Sorry for the lateness of this report but I seem to have been caught napping by the 10'th anniversary of destruction for the Newbury bypass creeping up unannounced and also it takes me ages to write this stuff. But what's a few days after 10 years? I've also missed the 10'th anniversary of Claremont Rd, M11 eviction and presumably I missed the anniversary of the truly magical Stanworth Valley. I had intended to show some pics from my archives of those amazingly wild times. Also apologies some of these pics are less than pin sharp. Most of the Newbury action took place during winter and it's hard holding a compact zoom lens sufficiently still with cold hands and when light levels were so low. Also the camera used to annoyingly fill up with tree lichen.

The Newbury bypass was the most destructive of all the conservative government's insane "roads to riches/(ruin)" road building program. Newbury already had one bypass to the east of the town but because of dysfunctional transport policy, infill development and selfishly car obsessed residents, both it and the town centre had become choked with mostly local traffic. The vindictive order to go ahead with the felling of 10,000 trees for the bypass of the old bypass and destroy an entire landscape was given literally in the last few hours of office by transport minister Brian Mawhinney just before he handed over to George Young. Up until this time, the findings of the bypass public enquiry had sat in his desk undecided upon for months. Young had previously been a member of Friends Of the Earth and everyone had been looking forward to him being very publicly expelled from FOE for supporting this egregious scheme until it turned out that he'd rather conveniently lapsed his membership. This was to be the first road protest that attracted significant support from both FOE and Greenpeace. All the others had been entirely grass roots.

Even before the destruction started at Newbury, media attention was intense. The Third Battle of Newbury campaign office had been under seige by mainstream journos for months. This was not just due to the good media skills that had been learned but also because the whole profile of direct action protest against road building had been raised massively by the previous campaign at Twyford Down and later the campaign against the M11 link road in east London. Some background here:
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/02/285484.html
then
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/03/287260.html

When the initial route clearance work started, Rendel the local lib dem MP would be out in the fields each morning arguing with protesters as to how wonderful the road would be for Newbury. He was so falling over himself to gain votes by promoting the road that he was almost driving the bulldozers himself.

One of the main strategies of direct action at Newbury was to establish dozens of defensive camps all along the route. It's estimated there were 39 such camps at the very peak. Some of these camps were little more than a few hard to defend tents on the ground. Many others were vertiginous villages of tree houses in the woods. All the tree houses in each camp would be linked by a network of high level rope walks strung from tree to tree.

The nature of the groups of people from camp to camp varied greatly. All over the country, all kinds of mostly young people were becoming inspired and politicised by all the regular coverage of the protests on their TV screens, newspapers and colour sups. There would be a steady influx of such new recruits and, on arrival at Newbury they could pick and choose which camp to live at and thereby what sort of atmosphere they wanted to live in, be that fluffy, spiky, punk, chilled, vegan etc. Training in non violent direct action, legal rights, tree climbing, tree house building and safety were given. Some of the names of the camps were purely geographical but others were much more inspired - heartbreak hotel, fluff central, spiritual roots, manic sha, rickety bridge (where I was, yeah!).

A typical days work for the forces of darkness would consist of about 700 cops and security guards, bailiffs and scab climbers storming into an apparently random camp at first light. The climbers from richard turner associates
 http://www.ropeaccessuk.com/
were universally loathed. First used for the eviction at Stanworth valley a year or so before:
 http://tash.gn.apc.org/simon.htm
these half dozen or so scumbags who had sold their souls to the devil basically enabled tree top evictions to be carried out at road protest sites around the country since it would have been quite beyond plod or regular bailiffs to venture more than a few feet above the ground.

The rope walks that we constructed enabled protesters to travel safely from tree to tree above the reach of police and security during evictions. In this way, protesters could not only flee from the bailiffs or move to where active defenders were needed but also just one person stood in the middle of a rope walk could prevent two trees being cut down either side. The bailiffs and scab climbers however would resort to potentially lethal practices such as pulling protesters out of the trees by attaching ropes to them.
 http://members.aol.com/pp3office/nbury03.htm
Also the climbers would sometimes cut the lower foot rope of a rope walk thereby putting a dangerous shock load onto the top rope. In this way, the evictions could be brutal and very hazardous. Every single one of the hundreds of police present would of course watch such dangerously illegal antics with a blind eye.

Many of the security guards on the ground were also encouraged to be violent by their supervisors.
 http://www-green.cusu.cam.ac.uk/archive/newbury/frenchie.html
But there were also several instances of them becoming so troubled by their conciences that they handed in their hard hats and actually changed sides and joined our ranks.
 http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/19960208000010.html

The police were enthusiastically using the newly created aggravated trespass law. Nearly everyone resisting eviction would be arrested and charged with this law and presented with the Newbury sausage. This was a map of the area with a sausage shaped outline drawn around the bypass route indicating the bail exclusion zone. This made it risky or impossible for anyone arrested to return to their camp and collect any belongings or even rejoin the protests elsewhere.

The tallest tree by a long way that was due to be felled was a truly gargantuan Corsican pine at Redding's copse that soared upwards ruler straight for what must have been a hundred feet. It was so tall that no one had been able to climb it until a longbow was brought in to fire a line over it's branches. A large tree house complex was then built near the top of it. The sherrif's officers had to bring in hydraulic platforms - cherry pickers - specially from the continent because there was nothing tall enough to reach the top in Britain. The end for the pine when it came was particularly brutal. The chain saw crews delighted in goading the evicted defenders with taunts of "Won't be long now before it's dead". At other woods too, they had also taken great pleasure in clear cutting all around some hard to remove tree protesters and cutting every lower branch off and leaving them trapped at the top of lone trees at the end of the day with no easy way down. This and their constant taunting made things become very personal. So when potentially valuable timber like the pine was felled, protesters would often, during the night hammer numerous hardened nails into the trunk lying on the ground waiting for collection the next day. This made the timber worthless as none of the saw mills would then accept it if they even suspected it contained metal as it was potentially ruinous to their bandsaws.

It'd be perfectly correct to point out that living in tree houses wasn't for everyone and hardly suitable for those less active or lacking a head for heights. But fortunately there were many, more inclusive ground based actions that often displayed much more imagination than just passively sitting up a tree waiting for eviction to come. The very first of these was right on day one of destruction when all the media were out in full force. Tripods were used to blockade the security vehicles in their own compound so security guards were unable to travel anywhere. No destruction at all was carried out that day which was a major victory. There were other similarly cheeky stunts such as letting the fire alarm off in the middle of the night at the hotel where the scab climbers were staying. One of the naughtiest stunts of all had to be TWOCing one of the contractor's JCBs one night and partially demolishing their Tott Hill compound with it.

There was also a truly amazing defensive tunnel built underneath Snelsmore camp where the geology was ideal for this unlike most other parts of the route that were only just above the water table. This tunnel was a feat of engineering to behold as it's clay walls were so cleanly cut that they appeared polished like some marble temple. The sheriff was clearly terrified at the cost and difficulty of having to extract someone from underground as they didn't then have anyone brave enough to venture underground and pull unwilling protesters out. As long as there was someone holding out down the tunnel - possibly for weeks, they knew they'd be quite unable to fell trees or bring in vehicles for fear of collapsing the tunnel. But the police then managed to pay some low life to infiltrate the Snelsmore camp and secretly report to them when there were very few present defending the camp one night and only one inexperienced person was down the tunnel.
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/true_spies/2405325.stm
The loss of this tunnel was quite a blow as it had taken months to dig.

It was always going to be hard to defend a long and linear route since it was usually impossible for us to know at which camp the forces of darkness would strike each day. On arrival they'd immediately form a cordon right around that camp making it very hard for us to get any reinforcements in. The eviction of rickety bridge camp was different. Rickety bridge was so called because during the wet winter, the camp was effectively an island surrounded on all sides by streams and a river and the only access to it was over an absurdly rickety bridge. This was where I and most of the London based RTS people were based. I had my own tree house 40 feet up in a tall ash called rainy view because of the constant wet weather during it's construction. We had delayed eviction for this camp through legal channels in the high court for as long as possible. One of the arguments used was that a colony of very rare Desmoulin's whorl snails each about the size of a match head had recently been discovered living in the sedge growing out of the river around our site. This really caught the national headlines.
 http://www.antiroads.org.uk/newbury/factfile.html#snail
When this case was finally lost in court we knew that the eviction would not be a surprise. It was certain to happen the next day because they were desparate to trash everything before the bird's nesting season and there were hardly any other camps left at that stage. We were therefore able to swell our numbers with loads of other protesters who would normally not have known at which site to be awaiting eviction .

Furious preparations had been taking place at rickety. Concrete lockons were built both on the ground and in an oil drum thirty feet up rainy view on a separate platform just below the main tree house platform. There was a maze of rope walks linking nearly every tree and I and others continued building more rope walks to replace cut ones right through the eviction which seriously pissed off the cops. They complained bitterly that this was most unfair! Because of all the large numbers present, rickety bridge eviction lasted for three days - far longer than most. The concrete lockon alone half way up my tree and occupied by two very brave Dutch women took them a full 6 hours to demolish. It was the most storming eviction of all with a sound system high up a tree incessantly playing music that we hoped would be particularly irritating to the sheriff and all his evil men.

The cynical may say "what was the point of all this, you didn't stop the road did you?". Well we tried damn hard and caused acute embarassment to the government of the time especially when the transport minister responsible had his lawn dug up and house explored by the protester's own "through the keyhole" video team.
 http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news102.htm
The extra security and policing costs that we caused for the Newbury project alone was something like 26 million which must have really stung them. To use a cliche, we lost most of the battles but we won the war. Out of the original 600 or so road building projects originally planned, only one third were ever completed. The rest were either cancelled or put on hold indefinitely. By any measure, that seems like quite a victory. Even more so, when a few years later Steve Norris, another conservative transport minister acknowledged on national TV that building the Newbury bypass was indefensible and that we'd been right all along. It's easy to claim that this war was won solely as a result of direct action but that would be quite untrue. There were many people from respectable organisations like Transport 2000, Alarm UK and many other groups and individuals lobbying away in the background and convincing civil servants and government ministers about the sheer folly of their unsustainable transport plans.

Today however, it seems like much of the ground that we gained by really making the public and politicians sit up and take notice that road building as a transport strategy just doesn't work seems to have been lost. The anti roads movement disbanded when most of it's members became sucked up into other struggles against injustice. Relatively unchallenged in the intervening years, the menace from the powerful roads lobby is now upon us once again and a different government has a whole raft of new roads in the pipeline:
 http://www.roadblock.org.uk
Despite nearly daily warnings about the evidence of climate change in the mainstream media, little seems to have been learned by our present idiot leaders. "Sustained economic growth" remains the most destructive mantra in existance. To all the selfish and thoughtless Newbury residents who supported the bypass which has, as predicted already increased town centre traffic, we hope you choke on all your traffic and infill development. We would all be smirking if it weren't so fucking tragic that a priceless landscape had to be destroyed in order for us to be proved right.

For a really good personal account of day to day Newbury actions see 3 pages here:
 http://members.aol.com/pp3office/nbury01.htm
There is also a huge text archive of Newbury here:
 http://www.antiroads.org.uk/newbury/factfile.html
However many of the mainstream media links there have sadly decayed in the intervening years.

If you want to immediately get involved in direct action, try helping out at Dalkeith:
 http://www.save-dalkeith-park.org.uk
or consider returning the favour and helping the Dutch now under threat here:
 http://earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/?q=node/900