Tony Mahoney, who has died aged 61, was at the centre of three epic east London squats in the late 60s and 70s: Ilford, Arbour Square, Stepney, and Parfett Street, Whitechapel. The legacy of that movement echoes in institutions such as Shelter and the Big Issue, and in vivid, smallscale neighbourhoods saved from redevelopment. Mahoney was also a leading light in 70s gay liberation.
Charismatic, complex and caustic, he used forensic skills gained from a Jesuit and Carmelite education to win national coverage for his cause. A fearless negotiator with judges, policemen and bailiffs; a skillful spokesman and coordinator, he was renowned for his hospitality, and for a flamboyant elegance achieved, often, in houses without hot water.
Born in Ilford, Essex, Mahoney went to Alfred Hitchcock's old school, St Ignatius college in Stamford Hill, then to the Aylesford Carmelite seminary. He was even sent to Rome, but left the monastic life in 1964. A job at Smiths Industries ended when Mahoney discovered the firm was manufacturing nuclear weapon components - he was already a CND veteran.
His activist career began when he befriended the family of a sacked Ford worker with epilepsy, who had consequently lost his council flat. Redbridge Council had just bought rows of large old houses in Ilford preparatory to replacing them with a motorway. So, in 1969, Mahoney and Ron Bailey led the move to open them up for the homeless. The media were alerted and showed bailiffs beating up families and workmen wrecking habitable buildings. Faced with disastrous press coverage, the council rehoused some families and issued licences to others. The houses are still standing.
Mahoney had moved in with the families, and been repeatedly arrested. In this and later court cases, he was fearlessly eloquent, clad in a Dr Who-style fedora, long scarf and velvet flares. A landmark legal decision ruled that landlords now had to apply for a court order before they could evict.
The squatting movement grew exponentially. Together with a future founder of Greenham women's peace march, Mahoney ran the Campaign to Clear Hostels and Slums from an office near Brick Lane, east London. In Stepney's Arbour Square, the campaign housed working-class families in council flats left empty for 18 months awaiting rehabilitation.
The activists then realised they needed housing themselves. The Fieldgate area (behind Whitechapel's 80s mosque and 50s synagogue) was then poised between departing Jewish and incoming Bengali communities, many of whom, in one way or another, joined or supported the squatters. In 1972 this was a designated clearance area. Two streets of small houses, owned by a textile business and kept empty in waiting for a government buy-out, were the site of the next and longest mass squat.
There were extraordinary scenes all through 1973; the drama was, as one longstanding resident recounted in Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar's 1980 anthology, Squatting: the Real Story, "better than the telly".
After a February dawn eviction, Alsatians were locked into the buildings to deter re-entry. Mahoney meanwhile made an impassioned TV protest - which resulted in a trained dog-handler advising the squatters to stuff sausages through the letterboxes. The guard-dogs emerged, tails wagging, to applause, flashing cameras and national coverage.
Mahoney's achievement was based on media relations. He knew each housing and social affairs correspondent by name, and started with national broadsheets rather than local papers. Journalists would be invited to a meal, music and wine. Their presence was crucial. Faced with everything from street theatre to fake bidders trouncing attempts to auction the houses over the squatters' heads, the textile business capitulated and issued licences. There were still people living legally rent-free until the 1980s. Many later became housing association tenants of the same properties.
Mahoney was gay with an extraordinary ability to engage with the straightest East End communist or elderly local with his "queenly wit". At first critical of the pieties of an emergent Gay Liberation Front, he later co-founded East London GLF, and stayed close to the theatrical Bethnal Rouge collective. He remained a believer, was part of a liberation theology group with Clifford Longley and others, and expressed his view of the incarnation as a higher humanism.
In the late 70s Mahoney embarked for Alexandria intending to write a book about Coptic Christianity. He moved on to Cairo, working for the British Council. But back in London in the early 1980s he found a changed landscape. He retained his flair for organising memorable events, though now as an English language teacher at Westminster University, Hampstead Education Centre and Newham college.
Moving up from a Finsbury Park bedsit through a damp and cellar-like basement on the Isle of Dogs, Mahoney was eventually granted a light-filled housing association flat which he and his students transformed with characteristic flair: a vine on the balcony, flowering window-boxes and hand-laid parquet flooring. He read enormously, loved concerts and cooked fine meals - for one female colleague, every Sunday for six years.
In 2004 he developed double cataracts and had to take early retirement. Two eye operations were followed by pneumonia. He seems to have been discharged too soon, and never fully recovered.
Mahoney's legacy is the cosmopolitan enclave of small houses and Victorian flats behind Whitechapel mosque. His wake was held just a few doors from his old home at a hub of the new anarchist movement, the London Action Resource Centre. Food came from Tayyab's, the buzzing Asian restaurant where young professionals have succeeded their immigrant parents who once squatted the nearby flats. Also nearby is an enormous, derelict Rowton House for "homeless vagrants", empty for decades and waiting perhaps for a mass occupation spearheaded by someone like Mahoney.
· Cornelius Antony O'Mahony (Tony Mahoney), activist, born May 21 1944; died around September 20 2005