Thatcherite 'anarchism' How inspired punks built a Hull housing co-operative

Forty years ago, a small group of students and university dropouts living rough had a novel idea. What if they pooled savings and jobless benefits for a terrace house, rather than rent a run-down flat?

- Peter Hetherington

They raised a deposit for a £3,200 mortgage on a neglected two-bedroom property in the Victorian terraces of west Hull, running down to the quayside of a once-thriving fishing port. Their enthusiasm for punk bands belied a determination to work the system rather than fight the class war in a city evoked by Philip Larkin: "Spires and cranes... ships up streets."

So began the ultimate counter-revolution for a group driven by what Martin Newman, one of its founders, called "green, practical anarchism". After largely teaching themselves bricklaying, joinery and plumbing, and solving their own accommodation crisis, why not help others sleeping rough?

A workers' co-operative was thus born as Giroscope - named after the ubiquitous giro benefit cheques of the 1980s. Pooling these partly funded their first acquisition and laid the foundations for what is now a multimillion-pound charitable social enterprise, headed by the tireless Newman.

Their tentative steps into property development became a campaign for more housing renewal in a long-neglected inner-city area in a country with some of Europe's oldest housing stock: more than a third of English homes are well over 80 years old.

But their inspiration emerged from the unlikeliest ideology: Thatcherism. Deregulation of the mortgage market early in the late PM's premiership led to looser borrowing, with banks giving loans alongside building societies. "She was encouraging people to make money, so we hatched this plan to organise and achieve rather than bring down capitalism first," said Newman, a pragmatic punk turned social property developer. "Credit became easy... Plenty of brokers, 'Jack the lads', happy to fill in a form on our behalf. So why not work the system?"