The Road to Nowhere: The Battles of Newbury and Fairmile
By Ruth Gurny

Recently, the towns of Newbury and Fairmile in southern England have become synonymous with the direct action campaign to stop the paving over of the English countryside. Protesters created underground tunnels and tree encampments to thwart the builders. Lawyer and participant Ruth Gurny updates the situation.

The battles of Newbury and Fairmile are over. The areas are fenced off; the last camp has closed; and the last tunnel has been demolished. But the spirit has not died. Earlier on this year, Friends of the Earth organized a demonstration to mark the actual start of the building of the bypass around Newbury. The idea was to have a two minute silence, with people holding hands and linking arms around the fence. However, while we were doing that, we discovered an irresistible opportunity to start shaking the fence and break it down. And that's what happened.

Now normally you may have at most a couple of dozen people who will go inside a cordoned-off area, because it is now criminal trespass in Britain to do that. On these occasions, most people just won't go anywhere near the site; they'll stand on the edge and watch it and applaud it, but they won't go in. This time was different. Suddenly hundreds of people started streaming onto the site. The police made a few attempts to get people out, while the security ran around not knowing what to do. In the end they had to give up.

There was a wonderful old oak tree, which had been saved because when the people protesting were living in it, a deal was struck that that one tree would be left if the protesters came down. This tree became a focal point, and we linked arms and danced around it. In the end, the site was taken over by about a thousand people, who co-opted all the machinery. To put it delicately, some of the equipment will not be used again.

Eyes on the Road Protestors
Although only a handful of people were arrested that day, this was not the case throughout the road protests. When protesters arrived at Newbury, the police were at the station with photo albums just waiting to pick up anybody whom they'd got pictures of from previous demos. Quite a few of the arrests that took place weren't for anything that happened on a particular day, but were for breach of bail conditions. Some conditions were that "offenders" were not allowed within 10 or 15 miles of the area. In a few cases that meant that those who lived in the area couldn't go home.

Going Underground
Tunneling was one of the most effective forms of activism. Once there's a person down a tunnel, not only is it extremely bothersome to try and get him or her out, but the presence of the tunnel prevents heavy machinery -- such as "cherry-pickers" used to pluck people out of trees -- being brought into the area.

Also many of the security forces refused to go down, or couldn't fit in, the tunnel. It also made the press focus on the issues. After a week the journalists eventually got bored of asking the tunnel-dwellers what they had for breakfast and whether it was cold in the tunnel, and they still had newspaper space to fill. This was how one of the protesters called "Animal" was discovered by journalists. As a result, "Animal" became known throughout Britain as a highly intelligent 16 year old girl, whose entire family completely supported what she was doing.

Changing Minds and Sides
When the Newbury protests first began there were security guards who joined the protesters. One of them has become quite well known and at the subsequent protests at Fairmile, he was the last person to be pulled out of a tree when the encampments were evicted. When Fairmile began, 100 security guards resigned on the spot.

Fairmile also has had its costs. I read about one man who was the local postal worker. He said that he'd originally been in favor of the bypass and that he needed it for his rounds. But he also said that he'd gone out to the site, and there had been a 300 or 400-year-old oak tree which had become the center of the protest, and which had been dismantled limb by limb because they couldn't go in with the heavy machinery and cut it down.

The postal worker told how he'd seen the tree's stump, and how there was a lovely little church near by. At that moment he'd had a flashback to when he was a child and had been taken to this church and how he used to play in the woods, which had just been cut down for the bypass. While he wasn't prepared to say that he was against the road, he was at least beginning to realize there was a conflict, and was actually experiencing some emotion about it himself, although it came too late.

Effecting Change
This is just an individual example of what's beginning to happen. Throughout Britain, people are beginning to sense the erosion of their liberties. It may be a cliché, but the British have a strong feeling of fairness, and I think that people sense that the system is not being fair. Even the police and many of security guards at protests are actually quite supportive. That's not to say some of them don't do their jobs very enthusiastically, but there is a feeling at some level that people are on the same side.

Fairmile was a turning point, because the public perception of road protesters as stupid, unrealistic and dirty old hippies changed. At Newbury, there were a small number of local people -- women and men in their fifties and sixties -- who had never been involved in protests in their lives and who had gone down to see what was going on. They gradually got drawn into the protests. Some of them started making sandwiches for the protesters and then ended up sitting in front of the machinery.

There is also a spiritual side to the road protests. There are people who feel very strongly their connection with the earth and the cycles of nature, and wish to cultivate an alternative life style. There was also a feeling when people were underground that, since they were there to protect the earth, the earth would protect them. Although there were many people who lived for weeks in the trees, very few fell and had accidents. Again, it was as if the trees were protecting them. There were even a couple of instances when trees would twist in mid air as they fell and collapsed onto the machinery that cut them down.

Ruth Gurny is an activist lawyer who lives in London.

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