{"id":37222,"date":"2024-11-26T10:54:24","date_gmt":"2024-11-26T10:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/?p=37222"},"modified":"2024-11-26T10:54:24","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T10:54:24","slug":"how-the-battle-of-claremont-road-changed-the-world-the-whole-of-alternative-london-turned-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/archives\/37222","title":{"rendered":"How the battle of Claremont Road changed the world: \u2018The whole of alternative London turned up\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thirty years ago, more than 500 activists united to save a street \u2013 and their actions marked a major turning-point in the environmental movement<\/strong>
Steve Rose
Tue 26 Nov 2024 10.00 GMT

Walking through Leyton, in east London, you could easily miss Claremont Road. It is hardly a road at all, but a stubby little side street between terrace houses that ends abruptly in a brick wall. But when it comes to the history of direct action, this could be one of the most significant sites in England. Thirty years ago, in November 1994, the scene here was very different: 700 police officers and bailiffs in riot gear marched into a significantly larger Claremont Road and waged battle against about 500 activists, who were dug in \u2013 some of them literally \u2013 against efforts to evict them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The activists occupied rooftop towers, treehouses, underground bunkers and even secret tunnels. It took three days to get them all out. In retrospect, the \u201cBattle of Claremont Road\u201d, as it came to be known, was an almost unbelievable event. \u201cI talk about the three C\u2019s that underpin this type of activism: creativity, courage and cheek,\u201d says campaigner Camilla Berens, who was there. \u201cIt set the template for the next 20 or 30 years of how to do responsible disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason for the battle, and the reason Claremont Road is now so short, lies behind that brick wall at its end: what is now the six-lane A12, also known as the M11 link road. The road had been planned since the 1960s, to connect east London to the north-east, but nothing happened for decades. In the interim, many of the condemned homes were vacated by residents and reoccupied by squatters and artists. (As a student, I squatted on Claremont Road for three years. I left in summer 1993.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An old car with poles stuck through it in all directions is used to block Claremont Road
View image in fullscreen Cars and shopping trolleys full of concrete were used to block the road. Photograph: Julia Guest
By the 1990s, the Conservative government was determined to make good on Margaret Thatcher\u2019s promise to carry out \u201cthe biggest road-building programme since the Romans\u201d. Resistance from locals and environmental groups was growing, though, against schemes such as the M3 extension at Twyford Down in Hampshire (which went ahead), and the proposed east London river crossing through Oxleas Wood, in south-east London (which did not).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe M11 link road was effectively the Cinderella of the three,\u201d says veteran cycling campaigner Roger Geffen. Unlike Twyford Down and Oxleas Wood, the M11 scheme went through a poor urban neighbourhood, rather than an area of natural beauty, \u201cbut in a way, that\u2019s what made it interesting,\u201d he says. It was destroying the environment by uprooting trees and prioritising cars, but it was also destroying a community. This was the era of the Criminal Justice Act, targeting illegal raves, squatters and Travellers, which also passed in November 1994. The poll tax riots of 1990 had been another landmark. The Claremont Road protests were a \u201ca joined-up mix of social and environmental motivations\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, Geffen had just moved to London. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a green brain cell in my head,\u201d he says, but he had just taken up cycling. Weaving through the traffic-clogged streets, he says, he realised: \u201cWhat I was doing wasn\u2019t crazy. I was overtaking a lot of people in little boxes, and that was far crazier than what I was doing.\u201d He joined the London Cycling Campaign, which led him into anti-car activism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the early 90s, the Department for Transport had begun repossessing and demolishing houses along the route of the M11 link road. In 1994, Claremont Road was the last street standing. \u201cWe realised that we needed to make a big focus of it,\u201d says Geffen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists built webbing up on the rooftops to evade police.
View image in fullscreen
Activists built webbing up on the rooftops to evade police. Photograph: Julia Guest
\u201cOne of the first things we did was to barricade it and set up street furniture,\u201d says John Drury, then a PhD student studying collective action. The street became something of a countercultural tourist attraction, with colourful murals and outdoor sculptures made of junk and a public cafe. Doug (not his real name), then an unemployed activist, says: \u201cThere was a real buzz, and it had a lot of energy, and everyone was really friendly, so I just started sticking around.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the inevitable showdown approached, preparations became more rushed. \u201cWe had to just throw everything at it,\u201d says Geffen. Some protesters built wooden observation towers on top of their houses. \u201cSo we thought, OK, what happens if we build an absolutely huge tower?\u201d This became \u201cDolly\u201d, a scaffolding structure 30 metres (100ft) high, rising out of the rooftops. It was named after Dolly Watson, a 92-year-old former actor who had lived on Claremont Road her entire life, and was among the last of the residents to leave. She once told a reporter: \u201cThey\u2019re not dirty hippy squatters, they\u2019re the grandchildren I never had.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other ad-hoc battlements appeared: treehouses, connected to the houses across the street by webs of netting and walkways; roadblocks made out of cars and shopping trolleys filled with concrete. Some activists built underground bunkers in which to seal themselves \u2013 \u201cvery elaborate womb-like structures that involved lots of layers of mattresses, foam, metal and furniture,\u201d Doug recalls. The idea was that whatever tool the police or bailiffs tried to use to get them out \u201cwould get gummed up\u201d. The upper floors of several houses beneath the tower were knocked together to create a \u201crat run\u201d, and the stairs up to them were removed, to make it harder for the police to reach the protesters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Volunteers had been monitoring police compounds for signs of activity. The callout came on 27 November. \u201c\u2018It\u2019s the one, it\u2019s the big eviction. Claremont is going to be taken,\u2019\u201d recalls Berens, a journalist who reported on the events for the Guardian. \u201cI think the whole of alternative London turned up. There was a massive party the night before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next morning, 28 November, an estimated 500 protesters were ready, remembers Neil Goodwin, a film-maker who recorded much of the siege: \u201cThe rooftops were packed; every bunker, every treehouse, on the nets, the landings, the walkways, up the tower \u2013 everyone was in situ.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe police turned up in the early afternoon,\u201d recalls Mark Green (not his real name), another participant. \u201cThere were hundreds of them and they swarmed into the street in stormtrooper gear with batons raised. They were expecting a full-on riot. Instead they just found a bunch of hippies and local residents sitting around.\u201d A sound system on the tower cranked up the Prodigy album Music for the Jilted Generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists on the rooftops with webbing and a 30ft tower that activists built in the background
View image in fullscreen
A 30ft tower was also built, with a sound system from which music blared out. Photograph: Julia Guest
Things didn\u2019t go as planned for the police. \u201cThey thought they were going to start by tackling the houses, and then they realised people had locked on to the road itself,\u201d says Julia Guest, then an aspiring photographer. Activists had drilled holes into the asphalt, into which they had sunk lock-on bolts, which were covered over with sheets of metal with holes in them. The activists \u201clay down with their arms through the holes and locked their wrists on with handcuffs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The police and bailiffs brought in mechanical diggers, cherrypickers, ladders, hammers and crowbars; and every occupant made themselves as difficult as possible to remove. \u201cI was in the loft at number 42, which I\u2019d covered in corrugated iron and filled with tyres,\u201d says Goodwin. \u201cThey had to prise us open, like a sardine tin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the bailiffs eventually broke through that evening, Goodwin attached himself to part of the scaffolding tower with a bicycle D-lock, the keys of which he had chucked into a pile of tyres. \u201cThe bailiff pokes his head in, shines his torch around and goes: \u2018OK, we\u2019ll do this tomorrow.\u2019 So they left, and I\u2019m like: \u2018I\u2019m gonna be sitting here all night.\u2019 So I said to people: \u2018Could you see if you can find some D-lock keys?\u2019\u201d Luckily, they were just teetering over the edge of a gap in the floorboards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone remembers being cold and hungry, especially the first night. Few people had warm clothes, let alone sleeping bags. \u201cAfter it got dark, someone led me down through a loft to warm up a bit,\u201d says Green. \u201cWe then went through a hole in a wall and exited through a wardrobe, which was surreal, into a room where people were watching themselves on the news on an old black-and-white portable TV.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the second day, about half the protesters had been evicted. But, says Geffen: \u201cThe police were puzzled that people who they thought they\u2019d evicted kept reappearing. Eventually, they got a metal detector out.\u201d They discovered the activists had built a tunnel out of oil drums, running underneath the back gardens and into one of the houses on the next road. Supplies and people had been going back and forth the whole time. \u201cWhen they found the tunnel, everyone on the tower and all the roofs just laughed at them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The longer the protest went on, \u201cthe more brutal the police and bailiffs became\u201d, says Berens. Green says he saw people shoved, grabbed and falling from heights (though no one was seriously injured). \u201cIt definitely felt like there was a political element to it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The protesters \u201chad a very strong commitment to non-violence\u201d, says Geffen. \u201cWe needed to be acting in accordance with the values that we wanted to speak for. If we\u2019re talking about environmental sustainability and sharing this Earth, and working in community, then violence doesn\u2019t form part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of the second day, there was only one protester left: Doug. \u201cI kept moving,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you live on a scaffolding tower for a few days, you can get quite good at swinging around. And they didn\u2019t really want to chase me around in a game of cat and mouse.\u201d Doug\u2019s persistence extended the protest by another full day. The police even brought in a \u201chostage negotiator\u201d to try to coax him down. \u201cHe pretended he was my dad, and was just concerned for my welfare.\u201d Doug was not swayed. \u201cI grabbed some rope, a saw and a few planks of wood, and I used them to make myself what was basically a coffin, which I slept in.\u201d The police finally got to him the next morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sign over the front of a house reading, \u2018Please leave Dolly\u2019s home alone\u2019, referring to Dolly Watson, a 92-year-old former actor who had lived on Claremont Road all her life
View image in fullscreen
A sign referring to Dolly Watson, a 92-year-old former actor who had lived on Claremont Road all her life. Photograph: Julia Guest
In the end, the police spent more than \u00a31m evicting the protesters. The M11 link road still got built, of course. Nobody believed the campaign would stop it. \u201cBut what it did do,\u201d says Drury, \u201cwas it turned the roads programme into a political thing. So, we won the moral argument, even if we didn\u2019t win that battle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Labour came into power in 1997, it cut the major road schemes inherited from the Tories from 150 to 37, and pledged to focus on public transport. It felt like a victory for the anti-car campaigners, but it did not last. By 2000, New Labour was committing at least \u00a330bn to building and improving roads, and forecasting that another 2,500 miles of road would need to be built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several of the Claremont Road activists went straight on to form Reclaim the Streets in 1995, which performed guerrilla anti-car actions \u2013 such as blocking off public roads to hold impromptu \u201cstreet parties\u201d \u2013 across the UK and worldwide. It also paved the way for subsequent campaigns such as Plane Stupid, the Climate Action Camps, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The protest changed the lives of many of those who took part. \u201cThat was the day that I crossed the line,\u201d says Berens. \u201cBefore that, I was a journalist looking in and reporting on it, but because it was such an impressive campaign, and the people were so amazing, I became a committed activist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt impacted me quite profoundly,\u201d says Guest. She became a documentary film-maker focusing on human rights in Israel, Palestine and Iraq.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Morozzo, one of the key organisers alongside Geffen, is now campaign director at Greenpeace. Drury is a professor of social psychology at Sussex university. Doug is a lawyer dealing with civic issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Green went on to design the famous Extinction Symbol, as used by Extinction Rebellion. He is less nostalgic about the event: \u201cI found the overall experience cold, dirty and depressing,\u201d he says. He doesn\u2019t like to describe it as a \u201cbattle\u201d. \u201cThat suggests an exchange of violence, whereas it was just a group of people passively occupying an area, with the only violence coming from the police.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But like a battle, the event took its toll. As well as committed activists, the area and the protest attracted many people with drug and mental health problems, not to mention locals who were either uprooted or forced to live on the edge of a six-lane road. \u201cI naively hoped it would be a spark for a wider and longer-lasting societal change,\u201d says Green. \u201cInstead, things have just got much worse since then than we could ever have imagined.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Geffen received an MBE for services to cycling in 2015, and now heads Low Traffic Future. \u201cWhat I\u2019m now doing is still basically the same cause,\u201d he says. \u201cIn the 1990s, transport, roads, cars were the central issue for the environmental movement, then we lost a lot of that momentum. Environmental campaigners have gone on to do some great things on energy \u2026 but transport is now the biggest-emitting sector of the UK economy, as well as being problematic in terms of air pollution, road safety, children\u2019s ability to play in the streets and all the waste products of car culture.\u201d He thinks the movement needs to focus again on transport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another action like Claremont Road is unthinkable now, given how far legislation has tightened against protest, public disorder and squatting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt breaks my heart,\u201d says Guest, \u201cbecause actions like that created a generation of people that have become acutely aware, and prepared to act on strong beliefs. That is, after all, the only way that anything that\u2019s unjust gets changed. And if people are prevented from being able to freely connect with that sort of experience, then what sort of world is going to come next?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2024\/nov\/26\/how-the-battle-of-claremont-road-changed-the-world-the-whole-of-alternative-london-turned-up<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years ago, more than 500 activists united to save a street \u2013 and their actions marked a major turning-point in the environmental movementSteve RoseTue 26 Nov 2024 10.00 GMT Walking through Leyton, in east London, you could easily miss … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[303,185,16,95,48,1836],"class_list":["post-37222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1","tag-killthebill","tag-law","tag-photography","tag-police","tag-protest","tag-rts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37223,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37222\/revisions\/37223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanlodge.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}