circular Bronze Age pits nearby could have been used by a tribe practising with their weaponry before setting off to defend their settlements. It is said this site was later an outpost for soldiers preparing to defend Anglo-Saxon Silchester from attack. A map from 1740 shows a military camp set up there and in 1746 this camp was the base for despatching troops for battle with Bonny Prince Charlie. By 1859 it was being used as a training camp to prepare for a French invasion. There were 16,000 troops stationed there in 1862; in 1872, it was 20,000. Later it was used for infantry training for those going to the Western Front and eventually it was taken over by the Ministry of Defence for use as an airbase for the Second World War in 1941.
The history of this common land is given over fully neither to peace nor war; it is where they meet. This is where peacetime prepares for war. The order and obedience required for battle are established here. Yet this is also where fighters return to recuperate in peace, free from the demands of the fray. This is then a place of rest and regeneration.
A decisive change came some decades after the Second World War. This could be when the history of this place reaches a crescendo, when the meeting point between war and peace is suddenly brought into focus. People will then see this as a place that discloses that which is held in common by war and peace. For even winners and losers belong together. Both sides play the game. Both enter the scene, take the risk, yearn for the prize. To attempt to win the battle is to consent to possibly losing the battle. To enter into war is to accept you might not have peace on your terms. There is common ground between sides, in that each side shares something fundamental with the other. This is something beneath the battle itself, functioning like the rules of a game, tacitly present – just ‘there’ – like common land itself.
War and peace require a specific place of meeting if they are to be differentiated from one another. If times of war cannot become times of peace, the battle will never cease. Then, even in peacetime, everyone is at war. Recreation is riven with contention, people mistake combat for contentment. Order and obedience no longer intersect with rest and regeneration, because there is no boundary where you pass from one into the other. With no common ground from whence to be despatched into the heat of battle, there is no common ground to which to return and rest in the cool shade. War becomes cold war. Peacetime becomes intensely heated. Those who would feel the rush of victory can only do so if others are to feel the sorrow of defeat. There must be commonality from which each side departs, but also to which each side can return. In this belonging, obedience meets freedom.
The decisive change in the destiny of the common land came with the Cold War. NATO announced they would deploy cruise missiles in Europe on 12 December 1979. In 1981, it was reported that these missiles would be housed on two sites in England, one of which was this common land. It would provide a base from which military trucks could depart carrying these missiles if or when they were launched at important cities in the Soviet Bloc. The missiles were to be kept in large concrete silos, six in number. These resemble ancient ziggurats or pyramids, with heavy shutters opening to vast chambers, where their precious cargo would be immersed in the deep darkness within. It is difficult for us fully to appreciate how sinister these seemingly sentient missiles seemed in an age less technological than our own. They were remotely controlled and could fly a thousand miles below the flight radars. Each one contained enough atomic power to detonate an explosion sixteen times the size of Hiroshima. The spark of Prometheus lay nascent within each silo, ready for the floods to break forth upon the Earth when the shutters opened.
In a pamphlet from the early 1980s, a mother in a nearby town describes the moment this new purpose for this local land was announced on the news:
I had seen a BBC TV programme about nuclear war … It came to the bit about putting dead bodies in plastic bags with labels on and leaving them in the road to be collected. I sat in front of the television, my one-year-old in my arms, my heart sinking with fear. Someone, somewhere, is actually accepting the fact that my children will die. Someone, somewhere, is quietly planning for the deaths of millions. This is not a dream, it is real.1
This mother became one of many thousands of women who protested against the cruise missiles base in the years that followed. She had joined with others in organizing a march from a nuclear weapon’s facility in Cardiff to the common land and the scenes that followed are those with which this common land is now always associated: Greenham Common.
Initially they called themselves ‘Women for Life on Earth’. Leaving Cardiff on 27 August, they arrived on 5 September: ‘a long straggling line of women and children tramping through the dusty Berkshire lanes with leaves in their hair’.2 The single-carriage roads that led up to the site were arched over by the boughs of ancient trees, under which far more orderly battalions had once marched in lockstep. The woodland on either side was birthing its September fruits. The leaves were still green and lush, just tinged by the encroaching autumn.
When nature called, the kids would run ahead and duck under these trees, clambering through the leaves into dusty enclosures enclosed by broad, low branches. Some would dare to run further into the woods, wanting to be first to glimpse the eight-foot wire fence recently erected around the Common. On the other side of this fence, the grass had that scorched yellowy colour that can make the English countryside in late August feel almost Mediterranean, if only for a few long days. Squinting in the summer sun after emerging from the trees, the kids saw freshly tarmacked roads and a few clusters of USAF buildings in the distance. The marchers emerged from the mysterious hollows and reaches of the English countryside to approach the main gate. Mowed grass verges appeared, with gorse between them and the woods, and neatly trimmed little privet hedges in front. Coming from the musty darkness of the trees into the brightly dazzling sun, the newly landscaped terrain seemed fuzzy and unreal.
There was a carnival atmosphere. The women had a folk band playing alongside them and ‘they all looked so beautiful with their scarves and ribbons and flowers … The colours, the beauty, the sun … and so many people’.3 Some had decided to chain themselves to the fences and maybe it was the joyful intensity of the occasion that led some of the others to decide they could not simply go back home and return to normal. Some set up a large campfire and slept out under the stars. Over the following days provisions arrived, makeshift structures were erected and, around the nucleus of the fire, some of the women decided to stay indefinitely. The encampment was later named Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Over the next three years it developed into what is now a well-known chapter in recent English history.
Within a few weeks it was decided it should be a women-only space. Some of the men present had been confrontational with the authorities, taken control of elements of the camp, or been overprotective of the women during skirmishes with bailiffs and police. These behaviours were not welcome. Numerous direct actions, court cases, imprisonments and campaigns took place in the next three years. The most well-known event is probably the ‘Embrace the Base’ event on 11 December 1983, when 30,000 women encircled and enclosed the entire base, linking arms around the nine-mile perimeter fence. There were marquees set up by the main gate for refreshments and childcare. The kids inside were kept amused with painting and makeshift puppet shows and their creations were later used to decorate the barbed wire. The event was on national television news. During the report, talking heads were interviewed in front of the main gate, voicing either approval or disapproval of the action. The kids’ brightly coloured paintings and puppets could be seen some way behind them but the wire fence was not visible at such a distance. Their creations thus seemed to be suspended in mid-air, hovering on the horizon. The women’s children, seeing their pictures on the TV, would be overcome with excitement and pride. Their triumphant cheers drowned out the droning commentary on the merits or demerits of the event itself.
Other direct actions were more volatile, taking place under cover of darkness. The project to house cruise missiles at USAF Greenham Common involved regular manoeuvres, when military trucks would take the missiles out of the silos and drive them around the surrounding countryside of Hampshire and Wiltshire, usually to a firing range on Salisbury Plain, five miles west of Stonehenge. To prepare and practise for a launch, the missiles
