The main thing I remember about the protest camp at Crystal Palace was its proximity to the transmitter tower, which gave everyone headaches and was believed to be responsible for a mildly dystopian atmosphere on site. I was only there for two days, travelling up with other activists from Brighton in response to an alert of a possible eviction. My friend Tom and I spent the night in a treehouse, wearing climbing harnesses inside our sleeping bags, throbbing with adrenaline. We were braced for the arrival of police vans and cherrypickers, used to drag protesters from the trees. I don’t remember sleeping much, though by dawn it was obvious it had been a false alarm.
The camp was established in 1998 to protect five hectares (12 acres) of parkland from destruction for a proposed £56m leisure complex. Its enticements included a 20-screen cinema and parking for more than 1,000 cars, necessitating the elimination of 200 mature trees. Local people opposed to Bromley council’s plans for their cherished park had raised £35,000 for a judicial review to overturn the planning process. When the high court rejected their case, protesters stepped in to protect the site.
Matthew Williams, known as General Survival, left school when he was nine to become an eco warrior and lived in the treetop house with his mother and older brother.
The photographer Janine Wiedel was a regular visitor to Big Willow Camp, documenting its residents and the innovative, Heath Robinson-style structures they built. These included treehouses, which functioned both as homes and defensive structures for protesters to lock on to when the inevitable eviction came, as well as a network of tunnels. One of the most striking features of the site was the crazy towers, made of scaffolding poles and scraps of wood and metal salvaged from skips. They looked as if a band of anarchic Wombles had taken to the skies. Crystal Palace is already the highest site in London, and from 60ft up the views were sublime.
Ecowarriors on top of a tower at the Crystal Palace camp, 1999. As the eviction threat grew there was always someome standing guard.
As with Adrian Fisk’s photographs of protest camps at Stanworth valley and Newbury, Wiedel’s images capture an arboreal subculture, dreadlocked and grubby, earnest and defiant. You needed a climbing harness if you really wanted to get involved. I’d learned to climb on a road protest the winter before, mastering the intense physical effort of prusiking up a single rope, followed by the unmatched joy of abseiling back down for breakfast. We moved from tree to tree by walkways, trusting to knots tied in two parallel lines of blue polypropylene rope, one to walk on and one to cling to. Blue polyprop was the substance on which all protest life depended. It made me laugh, seeing Wiedel’s portrait of a man with an enormous necklace of it looped round and round his neck.
One of several lookout towers at the camp.
Big Willow Camp was finally evicted in March 1999, a process that took the police three weeks. But the cost and publicity helped shift opinion, and in 2001 the development was shelved. Though the park was saved, it gives me a melancholy feeling, looking at Wiedel’s pictures. Over the past two years, the type of protest depicted here has been subject to draconian restrictions, explicitly a response to the so-called “serious disruption” caused by climate groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain.
Protester Barney about to work on rope walkways which interconnected the tree homes and would provide escape routes during the eviction.
The controversial Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 increased the police’s power to restrict protest by criminalising many of the basic tools of direct action, including obstructing roads and making noise. While some of the more extreme elements were thrown out during the bill’s passage through the House of Lords, they were rapidly incorporated into the 2023 Public Order Act, which passed into law in May. The act created four new criminal offences to do with protest, including locking on, causing serious disruption by tunnelling, obstructing major transport works and interfering with key national infrastructure. All these offences are now punishable by prison sentences as well as fines.
The government’s official reason for this clampdown is money. The Home Office policy paper for the Public Order Act explicitly cites the cost of policing climate protests as its justification, stating that in 2019 Extinction Rebellion twice brought London to a standstill, at a policing cost of £37m, while protester activity at HS2 had by October 2022 cost the project up to £146m.
Protester Ben keeping warm by the campfire, 1998.
I want to put those figures into context, to show what environmental activists like those at Crystal Palace have been trying to avert for the past quarter of a century. In 2022, it was estimated by the London School of Economics that damage and disruption caused by the climate crisis already cost the UK 1.1% of its GDP, and that under policies at the time, this figure would rise to 3.3% by 2050.
What this means is that the climate crisis is already costing us more than £24bn a year, and that by 2050 that figure could rise to more than £73bn. This is what I would call serious disruption: a catastrophic dismantling of the ordinary lives our government claims to be defending. The people in the trees were trying to secure a future for the planet and its people. Without the right to protest we are all at greater risk.
Olivia Laing’s latest book is Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Picador)
