1. Pothole city
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Looking back now, it is hard to pinpoint the moment when things got totally out of control. It might have been when council contractors teamed up with police for an operation that Nick Clegg, then the MP for Sheffield Hallam, later described as “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia”. It might have been when the council received a letter from the environment minister, Michael Gove, demanding that it halt the scheme – and chose to ignore it. It might have been when South Yorkshire police had to pay out more than £24,000 for wrongful arrests that they had made to defend the council’s work. But by the time a public inquiry was commissioned in 2021, chaired by the former undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs at the UN, no one could dispute that something had gone horribly wrong in Sheffield.
It all started with a perfectly reasonable proposition. Sheffield’s roads were in a bad state, and its pavements were wonky. To some locals, Sheffield had become known as “pothole city”. Residents wrote to their councillors to complain, and in 2012, after years of planning, the council launched a £1.2bn road improvement project called Streets Ahead. Its aim was to upgrade the city’s roads, pavements, street lights and bridges. The plan involved the mass removal of street trees, which were blamed for making pavements bumpy and cracking kerbstones.
The council did not anticipate any major objections. After all, the felled trees would be replaced with saplings. But saplings – which might take 30 or more years to mature – are not a like-for-like replacement. Mature trees, which can grow to a height of 15 metres (50ft) and live for hundreds of years, are visually spectacular in a way that saplings, shorter than the average person, are not. In 2014, when residents realised the council was felling trees on an industrial scale, protests started to break out – at first in small pockets on streets where trees were being targeted, and then on a larger scale. These protests would grow into a city-wide movement.
It was in December 2016 that Paul Brooke and Carole Sutherland learned the council was planning to cut down half of the trees on their road. The couple had moved to Sheffield about a decade earlier when their daughter left home for university. For Brooke and Sutherland, who worked in social care and housing, Sheffield’s trees were one of its great attractions. A third of the city sits within the Peak District national park, and it is estimated to have more trees per person than any other city in Europe. The couple moved into a Victorian terrace house on Meersbrook Park Road in south Sheffield, which was lined with 43 mature limes that stood 4.5 to 6 metres tall. As Brooke and Sutherland settled in Sheffield, they never tired of walking past the trees, watching the leaves change with the seasons. So it was a shock to hear that the council was planning to cut down almost half of them. “We started asking neighbours: ‘Do you know about it?’” Brooke remembered. When they looked it up online, they were astonished by the scale of the tree-felling that was taking place across Sheffield.
Brooke and Sutherland, who are now in their 60s, had always prided themselves on being unconventional. Brooke wears flat caps and waistcoats, and has a dandyish goatee and handlebar moustache, while Sutherland has cropped hair, dyed bright red, and favours vibrant colours and statement jewellery. But their most recent foray into activism had been in the 1980s, when they went to a few CND peace rallies. When the trees dispute came into their lives, they surprised themselves with just how extreme their involvement became. Within months, they were protesting weekly, sometimes even daily, putting their bodies in harm’s way to prevent tree surgeons from using their chainsaws. “It almost became a compulsion,” Sutherland said. “The belief in why you’re doing something overrides the anxiety about going to court or prison.” They were not alone. Hundreds of people in Sheffield, with no prior experience of protest or environmental activism, found themselves radicalised, giving up their lives for months to protect their trees.
In the face of council intransigence, the battle over the trees would become one of the longest-running and most divisive disputes in Sheffield’s history. “Obviously no one [at the council] went into the contract thinking: ‘Eventually we’ll need to pay a private militia to actually get this policy through’,” said Lewis Dagnall, who was a councillor in Sheffield from 2015 until 2021. “They thought it would be universally popular. When cracks started emerging, they thought they could just paper over them. And then it just escalated, escalated, escalated.”
2. For the chop
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At the heart of the conflict was a gulf between the way campaigners and the council thought about the city’s trees. Despite the six years it took to formulate and negotiate the Streets Ahead contract and assess the risks, no one at Sheffield city council seemed to consider a basic fact: people love trees. Urban trees provide a burst of natural beauty in otherwise congested environments, a sense of the sublime entering human-made spaces. Many of today’s street trees were planted more than 100 years ago, making them a living, breathing connection to the past. There is a reason that “leafy” is such a popular word on estate agent listings. “Trees are one of the few things in environmentalism that might actually cross the culture war divide,” said Paul Powlesland, a barrister who has advised a number of tree campaigns, including in Sheffield. Other environmental issues – sea level rises, global heating, Amazon deforestation – can seem impossibly huge and distant. But as Sheffield city council discovered, urban trees are something that people will take action to defend.
Alongside this emotional connection runs a strong policy argument: as the climate crisis makes extreme weather events more common, we urgently need the shade and flood protection that trees offer. Yet councils do not formally recognise the value of street trees. Sheffield’s Streets Ahead project was managed by the highways team, which appeared to see trees as a problem to be solved, rather than an asset to be protected. This pattern continues to play out around the UK, as other councils fell trees to make way for property developments or urban regeneration. “The destruction of trees is often the easiest and cheapest option,” Powlesland said.
In Sheffield, support for Streets Ahead cut across party lines. From 2008 to 2011, as the contract was being negotiated, the council was led by the Liberal Democrats; from 2011 to 2021, during the plan’s implementation, Labour was in charge. In the first year alone, 185 miles of road were resurfaced and 4,000 street lights replaced. For Labour, the project was a point of pride. Dagnall recalled councillors speaking “about how many roads were going to be resurfaced, and how many bridges were going to be repaired”.
When Streets Ahead was being planned, the council had commissioned a report on Sheffield’s 36,000 street trees. The report found that just 3% of these were diseased, dying or dangerous; these needed immediate felling. The report stated that more than two-thirds of the trees didn’t need any work. Monitoring and maintenance were recommended for the rest.
How did this modest recommendation turn into a death warrant for half of the city’s trees? The answer appears to lie in a misunderstanding. The report noted that 74% of the street trees were “mature or overmature”. These are technical terms: a mature tree is one that produces fruit and flowers; an overmature tree has usually reached its full size, and might need maintenance. Trees in both categories typically have many years left to live.
However, when Sheffield city council prepared its business case for Streets Ahead a year later, it claimed that “a large proportion” of these mature or overmature trees were “now ready for replacement with younger trees”, and that “this should help reduce the incidence of tree root damage to footways and private property”. This was not what the report had said. But as the slow process of negotiating the Streets Ahead contract continued, the idea that “a large proportion” of the mature trees needed to come down seems to have been repeated until it became a kind of dogma, with little connection to reality. The “large proportion” eventually solidified into a number: 17,500 trees, or 50% of the total.
The plan was to frontload the work and remove 5,500 trees in the first five years. As the plan progressed, sticking rigidly to these targets seemed to become an end in itself, pursued by the council with a zealous fervour. Rather than stopping to reconsider at any point, they sought to cross tree after tree off their list in pursuit of this grand target, while publicly insisting that there was no target at all, and that felling trees was a “last resort”.
3. Resistance takes root
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Resistance began to flicker into life in 2014, but it wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that the first direct action took place. It was spontaneous: a group of about a dozen local residents in Nether Edge, south-west Sheffield, decided to stand under some trees that were under threat, making it unsafe for the tree surgeons to proceed. “It was a no-brainer – the trees were so magnificent,” said Alison Teal, a local therapist, who took part in these early protests. She had never done anything like this before, but, she said, “We knew it was wrong and it couldn’t be allowed to happen.” (Teal later became a Green party councillor.)
Around the same time, Deepa Shetty, a vet, heard of plans to remove the trees on Rustlings Road, a Victorian street near her home, and co-founded a local campaign group. Like nearby Nether Edge, this is an affluent area, and many who got involved were well-connected professionals. The group commissioned experts to produce an independent report about the health of the trees and an estimate of their economic value. Trees provide a host of tangible benefits – from storm drainage to improving air quality – but on local authorities’ balance sheets, they are logged only as something that accrues maintenance costs, rather than as having any value of their own. Shetty hoped that quantifying the value of the trees would “put it in terms the council would understand”. They submitted the report, along with a request that the council explore other solutions to repair the damaged roads. The councillor in charge of Streets Ahead met the group, but nothing came of it.
By the end of 2015, more and more fellings were being obstructed by protesters standing under the trees. In these early days, the atmosphere was usually friendly. Sometimes, local residents came out of their houses with tea for the protesters, and the tree-surgeons and campaigners even joked around with one another. Alongside the direct action, residents started showing up at council meetings to raise questions about the tree fellings. There were so many letters and freedom of information requests that the council – low on staff and resources after several years of austerity – struggled to respond.
Sheffield is sharply divided along class lines: some neighbourhoods in south-west Sheffield are in the 20% wealthiest areas of the UK, while those in the north-east are among the 20% most deprived. A 2013 report found that on the route of the 83 bus, from the affluent area of Millhouses in the south to the deprived area of Ecclesfield in the north, life expectancy drops by 10 years. Many councillors were frustrated by what they saw as well-to-do people complaining about the look of their already-nice streets. The council was trying to make savings, and did not want to spend more on modifying the Streets Ahead scheme. “The good faith explanation is that the leaders thought: ‘I’m not closing more libraries and sacking more social workers to pay for trees,’” Dagnall said.
As the council ploughed ahead, their opponents got organised. In an attempt to unify the city’s disparate protest groups and step up direct action, a pensioner named Dave Dillner created the Sheffield Tree Action Groups (Stag) in August 2015. Dillner lived in south Sheffield, near the depot where the tree surgeons contracted by the council were based. Early every morning, he would go there with a small step ladder to look over the wall. When he saw vans departing, he messaged the Stag WhatsApp group to let members know in which direction the arborists were heading. (“Chipper and barrier wagon leaving depot now heading south-west,” read one typical message from Dillner. “We’re on it!” came a reply a few minutes later.) Others kept watch along the way, and people rushed after the vans to prevent the contractors carrying out their work.
Opinion about tree-felling was genuinely mixed; hundreds of people attended protests and took direct action, but councillors still received letters complaining about root damage to properties or roads. The campaigners tended to live in more affluent areas, but – seeing trees as a public good – protested around the city. In some more deprived areas, they met with opposition. (“It could be quite scary when residents didn’t agree,” Teal said.) Local residents wanted trees removed for reasons ranging from complaints about the pavements to tree sap on their cars. The council argued it needed to balance these concerns.
In 2016, worried about the mounting resistance, executives at Amey, the private company contracted to deliver the Streets Ahead programme, wrote to the council to propose repairs that would leave some trees in place. The council shut the discussion down. For the highways team, who managed Streets Ahead, the campaigners were a small, unrepresentative group, and bowing to their demands would betray what “real” residents wanted. An email from Paul Billington, a senior official on the highways team, summed up this view: “Stag commands little support among the wider Sheffield public … we know it to be true from our general contact with residents (the media support is way out of step with public support).” There was no hard evidence for this, but – in what would become a pattern – once the view had set in, it was difficult to overcome. “There was a bunker mentality building in that department,” Olivia Blake, then a backbench councillor and now MP for Sheffield Hallam, told me. (Billington did not respond to a request for comment.)
By the autumn of 2016, Lewis Dagnall, the Labour councillor, was becoming increasingly worried about a conflict brewing over the proposed removal of eight trees on Rustlings Road. When the council polled residents on the street, 90% opposed the tree-felling. At a Labour group meeting, when Dagnall raised his hand to flag that he thought Rustlings Road might be an issue, he said that he was “shouted down”.
“I tried to say it was going to blow up,” he told me. “And then it did.”
4. The raid on Rustlings Road
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At 4.30am on 17 November 2016, Streets Ahead staff and officers from South Yorkshire police met in a supermarket car park near Rustlings Road. A few minutes later, they closed off both ends of the road and established safety zones around the trees. At about 5am, police officers knocked on doors, ordering people to move their cars, while arborists began climbing up trees to saw off branches. Hearing the commotion, residents came outside. Realising what was happening, a young man and two women in their 70s stepped into the safety zone. All three were arrested on the spot. (Charges were later dropped.)
Shetty lived nearby, and woke at about 8am to see a text message: “They’re cutting down the trees.” Panicking, she rushed to Rustlings Road to find seven trees had already been felled and protesters standing in a resident’s front garden – underneath the overhanging branches – to protect the eighth. “It was just carnage,” Shetty said. “Remember, we were still under the illusion that the council was reasonable. This was a complete violation, a complete abuse of power.”
The council had given the impression of seeking dialogue, but internal emails show that the officials running Streets Ahead were impatient to press ahead. Asked for advice about the plan to tow cars, an in-house lawyer wrote: “Personally, I do not believe that what is being proposed could in any way be considered reasonable.” When one communications officer learned of the plan, he wrote to the council chief executive, John Mothersole: “My professional view is that this is crackers.”
Behind the raid on Rustlings Road was a hardheaded calculation. A council memo from the time stated that “removing the trees [on Rustlings Road] will remove a ‘symbol’ of the tree campaign”. If the aim was to show the council’s implacable resolve and destroy campaigners’ morale, the plan badly misfired.
By lunchtime, the “dawn raid” on Rustlings Road and the arrest of two pensioners was national news. Much of the coverage highlighted something strange: at 4.30am, as police were closing off the road, the council had quietly published online a report by its own independent tree panel, a body that it had created in 2016, supposedly to give residents a say in what happened to trees on their street. The report advised that only two of the eight trees on Rustlings Road needed to come down. It had been submitted in July. But for five months, as they carefully coordinated the operation with police, people running Streets Ahead kept the document – and their decision to override it – secret.
The Rustling Roads operation galvanised resistance, bringing hundreds of new recruits to Stag. Other action groups formed. The council had been so brazen that a small-scale campaign that had started with residents objecting to plans on their own streets now expanded significantly. Justin Buxton, a design consultant, was one of the campaigners who got involved after seeing coverage of Rustlings Road. “Something wrong was happening,” he said, “and for the sake of my own conscience I needed to try to stop it.”
5. A giant game of cat-and-mouse
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Brooke and Sutherland were horrified when they read about the raid on Rustlings Road. Brooke started to attend protests, initially just to see what was going on. At his third protest, in February 2017, he suddenly felt moved to sit down under a tree, and was arrested along with six others. When Sutherland received a call telling her that her husband was being detained, she took a deep breath. They had never been in any trouble with the police before, and she was anxious about what Brooke was getting into. The couple had first met as teenagers when they worked in the same care home – “We met over a bedpan,” Brooke told me – and they had always done things together. Over the next few weeks, they talked it over, as they always did, and Sutherland went along to a Stag meeting. “When you’re faced with all the facts, it’s just like, of course we have to do something,” she said. They were all in.
In March 2017, Brooke and Sutherland joined a WhatsApp group with about 30 active users, who called themselves the Flying Squad. Whenever a member spotted the contractors, they would send out an alert and someone on the group would drop what they were doing and go to the scene to stand under the tree. “There were an awful lot of crestfallen faces when we’d turn up,” Sutherland recalled.
For people embroiled in the trees dispute, Sheffield became the stage for a giant game of cat-and-mouse. While protesters kept watch for arborists’ movements, Amey’s contractors started noting the number plates of protesters. Sometimes, when they saw the Flying Squad arrive, they quickly diverted to another street. In a practice the protesters called “chipper-chasing”, whoever had driven to the scene tried to pursue the arborists. “It was like the wild west,” Buxton told me recently, as we drove around Sheffield revisiting the sites where he had saved trees. He pointed to a set of traffic lights ahead. “I was following a crew and they jumped a red light to get away from me.”
The activists were effective. In June 2017 alone, contractors had to abandon 329 of the 472 fellings they attempted. “It was incredibly frustrating,” a former Amey tree surgeon told me. “I wanted to do the job I was paid to do, not be the face of a controversial policy. I had colleagues who didn’t agree with what the council was doing who were almost relieved if the protesters turned up. But for me, I just felt caught in the middle and started to dread getting up in the morning. I was eventually signed off for stress.” As protests grew, police started attending.
Throughout 2017, protesting took over Brooke and Sutherland’s lives. By this time Brooke had left his job running an adult social care programme, and was working as a self-employed joiner. He sometimes attended more than one protest a day, and Sutherland joined when she had time off work. At one point she was setting alarms for 2am to do a shift on the protesters’ night rota, driving around looking for arborists felling trees at night. “We used to turn to each other and say: ‘What did we do before the campaign?’” Sutherland said.
In the summer of 2017, the council received the independent tree panel’s final report. The panel advised that a significant number of the trees could be saved using alternative highway repairs. The council had presented the debate as a binary choice: trees versus smooth roads. Now it was being told that, just as Stag had argued, the city could have both. Yet in almost every case, the council declared the alternative measures too expensive and opted to go ahead with the felling as planned. Many Labour councillors saw their party’s repeated victories in local elections as an absolute mandate to carry out the Streets Ahead project as originally designed. “The majority of people who voted in elections through those years backed that proposal,” Bryan Lodge, a Labour councillor, later told the inquiry.
The council’s decision to reject the panel’s recommendations was a turning point, where any remaining shred of goodwill between campaigners and council disintegrated. “The council lost the moral high ground the moment they didn’t honour the policy they introduced,” Dagnall said. He supported finding a resolution through talks with the campaigners, but he also disliked the campaigners’ approach. “Some of them shouted and made accusations of corruption and posted personal insults on social media. They made it as difficult as possible to sit down with them.”
Decision-makers at the council were not particularly interested in mediation. They had other plans.
6. Bunnies, geckos, squirrels
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One summer evening in 2017, Brooke was having a pint in his local pub when a legal representative of the council turned up holding a box. Inside were numerous documents, showing that he had been surveilled for months. There were notes on his car registration and photos of him protesting. An accompanying letter explained that the council was seeking an injunction to stop him protesting, and that breaking it could carry a prison sentence, and make him liable for court costs that could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. “It was a surreal moment,” Brooke recalled. Fifteen other campaigners received similar deliveries. Until then, campaigners were unaware that Amey had employed “evidence gatherers” to photograph and follow them.
When the injunction was granted in August, it specifically named a number of protesters and also prohibited anyone else from disrupting tree fellings. “The view was: if we bring in this injunction, people will abide by it,” Dagnall said. “There was no taking stock of what might actually work.” Even Amey was seemingly uncomfortable with the council’s hardline stance. The company declined to be part of the injunction proceedings that followed and had, in fact, offered to bear the cost of alternative engineering solutions for some trees.
But by this stage, the highways team seemed consumed with defeating the protesters and completing the programme as originally designed, which meant felling all the trees. The council dismissed Amey’s suggested alternatives and pressed ahead. Once it had decided to go down the route of punitive legal action rather than mediation, the sunk costs fallacy set in. In an email discussing what to do about people breaching the injunction, Billington wrote: “Given we’ve spent £150,000 to get this far, we don’t really have a choice.”
Campaigners, of course, did not know this. Stag had a diffuse membership – and, like many protest movements before it, the group regularly descended into infighting. The most common topic of disagreement was strategy: was it best to focus on direct action or democratic participation? To keep the campaign non-partisan, or pressure Labour councillors to change policy? After the injunctions, some Stag members opposed continuing direct action; others wanted to deliberately break it to test the council’s response. A majority wanted to disrupt the work without breaking the injunction, which specifically prohibited standing inside safety zones on public highways.
When the injunction failed to stop the protests, officials at the council pushed Amey to do more. “You are losing the battle,” Billington wrote in an email to the account manager at Amey on 6 November 2017. “The council is very frustrated at the current policy of ‘turn up and pack up’.” The council withheld £2.5m in payments to Amey over a five-month period. Under pressure, in November 2017, Amey hired private security guards to enforce the injunction. (Peter Anderson, a senior Amey executive, later told the public inquiry: “We were contractually obliged to deliver the project … I’m sure if Sheffield city council had told us we could stop then we would have.”)
The campaigners were exhausted. “I don’t think the council ever realised how close most of us were to feeling we couldn’t do it any more,” Brooke said recently. There was only one way around the restrictions imposed by the injunction. To avoid being identified, campaigners decided they would now don masks before entering the safety zones. Sutherland, who was not on the radar of the council in the same way that her husband was, knew immediately she wanted to do it. As always, she and Brooke talked over the risks, approaching it as a team. “We decided: we’ll just face whatever comes,” she said.
To evade Amey’s evidence-gatherers, who were following protesters to their cars or houses, and cross-referencing photographs to identify people by their clothing, Sutherland kept a disguise in her car. It consisted of clothes she never otherwise wore – a plain cagoule and pair of jeans, a woollen hat. On one occasion, an evidence-gatherer asked Sutherland to leave a protest site and, worried her voice might identify her, she affected a Glaswegian accent. (“I am not good at accents,” she added.)
Fellings were hectic – campaigners, arborists, security guards, police – all shouting and jostling for space. Protesters referred to people hopping – scrambling, really – over barriers to stand inside safety zones as “bunnies”. Protesters who wedged themselves between barriers and walls were “geckos”, while “squirrels” climbed trees and sat in the branches. When a bunny arrived, protesters cheered – as this meant a real chance of saving the tree. Finding a way into the safety zone was a challenge. Sometimes, Sutherland – who was in good shape, owing to her regular rock-climbing in the Peak District – practically crowd-surfed through. Other times, she climbed over cars or garden walls. After one day on which she entered six different safety zones, she acquired a new nickname: “the Duracell bunny”. As she described this to me, Brooke broke in to address her directly, with admiration in his voice: “Every single one of the trees you protected that day is still standing.”
The injunction hadn’t worked; the court proceedings hadn’t worked; the security guards hadn’t worked. But the council did not reconsider its approach. Things were about to get violent.
7. The battle of Meersbrook Park Road
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On 15 January 2018, Amey – under immense pressure from the council – gave security guards permission to use “reasonable force” against protesters. This meant they could physically remove bunnies from safety zones. Now protesters and security guards tussled and shoved. On one occasion, a contractor spat in Brooke’s face. Protesters were verbally abusive to tree surgeons, security guards and council officials.
For people living in battleground areas, it was a nightmare. “Sometimes I couldn’t get out of my own house,” one woman who lives in Meersbrook told me. “I like trees, but I felt the campaigners were inconsiderate of residents – and the fact that disabled people and mums with prams literally couldn’t walk down these streets as the pavements were so bad.” Many residents who supported tree-felling cited the need to repair the roads, persuaded by the council’s unwavering argument that there were just two options: save the trees or fix the pavements.
Meersbrook Park Road, where Brooke and Sutherland lived, was one such battleground. On 22 January 2018, Sutherland was already inside the safety zone – her face obscured by a mask – when Brooke arrived at the protest at about 1pm. There was a big crowd and an angry energy in the air, crowds pushing and shouting. As security guards tried to remove Sutherland from the safety zone, she flopped to the ground, making her body dead weight. The guard dragged her by her arms on the ground, before leaving her on the floor.
Sutherland was unharmed, but from his vantage point in the crowd, Brooke thought she was being assaulted. Seeing her limp body on the ground, he pushed through the crowd and kicked down the metal barrier to run to his wife’s defence. About 20 people ran in after him and linked arms around the tree, breaching the injunction. Lying on the ground, Sutherland had not seen her husband. She scrambled to her feet and joined the others around the tree. Having breached the injunction, Brooke knew he would end up in court. He also realised that if he showed any sign of affection to Sutherland, he might accidentally give away his wife’s identity, and she would face the same fate. Seeing that Sutherland was OK, Brooke slipped out of the safety zone.
The physical scuffles between guards and protesters, and the destruction of the barrier, had made it a particularly dangerous day, and when Dagnall saw the photographs, he was horrified. Alongside being a councillor, he was doing a PhD in history, and saw alarming parallels to the Peterloo massacre of 1819. “If the security guards had muskets, I fear they would have unloaded them,” he told me. Dagnall led a group of backbench councillors who approached the then council leader, Julie Dore, to warn that there was a growing risk of serious injury or death. It did not prompt a change of course. (“Julie was always willing to listen, if not willing to hear,” one councillor told me. Dore did not respond to a request for comment.)
Staff at Amey, however, had grown so concerned by the growing levels of violence that, a few days after the battle on Meersbrook Park Road, the company announced a pause in the tree-felling. The council did not use this time to consider a more conciliatory approach. During the month-long pause, Billington sent an email to Lodge, the councillor heading up Streets Ahead, and Mothersole, the chief executive. The subject line was: “Please print and then delete.” Billington suggested strategies to remove the remaining trees, including a technique known as “ring-barking”, completely removing the bark on a healthy tree. “The tree is killed and dies over a number of months,” Billington wrote. “It would move all trees into the ‘dying’ category and mean that Stag could no longer claim they were defending ‘healthy’ trees.” Mothersole ruled this out.
When felling resumed on 26 February, the level of bad feeling was so extreme that at times it descended into comedy. Amey reported a couple in their 50s to the police, accusing them of having given workers tea laced with laxatives. (The couple denied it and “the case of the toxic tea”, as the press dubbed it, was later dropped.) The violence intensified. A security guard’s wrist was broken and several protesters required hospital treatment after clashes. “We’re immensely lucky that no one died,” Dagnall said.
In mid-March 2018, James Henderson, Sheffield’s head of communications, wrote to Mothersole urging mediation. “Put simply,” he wrote, “there is no good picture of older residents being arrested. There is no good way to photograph a tree lying in the street.”
After a number of violent clashes, Amey told the council they couldn’t carry on. South Yorkshire police, too, said they could not continue to commit so many resources to policing protests. The information commissioner forced the council to publish the contract with Amey, making it public knowledge that, contrary to the council’s public claims, there really was a target to fell trees. The Forestry Commission opened an investigation into whether the council’s tree-felling was illegal and unlicensed.
On 26 March 2018, Amey called another pause. Tree-felling never resumed. Over the previous six years, 5,600 trees had been cut down.
8. ‘Talking with the enemy’
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A few months after the pause was called, Brooke was in court for breaching the injunction. The presiding judge opened by asking whether, given the pause on the tree replacement programme, the council really wanted to go ahead with legal action that could end in protesters receiving prison sentences. There was a delay while the legal team phoned Dore to check whether she wanted to proceed. She did. Three other campaigners were found guilty – two were given short suspended sentences, while the judge decided not to punish the third. The decision on Brooke’s case was postponed.
After the hearing in June, Brooke and Sutherland went on a two-week canal boat holiday. “We didn’t know how it was going to go and we were shattered,” Sutherland said. “On the boat we just totally calmed.” As it happened, Brooke was called back to court in the middle of this trip. They left the boat and travelled back to Sheffield.
In court, Brooke’s lawyer argued his breach was justified because he believed a fellow protester was being assaulted. He did not explain that the protester in question was Brooke’s wife. Sutherland had never been arrested for bunnying, nor publicly identified, and they didn’t want to reveal her identity now. Sitting in the public gallery, Sutherland felt all eyes on her. She was so overcome she left the room.
Later that day, the judge gave his ruling. He found that Brooke had acted reasonably – in his judgment, he noted that the welfare of the female protester “mattered a great deal to him” – and dismissed the charge.
Although the council successfully applied to renew and extend the injunction, behind the scenes things were changing. That April, for the first time, Mothersole told staff to focus on constructive dialogue. This was not a straightforward proposition; trust was low and personal enmity high. In his notes about possible negotiation tactics, Billington wrote that “Rejection by Stag [of council proposals] will allow us to present them as ‘fanatics’ who refuse to compromise.”
In May 2018, after Labour lost a number of seats in the local election, Dore put Dagnall – someone who had long advocated mediation – in charge of Streets Ahead. He approached Stag, which was now co-chaired by Brooke. Both sides faced internal opposition to peace talks. Dagnall’s Labour colleagues had spent years trying to push through Streets Ahead, facing hostile questioning and personal insults from protesters. Brooke’s co-campaigners had been dismissed, arrested and assaulted, and some were still being pursued in the courts. But, Brooke argued, “talking was all we could do”.
The first meeting, mediated by the Bishop of Sheffield, took place in late September 2018. It was tense. Stag was outraged at the council’s initial proposals, which focused on further tree fellings. But the group stayed at the negotiating table. “As long as we were in the room, they weren’t cutting down trees,” Brooke said. As the process continued, Dagnall was frustrated that, while he was trying to keep Labour colleagues on side, some Stag members were still asking hostile questions at council meetings.
Both men were consumed by the process; Dagnall’s PhD “went off the rails”, while Brooke spent most of his time strategising, relieved that the powerlessness he’d felt during the injunction period was lifting. They persevered and in December 2018, mediation concluded with a joint statement from Stag and the council, agreeing that they would work together to agree a solution for the remaining trees. Agreeing to work together was surreal for people on both sides. “People asked why we were talking with the enemy,” Brooke said. “But there was only ever one solution, and that was to find a peaceful way forward.”
In early 2019, a team of experts inspected 12 trees, chosen at random, to see if repairs to the pavement could be made without removing them. Brooke remembers one inspection where the pavement next to a lime tree was uneven. This was a common sight in Sheffield, and the core assumption throughout Streets Ahead was that the tree roots were to blame. Until this point, no one had actually dug into the asphalt to check. When the engineers did just that, they found that the roots were not, in fact, close to the surface. Here, and on many other streets, the problem was caused by asphalt being repeatedly overlaid where roots had slightly lifted the surface. In some places, the road surface was 25cm deep.
The trees did not need to be cut down to resolve the issue. There was a viable alternative to felling each of the 12 trees they inspected. In many cases the solution was so straightforward that engineers carried out the repair the same day. Years of bitter conflict, it seemed, could have been avoided if only the council had considered changing course earlier.
9. ‘Ordinary people doing extraordinary things’
* * *
Earlier this year, after two years of work, the public inquiry, chaired by Sir Mark Lowcock, formerly of the UN, delivered its report. It found that Sheffield city council had “repeatedly said things that were economical with the truth, misleading and, in some cases, were ultimately exposed as dishonest”. There had been “a serious and sustained failure of strategic leadership”. The council’s new leadership accepted all the findings and has written to a number of protesters to apologise directly; but there have been no consequences for the individuals involved, most of whom have quietly retired or moved on to other roles, or – in some cases – still work at the council.
The Sheffield street trees report was vindication, but for many protesters it does not feel like enough. A number of protesters I interviewed have been diagnosed with PTSD or other mental health conditions as a direct result of the stress of campaigning. Several became tearful while describing their feelings of powerlessness, the sound of chainsaws hacking down beloved trees, or the breakdown of personal relationships as their lives were consumed by the protests.
While it may never happen again in Sheffield, similar disputes over trees are playing out elsewhere in Britain. In March 2023 – the same week the Sheffield public inquiry published its findings – Plymouth council sent a team of arborists to fell more than 100 trees at 4am to evade protesters (16,000 people had signed a petition opposing plans for their removal). Since February, residents in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire have been fighting the felling of 50 mature lime trees to make way for a dual carriageway, leading to arrests and court actions. “Trees galvanise people,” Powlesland said; he was arrested in Wellingborough for taking part in tree protests. “Mature trees are an irreplaceable, priceless gift from the past.”
As the mediation talks took place, Brooke and Sutherland thought about the next stage of their lives. “We wanted to leave on a high,” Brooke said. They sold their house and bought a canal boat, which they spent months fitting out with fixed bar stools, a polished bathroom and prints of tree-protest placards. They took early retirement and now spend their time, in Brooke’s words, “pootling around” the English countryside, enjoying the trees and other natural beauty.
A few months ago, I visited their boat, in a village in Oxfordshire. They were making their way down to Henley, where they had spent their honeymoon, to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary. Over lunch, we looked through a hard drive of protest photographs, including one of Sutherland masked and crowdsurfing over a metal fence as hefty security guards look on. It was a stark contrast to the well-groomed woman in front of me, serving up salmon and homemade pistachio pesto.
“It was ordinary people doing the most extraordinary things,” she said. Brooke nodded in agreement. “You have to be able to celebrate the success,” he said. “It doesn’t bring back the 5,600 trees we lost. But we achieved something.”
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