Trench Town Was a Government Housing Scheme Before It Was a Shanty Town

• Trench Town began as a 1930s colonial housing scheme
• Government later burned over 800 shanties there
• The eviction inspired Desmond Dekker’s 007 (Shanty Town)
• A scholar cites Deuteronomy on the state’s duty to the poor

Trench Town, the Kingston community that gave the world No Woman, No Cry, began its life not as an informal settlement but as a planned colonial housing scheme. From the 1930s, the Central Housing Authority acquired a 200-acre parcel called Trench Pen in western Kingston specifically to address dire housing needs across Kingston, St Andrew and St Catherine, erecting traditional Jamaican vernacular timber-framed houses for rent, built around compounds with shared communal bathroom, kitchen and storage facilities, exactly the government yards Bob Marley sang about decades later.

The community’s later, more infamous history involved the state actively clearing it rather than building it. The Public Works Department and Ministry of Housing levelled and burned over 800 shanties, with a 300-strong police detachment standing by and extra security posted at Jamaica House, Gordon House and other government sites, anticipating unrest. Displaced residents moved their shacks, whole and dismantled, on trucks, hand-carts and animal-drawn buggies to resettle at May Pen Cemetery, Moonlight City, Tower Hill, Sligoville and Riverton City, according to Dr Patricia Green, writing in the Gleaner, some braving the towering flames and intense heat to retrieve furniture and building materials before the demolition crews finished.

The eviction left a lasting cultural mark. By summer 1967, Desmond Dekker and the Aces released 007 (Shanty Town), one of the first Jamaican-produced recordings to reach international audiences, its lyrics describing looting, shooting and rude boys on probation against a shanty town backdrop drawn directly from that displacement.

Green’s argument, marking 60 years since the anthem, is explicitly theological: she cites Deuteronomy’s command to be openhanded toward the poor and needy in the land, and Proverbs’ warning that those who refuse to help the poor should not expect to be heard when they themselves cry out for help, as a scriptural case against exactly the kind of forced clearance Trench Town experienced. A May 2019 Draft National Housing Policy has since tried to formalise more adequate, affordable housing provision, but Trench Town’s own history, planned scheme, then mass eviction, then folk memory preserved in reggae and rocksteady, remains a specific, documented example of the pattern Green’s biblical argument is aimed against.

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