Focus E15
Based on Wikipedia: Focus E15
The Mothers Who Refused to Leave
In September 2014, a group of young mothers walked into an empty block of flats in Stratford, East London, and refused to leave. The flats had sat vacant for up to eight years. The mothers had been told they might be shipped off to Birmingham or Manchester—cities over a hundred miles away—because London had no room for them. They decided to make a point.
The Carpenters Estate occupation lasted only weeks, but it ignited a housing movement that continues to this day. It also revealed something that struck many Londoners as outrageous: in a borough where 16,000 people languished on a waiting list for housing, perfectly habitable flats were gathering dust.
How It Started: 29 Eviction Notices
The story begins in 2013 at a hostel called Focus E15, a temporary shelter for young homeless people in Newham, one of East London's poorest boroughs. The East Thames Housing Association, which ran the facility, served eviction notices to 29 mothers living there. Almost all of them were under 25.
The reason? Newham Council had cut funding for the hostel. The mothers were told to find accommodation elsewhere. The council's suggestion? Consider moving to Birmingham or Manchester, where rents were cheaper.
For these women, such a move would have been devastating. It would have meant leaving behind family support networks, job connections, and everything familiar. It would have meant uprooting children from schools and communities. The mothers organised.
They took the name of their hostel—Focus E15—and turned it into a campaign.
From Stalls to Squats: The Escalation
The group started modestly. Every Saturday, they ran a help and advice stall on Stratford High Street, talking to passersby about housing rights and their own situation. They tried to work within the system.
In 2015, they attempted to speak directly to Robin Wales, then the Mayor of Newham, at a local event called the Mayor's Show. Security guards escorted them away. Wales's dismissive response pushed them toward more confrontational tactics.
The mayor would later be officially censured by the council's standards advisory committee for "failing to show appropriate respect to a member of the public." He was ordered to attend a mediated meeting with Focus E15 members. But by then, the mothers had already moved beyond asking for meetings.
Their first occupation came in January 2014. Mothers pushed children in buggies into the East Thames Housing Association's offices in Stratford and took over the showroom—a model living space designed to showcase the association's properties. They turned it into a children's party venue.
It was theatrical, attention-grabbing, and pointed: here was a housing organisation with pretty display flats while actual mothers and children had nowhere to live.
The Carpenters Estate: Empty Homes in a Housing Crisis
The Carpenters Estate occupation in September 2014 proved to be Focus E15's defining moment. The estate, located in Stratford near the 2012 Olympic Park, had been partially emptied by the council as part of a planned redevelopment. Entire blocks stood vacant.
The mothers occupied flats on Doran Walk. One flat became a self-managed social centre, visited by hundreds of supporters. The occupation made national news. Journalists and photographers documented what they found: flats that had been empty for four to eight years but remained in perfectly livable condition.
The contrast was stark. Newham had 16,000 people waiting for housing, yet these homes sat empty because—according to the council—renovation was too expensive and demolition was planned. To Focus E15 and their supporters, this seemed like bureaucratic madness.
Russell Brand, then at the height of his political activism phase, visited both the occupation and the subsequent court case, speaking in support of the mothers. The Guardian sent photographers. The story spread.
Newham Council immediately sought a court order to evict the squatters. A local councillor dismissed the occupiers as "agitators and hangers on." The council argued the estate needed to come down regardless of the condition of individual flats.
Victory and Its Limits
The court granted the council a repossession order. The squatters agreed to leave by October 7th, 2014. But Focus E15 claimed victory anyway.
Why? The mayor apologised for how the mothers had initially been treated. He promised that 40 homeless people could move back onto the Carpenters Estate and live there until demolition. Most importantly, the young women who had started the campaign were eventually rehoused within Newham—exactly what they had demanded from the beginning.
There was a catch, though. They were placed in privately rented accommodation on 12-month contracts, not council housing. This meant less security, higher costs, and the constant threat of future displacement. It was a partial victory at best.
The original Focus E15 hostel building eventually became council property in 2016. Renamed Brimstone House, it continued to serve as temporary accommodation. By 2019, residents there had begun legal action against the council, arguing their "temporary" placements had stretched on far too long.
The Wider Fight: Individual Struggles
Having won their own battle, the Focus E15 mothers didn't disband. They continued campaigning, applying the lessons of their own experience to help others facing similar situations.
In 2015, a mother with three children was evicted from her privately rented home in Stratford with just two weeks' notice. The council initially promised local rehousing, then offered emergency accommodation in Edgware—a journey across London that would have made it nearly impossible to get her children to school or herself to work as a cleaner at council offices.
When she refused this offer, the council declared her "intentionally homeless" and called the police to remove her from the housing office. The family spent a night sleeping on the floor of Forest Gate police station. Focus E15 intervened, and emergency local accommodation was eventually found.
A separate case that year involved a mother and daughter evicted from their council flat on Kerrison Road after the mother lost her housing benefit and fell behind on rent. Focus E15 occupied their flat in April 2015, calling the action "Jane Come Home"—a reference to the landmark 1966 television play Cathy Come Home, which had shocked Britain with its depiction of a family's descent into homelessness.
The group redecorated the flat and threw a "welcome home" party. The mother's extended family offered to repay her rental debt. The council refused.
Then came a dirty trick. The mother was invited to a meeting at council offices. While she was out, officials attempted to repossess the flat. A 20-year-old Focus E15 supporter who had stayed behind was arrested on suspicion of squatting in a residential building—an offence that had been criminalised in England and Wales in 2012. The charges were dropped less than 24 hours before trial.
The Out-of-London Exile
One of Focus E15's recurring battles has been against the practice of relocating homeless Londoners far from the city. This isn't unique to Newham—councils across the capital have done it, shipping people to cheaper areas in the Midlands, the North, or surrounding counties. But Newham has been one of the worst offenders.
In 2016, a Newham mother with three children was placed in a single room at Boundary House in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire—outside London entirely. She was told it would be temporary. She lived there for 18 months.
After complaints and Focus E15's involvement, she was offered accommodation in Birmingham. Then Basildon. Eventually, Newham stopped using Boundary House altogether, though whether this was due to campaigner pressure or other factors remains unclear.
A 2018 case followed a similar pattern. A mother who had lived in Newham for 12 years was offered accommodation in Birmingham after six months in emergency housing. When she requested a review—since accepting would mean losing her job and pulling her son out of school—the council said the offer was appropriate. When she refused, she was declared intentionally homeless and denied the right to appeal.
Focus E15 supported her legal challenge. She won the right to appeal in court.
New Mayor, Same Problems?
Robin Wales, the mayor who had been censured over his treatment of Focus E15, lost his position in 2018. His replacement, Rokhsana Fiaz, promised a different approach. She pledged to rehouse displaced people and give residents more voice in decisions about estates like Carpenters.
But old habits die hard in bureaucracies. In 2019, a woman living in Victoria House—the building formerly known as the Focus E15 hostel—received a note from a council worker threatening her with homelessness. Mayor Fiaz was publicly horrified: "This undermines everything we are working towards. I feel massively let down and ashamed that this happened."
By 2022, Focus E15 was criticising the council again, this time over a ballot about regenerating the Carpenters Estate. The council and its housing arm, Populo Living, spent over £350,000 on the ballot process. Residents who opposed the plans had to run an unfunded protest campaign against this official machinery.
The Research and the Art
Between 2015 and 2016, Focus E15 members participated in what academics call "participatory action research"—a method where the people affected by an issue help design and conduct the study rather than just being subjects of it. They analysed 64 interviews with people who had contacted Newham Council about housing or homelessness in the preceding year.
The findings confirmed what the mothers already knew from experience: Newham had one of the highest numbers of people in temporary accommodation in London, and one of the highest rates of rehousing homeless people outside the city entirely.
The Focus E15 story also entered the cultural sphere. LUNG Theatre created a verbatim play called E15, performing at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival before transferring to Battersea Arts Centre. "Verbatim theatre" means the dialogue comes directly from real interviews, speeches, and documents rather than being invented by a playwright. The young cast performed surrounded by the actual banners and slogans from the campaign.
Another theatre troupe, the all-female "You Should See the Other Guy," toured a piece called Land of the Three Towers across London housing estates facing their own eviction threats. The play used documentary footage from the Focus E15 occupation, drawing out parallels for audiences who might soon find themselves in similar situations.
Songs and Shops
The campaign spawned other projects. The Rebel Choir, an all-female singing group, grew out of Focus E15. They have run workshops and performed at events like the Women's Strike Assembly on International Women's Day 2018. In the same year, the online radio station NTS released a music compilation on cassette and digital formats to raise funds for the group.
With funding for a social networking hub, Focus E15 rented a corner shop in Stratford and named it Sylvia's Corner. The name honours Sylvia Pankhurst, the socialist and suffragette who spent much of her life organising in East London. Pankhurst had lived in nearby Bow and founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes, which combined the fight for women's voting rights with campaigns for the working poor. The connection felt appropriate: a new generation of East London mothers naming their space after a woman who had fought similar battles a century earlier.
What Focus E15 Represents
The Focus E15 campaign emerged from specific circumstances—29 eviction notices at one hostel in one London borough—but it touched on something much larger. London's housing crisis has been decades in the making, driven by the sale of council housing under Right to Buy, chronic underbuilding, the financialisation of property as an investment vehicle, and the transformation of formerly working-class areas into playgrounds for global capital.
The 2012 Olympics, held just down the road from the Carpenters Estate, accelerated gentrification in Stratford and surrounding areas. Property values soared. Long-term residents found themselves priced out. The regeneration that was supposed to benefit everyone seemed to benefit mainly developers and newcomers.
Against this backdrop, Focus E15 represented something rare: a group of the most marginalised people—young, homeless, mostly single mothers—who refused to be moved quietly. They didn't have money or connections. They had each other, a refusal to accept their treatment as inevitable, and a talent for making their cause visible.
The empty flats on the Carpenters Estate became a perfect symbol. Here was the absurdity of the housing crisis made concrete: homes standing empty while families were told there was no room for them in London. The image cut through the usual abstractions about supply and demand, regeneration and redevelopment.
Whether Focus E15's tactics can be replicated, whether their victories will prove lasting, whether the broader housing crisis will improve or worsen—these remain open questions. But they demonstrated that even people with very little power can make themselves heard, can change how their situation is discussed, and can sometimes win concrete improvements in their lives.
A decade after those first eviction notices, the campaign continues. The housing crisis continues too. The tension between the two shows no sign of resolution.