work with rough sleepers in Cambridge is to what extent do we take for granted the support of some communities?
Glade
We have a really good relationship with Willow Walk, the local hostel — we’ve welcomed most of the residents and stuff there. [Editor’s Note: Willow Walk has since closed as the council have claimed its services in the city are no longer needed.] So [not finding support among rough sleepers] is sadly too common, but it just brought it home to me: ‘Yeah, these are complete people.’ Just because they’ve been cast aside because they’re having mental health issues or because they’re drug users, they’re not there to be recruited. They’re there to live their lives. If you need help, come to us. We have stores of sleeping equipment. We have stores of warm clothes. We can’t necessarily house you, but we can give you as much as we can give.
Søren Hough
I’ve heard a range of perspectives from rough sleepers in Cambridge: some feel CCK/The Lockon really stepped up when the council completely dropped the ball during the pandemic, while others found that they ideologically just could not buy into the project, arguing that these projects help migrants and non-Brits when it should be prioritising British people.
Sure, we can assume landlords are probably not going to love a squat like this. But is there an assumption in reverse that rough sleepers will love the idea of The Lockon and CCK, especially when you see how they’re treated by the council? You’ve mentioned to me before we started the interview that some folks have vandalised your community fridge.
Glade
They’ve vandalised it a couple of times. I’ve seen them and had a word and asked them not to. And it’s not like — people aren’t opposed to a community fridge. I don’t understand why they would do this, and I haven’t had that dialogue. But they certainly see us as not a force for good, some form of opposition.
But to our faces, and in conversation and dialogue, we don’t directly get that feedback. The people who I suspected of vandalising that fridge were lovely to me. They weren’t aggressive or anything. I think it might just be venting and they just see us as kind of a vulnerable, easy target because we’re not going to call the police. You do you, guys — we’re gonna just rebuild the fridge, make it stronger. Put the stores in.
This is the first time hearing that kind of dichotomy. ‘I want money to go to British people first, not migrants, even though the council is fundamentally in opposition to my existence.’ That’s heart wrenching to hear. I’d love to invite them and just chat to them. Not to, like, educate or anything, just find out where they’re coming from — ‘How do you sit with that? How do you rationalise these two opposing thoughts?’
Søren Hough
From my perspective, the great middle of political thought doesn’t really engage with reality (emiseration at the hands of capitalism, structures of state oppression). This leads to a sort of discontent that goes unaddressed, leaving people looking for answers at political poles. And as we know, one pole offers completely conspiratorial, unhelpful, and reactionary answers to those questions, while the other — where we are — has an actual analysis of the problem. But I think if you bought into one, it’s hard to see the other one as being legitimate.
Glade
Yeah, these types of places arise in the cracks of governance. We see a role that needs filling, and we fill it as well as we can according to our ethics and morals. To me, I’m very much inspired by the CNT-FAI, the Spanish Revolution, wherein they didn’t just slowly emerge on the day of revolution. They’d been in the community providing free education, because education wasn’t being provided; providing free food, because food wasn’t around. They were driving people to places. They were very much part of the infrastructure of the community. And for my vision, that’s how I want to live and how I would like to see society and my community grow: in those cracks.
And then when the time comes, maybe when push comes to shove, we’re already going to be in people’s lives. And we’re going to welcome them with open arms. And we’ll explain how we organise, explain how we divide our labour. We’ll explain these concepts in as manageable and easy a way as possible. They can accept it and join us. Or, if they don’t, then we’ll coexist, just like people in anarchist communities in Spain who didn’t want to collectivise their property. The norm was to say, ‘Okay, you can have as much land as you can farm. But you can’t have people come work for you. You can keep your own property, we’re not going to take it. We can trade, we can be friends, but we understand you want to do this.’ I read that and was inspired by the sense of ‘I know that I’m doing the right thing. I know that my struggle is just and I trust in the community. Even if you don’t buy in yet, maybe you will one day, but that doesn’t mean we can’t coexist.’
Søren Hough
It’s interesting to hear you bring up the CNT-FAI as inspiration. That brings me to the next question: how do you operate? And how do you manage expectations within the community while balancing your community’s anti-hierarchical viewpoint with making sure that everyone is participating in a positive way? If there are disagreements, how are those mediated?
Glade
Community means a lot of different things. In the first instance, there’s the direct Lockon community, i.e. the residents and people who live here. Then there’s the wider community, basically good friends of the people of The Lockon that specifically have a relationship with us. There’s also the people quite literally directly around us, and then there’s the community the Kitchen is supporting, out in the suburbs away from the hub of the city centre.
So in the first instance, people live here: our community is organised as informally and non-hierarchically as humanly possible. The only sort of demands we put on people who come to the space is to try to make weekly meetings. It’s our primary organising tool. And try to do some chores. If somebody is not doing labour, for example, somebody isn’t cleaning, this creates mess and it can feel like they’re just taking from the community.
But actually, that person is probably going through some stuff. They need that time, they need that space. Take it. Do you. Don’t come do the washing up if you’re feeling really sad, or if you don’t want to be part of this DIY project. That’s absolutely fine. Look after yourself, because if you don’t, you’re going to be burnt out, and then the next person is going to be burnt out, and then there’s going to be nobody holding space.
So it’s almost like 40–50% of us are in this kind of restless state, not really feeling we can fully participate. I’ve just come out of this kind of crazy depressive episode that lasted a couple of months and I really struggled to participate. I felt so bad and guilty that other people carried me. But then I got my energy back and I got myself back, and I felt confident. I went straight into my community: ‘I’ll do the washing up. I’ll be this person.’ I put myself on the front line. ‘I’ll do this, I’ll do that, it’s fine. I’ve got time, energy, and space for this, and if you don’t, that’s fine, because I’ve taken my rest. And I will take my rest again.’
We just trust in the community spirit, light in a dark space. I feel you, take your time. We’ll carry this with us.
Søren Hough
So the exact opposite of how a job works.
Glade
Yes. Precisely. We don’t try to segregate ourselves from the realities of life. People here are unemployed, people are in work, people have mental health issues, people are students of the University of Cambridge (a terrible, terrible institution that’s hammering them, bless them). We have lots of activists, and a lot of their work takes energy and time away from the community, which is just part of the reality of life. But we get it back in spades through interpersonal relationships, through living life as comfortably as we can within the confines of our own morals and ethics. It varies person to person. If you’re a waged person, then you have that kind of class struggle; if you’re students, you have that student struggle; several trans people here have the trans struggle. We’ve tried to keep this idea that just because energy isn’t going into the community, just because labour isn’t directly benefiting the people next to us, we are humans first and foremost. Just because we’re anarchists, we’re not gonna die by the label. Nobody should be made to.
So our organising tool is fundamentally important. We ask people to try to attend the Wednesday meeting, in which tasks are divvied up. One of the boards downstairs has a list of action points people have agreed to do. People can just write on the board for the agenda to be discussed. If you can’t make the meeting, we take minutes, and we inform people [who weren’t there]. We try to hold each other accountable and say, ‘Have you done this? Do you need to hand it back? Can we go through the list and just make sure that nothing’s been missed?’
Søren Hough
How do new people end up joining The Lockon?
Glade
We have a formalised process for voting people into the space and for things that alter the nature of the space. It’s majority vote for a trial for a new resident. Then after that trial, there’ll be [another] vote and it has to be unanimously agreed. We will sit and discuss it for as long as it takes until we have consensus one way or the other. So if one person has concerns, we’ll talk that concern out. And it might just mean, ‘Okay, can we have another week-long trial because we’re not sure if [they] fit in here? Is this mutually beneficial?’ We don’t want to invite someone into the space, have them not feel supported, then they have a tragic breakdown in their room — as happens in many other squats.
If you just walk in here and you’re a great fit, get on with everyone, and you understand the politics and how things interact interpersonally, then you’re going to be fine. Most people who come to live here share our desire to live in a community. If you turn up at our door, we kind of assume that you’re likeminded, or else what are you doing here? [Laughs.] These people tend to already have a close relationship with at least one or two people here. So they have that holding hand as they acclimatise into the flow of the squat.
Søren Hough
So you have a fixed set of residents here, but also people just passing through?
Glade
Yeah, and like you said, we have a transient community of our friends and activists flowing through Cambridge. We have close relationships with a lot of vagabonds who don’t really want to be tied down to places. They are intimately connected [to us]. And at any given time we also have people away on projects. Like we’ve got people in Germany, we’ve got people in London, and people can stay in their rooms in Cambridge, use their space. There’s this constant flowing of people in and out.
Søren Hough
To what extent do you want to extend this project to other locations?
Glade
We want more people, we want more squats. We want to open up more spaces in Cambridge because there’s a lot of abandoned buildings. We’ve scouted quite a few. And then as we open those, we’ll have a core crew go support that, set it up, then pass it off or create a community from that kind of seed. My dream is six squats, all mutually supporting each other, all capable of mutual defence in case of eviction. If one falls, then there’s space, time, place, and energy to go to the next, and then the next: this barrage of taking over space that isn’t used.
It’s easier said than done. As I said, it is a lot of managing internal and external energy and labour. And at any one point, it’s hard to say, ‘Okay, this is go time, we can do this now.’ And then in the view of the grand scheme of what’s going on in Cambridge, what’s going on in politics — where do we direct our attention? You’re never [able to come to that decision]. It’s informalised. ‘Oh, this is what we’re doing. Okay.’
Søren Hough
In cases where something terrible happens, like if people get into a fight or something, is that handled in the same way as not doing clean-up or something like that? Do you have a transformative justice model in place?
Glade
There is a transformative justice model. It hasn’t needed to be utilised in its current form, thankfully. Spruce and Badger in particular, they’re constantly reading these texts and tomes on transformative justice and community justice. They are such powerhouses of knowledge and they’re great guides and directors of this kind of process.
In the past when we’ve had to use these systems, unfortunately it's been for quite severe breaches of human decency. You need the transformative justice system in place before these things happen, like from the get-go. It has to be agreed and understood. And we were feeling our way through this novel concept of transformative justice. I imagine different people have different views; I personally think it went really well. Because at the end of the day, I’m proud of the community for centering the victim instantly. ‘We’re gonna make this a safe space for you and ask the perpetrator to step back. And then we’re going to sit and discuss this.’ So what’s the victim want to do? What does the community feel about this, and is there further consideration? We started to chat about it because an incident had happened. It wasn’t formalised at this point.
And then, usually, with support, the victim will express what they want to happen. They will have a direct conversation, usually as a written letter: ‘You have done this harm. We need to work this out.’ or ‘I’m probably gonna ask you to leave the space and we don’t want to have a relationship with you. But we’re going to still provide you support. We’re going to contact you, talk to you, make sure you’re doing okay. But there’s too much of a breach for you to be here.’
Søren Hough
For the safety of The Lockon.
Glade
Yeah, and just the difficulty of being around constant conflict in quite a cramped space. It’s very challenging and it’s not a burden we want people to carry. So we have asked people to leave. That is quite a big breach, very clear and obvious.
The smaller things in the first instance are hopefully dealt with by the people trying to remember that we’re all humans feeling our way through everything. And then in the second instance, we sit down, have a frank conversation where everybody will get a chance to speak and we’ll try to air things out. Usually, it’s subtle disagreements or people holding onto some sort of grudge — someone slighted them and it’s just grown into something bigger. The moment they have the chance to express that, two other people will go, ‘I felt the exact same thing. Thank you for expressing that.’ And that kind of diffuses everything pretty quickly. So yes, minor and major processes. The minor one is really informal. The listening circle kind of model helps massively. And there hasn’t been a need for a formalisation process.
Søren Hough
Was there anything else you wanted to share with us about The Lockon?
Glade
I’ve missed quite a key aspect of our organising. We also use a working group model, so tasks can be devolved down. Rather than having to quickly go around and ask everyone if they’re okay with something happening, we devolve. Your kind of mandate, informally, is ‘go do this.’ A couple of long-standing working groups, like our Direct Democracy Working Group, have been meeting to work out and discuss how we directly impact our community and what tools are available. (I’ve not been part of this group — I’ve come in at the end.) The Direct Democracy group has lots of learned, educated people who are happy to pile through materials. I’ve come in explicitly because I was involved quite early on when it was like, ‘Okay, this is how we should do things — we’ll have this weekly meeting, the chore list…’ And this hasn’t really evolved. That was [when we were] organising for just a few people. Now we’re organising for three times as many. And it’s not the greatest — it’s very janky. So we are examining that and seeing if we can bring in some more structures. And this, again, is coming up through the Direct Democracy Working Group.
We’ve come to the conclusion that we want to organise around labour. We’ll break down all the tasks that are daily in the squat and then we’ll have very fluid groups you can move between. But fundamentally, rather than having a room full of so many people, you’ll be represented by a coordinator from this working group who will take the views of people into consideration, bring them in, and there’ll be a small group of three or four people. Trying to push everyone into a meeting and then having everybody express their views how they want to without pressure is very difficult. That many people for an hour, a whole agenda list — it clashes. So we want a way for people to be able to participate directly but via the working group kind of model.
Søren Hough
This sounds like something resembling what José Llunas Pujols outlined regarding delegates in his 1882 essay, “What is Anarchy” (1882). What power do these delegatees have in your system? Are they recallable? Are they permanent positions, or is it a rotating sort of list?
Glade
To clarify, it’s not in place yet. This is what the committee decided and we are in a position to bring it to the group. But we also want to have a final round of everyone who wants to have a say to come directly participate in that penultimate meeting. And nothing’s going to be fixed [in stone]. You’re not going to be blocked out if you don’t attend or whatever. But before we present it and start to explain how it works to people, we want people to be able to mould it how they see fit, because it’s only three or four of us sat down talking about this. ‘We agree this is a good idea — let’s see if it’s what other people want.’
What I’m kind of directing and expressing is that the working group should be self-contained. The working group will decide what the limitations of that delegate is — we’ll give people tools that they can use, like votes, consensus building, these kinds of ideas. The delegates would not have any power per se, because they’ll be representing the views of a group. They don’t have any decision-making capability. They just take the information from that working group and bring it to the rest of the community.
Søren Hough
I think that’s really the only way to do it.
Glade
Definitely. We challenge hierarchy as much as possible — root it out. Just living together, just being people, it creates informal hierarchies which are hard to deconstruct. [Gestures to the interview room, which is also the bedroom of Lockon resident, Mark.] This is a particularly nice room, for example, but the makeshift rooms downstairs are less nice. That is a hierarchical kind of relationship, but then Mark is so open for this room to be used for this kind of thing. And likewise, people with the nice rooms are very welcoming and bring people in, and it’s good to have that ability to share a generous luxury with different people.
Søren Hough
Earlier you alluded to this ideal vision of spreading squats across the city. This is a two-part question: first is, do you think that mutual aid in and of itself is revolutionary? And then more broadly, I understand that this project emerged out of the pandemic. Frequently, anarchist spaces are built to purpose until they’re not needed, then they sort of go away. Obviously, there’s still people who need food and so on. But as the pandemic fluctuates, or if it starts to wind down, will The Lockon and CCK continue?
Glade
I mean, space and food are two things that people always, always need. The reasons for needing those spaces are varied; you could come from an abusive household and you need to get [out], or you might not have access to money. So, fundamentally, space is always going to be a necessity. That’s why opening a squat is always going to be a constructive creative process, because you are filling a need. So once we have facilities, we will continue to try to provide food to anybody who needs it at any time, for any reason, no judgement.
The model of CCK and the way we operate is in response to the pandemic. Once those pressures drop or cease, CCK has its own wheels now. It has operated out of different spaces when we’ve had to self isolate, close the building down. It has the ability to function in and of itself with support from local people just because they have the knowledge and they’re well placed. As for squatting, opening up more spaces and feeding people — I really enjoy directly feeding people, handing them food. I’d like to see that again.
Then what happens in the new spaces that we open and how they operate is completely down to them. If I’m in that space, you know, I’m going to bring that desire to feed people. Other people might focus on free stuff — definitely providing provisions and resources to anybody. Another place might be a response to domestic violence and a safe space for people who are vulnerable.
We also have informal connections with a lot of London squats and their projects that we get to hear about. One of them will open up a building and act like a skeleton crew keeping things functional, keeping people safe, providing resources, physical tools, as well as things like, ‘This is a good way of solving problems.’ They open up to any rough sleepers that need it — very, very, brave and brazen and welcoming and accepting. And they’ve had great success from what I can tell, but it’s also very challenging. It’s not a model to quickly replicate. You need to have a very strong crew to do that.
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