ASIAN GARDEN DECORATIONS

Photo: Gideon Mendel

I'm going to talk about the anti-road building movement of the early-mid 1990s. This was a 19-billion pound programme. An early part of this would have meant cutting down an area of the South Downs, through Twyford Down, where a protest camp was formed. Activists visited the camp which lasted for over a year. Others would stay for longer and get involved in the direct action itself. For five or six years these camps were appearing at road schemes all over the country.

I would like to talk about Claremont Road, part of the anti-M11 link road campaign. This was about a 6 km link road that would have joined inner London to the motorway, which would have meant the demolition of hundreds of houses, and would have cut the travelling time of cars by seven minutes! The plans had been going on since the 1960s, but the programme itself began in 1993.

Protests took a variety of forms from house occupations, tree dwellings, invading the building site, disruption, invasion, etc., over a period of about 18 months, ending in Claremont Road in Leyton where the last protestor was cut down from a scaffold built up through one of the roofs of the houses on the street.

For me this campaign exploded my previous ideas of what politics was about – it gave one a sense of one's own subjectivity, having the upper hand for the first time in your life. Of course, some of the campaign slogans were 'respectable', representative, moral, but more interestingly for me other, nobler traditions, are more relevant. (1) Sabotage or 'pixie-work' on site especially at night. Sand in the engine blocks, site invasions during cement pours which would halt work adn have huge logistical and financial implications. Such ambushes were routine – many a day. (2) Subversion or 'seduction' – regular parties on site with live music.

Toward the end of the campaign four houses were lost and a building site with security guards replaced them. People would go down and talk to the guards, mostly good-naturedly, humourously, and so on. This was done without expectations, but very occasionally it produced surprising consequences – some of the less experienced guards came to believe we would no longer invade their site, for instance. Amazingly, in a couple of instances, guards left their jobs to join the campaign and provided us with information! (3) Acts of self-reduction or refusal.

100 or so of us travelled down to support an office occupation at the Department of Transport, charging through and refusing to pay the fare. For some people this became a matter of principle – something that had to be done. (4) Self-valorisation. Liberating materials for our own uses – the things destined to be used to build the road were used to prevent it from being built. (5) Reclaiming and communalising the space itself. Claremont Road moved from being a quiet Victorian terrace to a communal, decorated, social space. In two houses the ground floors were turned into cafes. Tree houses were built opposite, linked to the houses with cargo netting, breaking the barrier between inside and outside – open living rooms. The spatial relationship was redefined. People behaved in nicer ways. It wasn't a utopia – there were tensions between people on the basis of drinking, commitment, hedonism versus hard work – and frustrations sometimes led to people being asked to leave the street. Nevertheless the experience was instructional because it allows us to think about our own possibilities, and what we must do if we want to live and work autonomously from the state. Dolly Watson, a 93-year old resident who had always lived on Claremont Road, welcomed everyone to the street, and told a journalist that the occupiers weren't 'dirty squatters' but 'the grandchildren I never had'. Another resident jumped from a roof onto a crane, shouting obscenities at the bailiffs. A queer activist who was attacked by security got all the male occupiers to dress as women for an evening as a provocation.

by Dermot

Life Despite Capitalism - Workshops
Moments of Excess

Notes on Moments of Excess 4.30 pm - 6.30 pm 16 Oct. 2004

Watching the Cardinals game outside on a fine Phoenix day. Firepit in foreground, signed Cardinals player cleat for luck on the TV, and home made Cardinals metal football below the TV. Blackberry Storm photo. Day 3