The Sharp Side

The M11 Link Road was designed to link the southern end of the M11 motorway with the A101(M) in Hackney, a London Borough where 67% of households did not own a car.

All that stood in the way of this scheme was a stretch of green belt land in middle class Wanstead and a dense working class residential neighbourhood in Leytonstone.

Several hundred homes were compulsory purchased and their inhabitants told to fuck off and find somewhere else to live. (Two of the victims of this policy were elderly women who died soon after being dispossessed of the homes they had lived in all their lives.) The local Labour Council opposed the new road in the courts but when the judgement was that it should go ahead the local Labour Party withdrew from opposition. The Law Must Be Obeyed. There’s a wider history of the protests here. And some photos of the resistance here.

By a historical accident the start of work on this new road coincided with the climax of the protests against the building of the M3 extension through Twyford Down outside Winchester. That protest, which erupted out of nowhere, had united crusty Winchester conservatives outraged that their downs were being destroyed for a motorway, with a miscellaneous collection of young non-aligned environmental radicals.

Having lost the battle in Hampshire, some of these radicals gravitated to East London to begin resistance to the new road. This took the form of squatting in derelict properties on the route and non-violent obstruction of roadbuilding work. The corporate mass media decided that anti-roads protests were sexy and gave the protesters extensive local and national publicity. This had the effect of drawing in more supporters from both the local community and environmental radicals from across London. Soon the ‘No M11 Link Road’ campaign had attracted hundreds of supporters, assisted by the fact that the road route was adjacent to three stations on the London underground Central Line and easily accessible and that it was lined with now empty properties which could be squatted in, obstructing the demolition and road clearance programme.

The ‘No M11 Link Road’ protests were largely concentrated in the period September 1993-November 1994 and roughly developed over that year from the Wanstead end of the road construction down to the Leytonstone end. The three highlights were the protest against the bulldozing of the chestnut tree on Wanstead Green, the siege of some large houses in Wanstead collectively dubbed the independent republic of Wanstonia, and the siege of Claremont Road in Leytonstone. But apart from these nationally publicised episodes there were numerous guerrilla actions involving small groups of protesters stopping work on the road all along its route, on a daily basis. These rarely attracted any publicity or written record.

The strength of the ‘No M11 Link Road’ campaign was that it enjoyed significant support in the local community which supplied back-up for a core of young, full-time committed protesters, who had a range of imaginative techniques for disrupting the roadbuilders. The philosophy of the protest was passive resistance and a strict code of non-violence.

An arguable weakness of the campaign was that it had no wider support. It was never going to stop the building of the road. Only the involvement of radical organised labour or a radical national government could have done that. However, that was never seriously on the cards. There were no trade union links and no concrete trade union issues (except possibly the employment of low paid, ill trained security guards). The Blair government came to power in 1997 at a time when the road was far from completed; it could have frozen the project and converted it to a tramline, but that, of course, would have depended on Blair being something other than what he has always been. (Let us never forget that at his very first cabinet meeting Blair said, ‘The railways are not a priority’ – and the assembled sheep bleated their agreement.)

What the campaign did do however was massively delay the building of the road and cause the costs of building it and policing it to rocket.

This had two effects. Firstly, it caused even the Blair government to freeze a variety of projected road schemes and put forward a transport programme very much more progressive than the car-crazed Tories.

But secondly the state learned various lessons from the successes of the ‘No M11 Link Road’ campaign. Firstly, policing had in future to be much more aggressive. When work on the Newbury by-pass began, policing was put in the hands of an ambitious cop who knew what his masters expected of him – Iain Blair, since promoted to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

There was also the problem that the M11 campaign had exploited a weakness in the law, namely that trespass was a civil not a criminal offence. The police were relatively powerless to do anything than ask someone to leave a roadbuilding site. This loophole was swiftly filled in by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which introduced a new offence, “aggravated trespass”. This ferociously repressive piece of legislation is now regularly used against a wide variety of non-violent direct action protesters.

At a personal level, involvement in the campaign raised my consciousness in all sorts of ways. And I learned one valuable lesson, which I shall pass on. When climbing a crane to prevent it being used, be aware that it has very hot surfaces and always wear gloves.

The rest is postmodern archaeology:

Claremont Road, whilst functioning as a critique of the 'auto'-(mobile) culture, also functioned as an auto-critique of both the dominant museum culture and of 'traditional' definitions of material culture. .

Yeah, right…

Oh, and I do remember that ITN gave the protests far more lavish coverage than the BBC, which mostly shunned them. But then where car culture is concerned the BBC has always preferred to focus on the really big issues.



















The site of Claremont Road today. The M11 Link Road cuts Leytonstone in two.