Ernest Perry, MP for Battersea South, looks back to the years before and immediately after WWII - vandalism to trees and squatters in Nissen huts:
"I remember the days when I was chairman of a local government committee before the war, when, as soon as we planted some young saplings to make a street look more beautiful, children would come along and take a delight in bending the trees right to the ground so that they snapped, with the result that all the effort and money spent by the council "went for a Burton". That sort of thing happened then, and it is still happening.
On Wandsworth Common, where a very nice avenue of new trees was planted, 50 per cent. of them are now desecrated, mostly, I suppose, by adolescents and youths, or even by girls, who at night make a sort of foraging expedition to destroy the work done and paid for by ratepayers and taxpayers...
..."After the Second World War, in 1946, 1947 and 1948, there was an enormous number of empty Nissen huts, formerly used by the Army and RAF, on commons and open spaces in London, such as Clapham Common and Wandsworth Common, where I come from. They were in a dilapidated condition, but because of the extreme housing shortage squatters moved into them and turned them into first-class homes. The squatters, who were perhaps just out of the Forces - married men with children - made the huts homes to be proud of, homes that were a credit to them."
[Hansard: Link]