Lucky Jim, Mayfair Squatter

Thursday, Jan 29th, 2009, 12:22 pm Cities No Comments

As I read an article about London’s Mayfair squatters, I came across a reference to a blogger among the group who calls himself “luckyjim.” Out of curiosity, I looked up his blog and started reading. To my surprise, I found that he’s a better writer than all the journalists covering his plight (myself included), and in a certain sense seems to have more integrity. As he inhabits abandoned, multi-million dollar homes in an upper class London neighborhood, he documents the class struggles and social codes among these temporarily high-profile vagrants. The internal struggles over who can truly claim “outsider” status (”he admitted he worked for a brand consultancy and had a mortgage, which he defended as ‘more anarchic than renting’”) are juxtaposed with moments of genuine compassion and humiliation. It’s a mesmerizing window into the world of a highly literate, self-aware squatter.

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