at Greenham Common, making my hometown nuclear strike target number one.
The move represented a significant escalation in tactics by the hawkish new US President Ronald Reagan, who had reversed years of détente with the Soviet Union and begun calling it the ‘Evil Empire’. Many felt that the MOD – and the British state overall – had sold out British interests for American ones. ‘The sign at the gate maintained the pretence of RAF ownership, hence British control,’ notes historian George McKay. But ‘there is no obligation for the US Government to obtain Britain’s consent before firing missiles from Greenham Common.’ Instead of feeling safer under the US ‘nuclear umbrella’, the UK was now in the firing line, more than ever before. The investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who revealed many of the Government’s clandestine plans for nuclear war, noted at the time: ‘Cruise missiles may soon be sited at Greenham Common and Molesworth, also US main bases. The Soviet Union would wish to destroy all these bases with considerable speed.’ Years later, when I met Campbell in person to interview him, I told him I had grown up in Newbury. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘Yes, that would have gone quickly.’
To local residents who had moved to this leafy Home Counties fastness for peace and quiet, the spectre of nuclear war now loomed terrifyingly large. Greenham Common quickly became a magnet for anti-nuclear protest. In 1981, a group of anti-nuclear protesters called Women for Life on Earth decided to march from Cardiff to Greenham to protest the lunacy of nuclear weapons. Upon their arrival at the base, four of them chained themselves to the fence, while a fifth, Karen Cutler, created a diversion. The lone policeman on guard ‘mistook her and the other protestors – as if playing his part in an unsubtle feminist satire – for the base’s cleaners.’
Ann Pettit, another of the marchers, was awestruck by the potential for a protest camp at Greenham Common. ‘I thought, “My God, it’s the Forest of Arden”,’ she recalled later, referring to the magical woodland in Shakespeare’s As You Like It where social rules are broken and norms challenged: ‘Somewhere to take to the woods and uphold better values than the corrupt court values.’
Historian Andy Beckett argues that Greenham Common ‘was one of the best places imaginable to stage a confrontation with the overmighty, transatlantic power structures that had grown up around British-based nuclear weapons. A great sweeping tabletop of gorse heath and grassland, fringed with deep-green stands of birch and bracken, in 1981 it was one of the few charismatic landscapes left in an increasingly suburbanized southeast England.’
The MOD and US Air Force had now militarised this landscape, sealing it off from the outside world with miles of fencing and barbed wire. But Greenham’s enclosure fence was soon to become synonymous with civil disobedience. On 12 December 1982, in an action called ‘Embrace the Base’, 30,000 women, including my mum, encircled Greenham Common’s perimeter. Others adopted spikier tactics, cutting through the fence with bolt croppers in order to exercise what they argued was their right to walk on common land. A court later found the protesters to be in the right: since Greenham was indeed a common, they couldn’t be stopped from walking on it – but damaging the fence in order to actually get in was still a criminal offence. Even so, the MOD opted to introduce new by-laws covering Greenham to ensure future trespassers could be sentenced harshly.
The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp maintained a permanent presence at the base for nearly two decades, becoming a rallying point for both anti-nuclear and feminist campaigners. Eventually, with the sudden end of the Cold War, the Cruise missiles left Greenham, and the MOD deemed the site ‘surplus to requirements’. It was sold to the local council and a charitable trust, who decided to finally open up the common again. The perimeter fence was torn down, grazing cattle returned, and common access rights restored. Greenham airbase’s huge runways were broken up, although this symbolic triumph also had a downside: most of the concrete was used to help build the Newbury bypass.
Only the colossal earthen bunkers that had housed the Cruise missiles remain standing today. On my visit to Greenham Common one spring evening, I stared across the heath at the brooding bulk of the missile siloes. Their silhouettes resembled a cross between aircraft hangars and Bronze Age burial mounds. But whereas the tumuli that dot Berkshire’s chalk downlands were built to remember the dead as they passed into the afterlife, these structures seemed to me to be far more nihilistic: monuments to Mutually Assured Destruction. Up close, the silos appeared even more malevolent. Still shrouded by three lines of fencing, some of it topped by razor wire, they squatted: ziggurats of grassed-over concrete with thick bulkhead doors, defended by menacing MOD signs. THIS IS A PROHIBITED PLACE WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT, read one. UNAUTHORISED PERSONS ENTERING THIS AREA MAY BE ARRESTED AND PROSECUTED.
I patrolled the perimeter of the bunkers, thinking about the peace protesters who’d performed a Situationist rite during the Vietnam War to levitate the Pentagon. Here and there, I was gratified to see, were signs of where the Greenham Women had graffitied slogans onto the concrete fenceposts and cut holes in the fencing. To my disappointment, all of them had been repaired, making easy access to the site impossible. But nature is now slowly doing the job once performed by the protesters. In one place, a silver birch had grown through and around the fence, and was tearing it apart.
It’s not just the military who enclose common land and public space, of course. In West Berkshire, as elsewhere across the country, the main culprits are big private landowners. I saw this plainly when I decided to return to the county for a few days’ hiking one winter. The Berkshire countryside, beautiful though it is, is also stuffed full of PRIVATE – KEEP OUT signs, letting errant commoners know that the real owners of the landscape would rather you weren’t in it.
In some places, the influence of big estates permeates entire villages: a reminder that for a sizeable slice of rural England, feudalism has never died. That much seemed obvious when one freezing December afternoon I walked into the tiny village of Yattendon, on the edge of the Yattendon Estate. Acquired by the media mogul Baron Iliffe in the 1920s, the 8,295-acre estate has reshaped the area’s countryside with its vast conifer plantations. It sells 80,000 Christmas trees each festive season.
As I skirted around iced puddles, I noticed something odd about the village. Everything looked the same. All the doors, gates and windowsills in Yattendon were painted in the estate’s official dark green, as uniform as the serried ranks of saplings planted in the surrounding fields. Even the telephone box – that staple of quaint old English villages, maintained for tourist selfies long after the landline has been ripped out by vandals – was Yattendon green, rather than the traditional red. The village’s noticeboard, proudly displaying a plaque for the award of Best Kept Village of the Year 1974, presented neatly typed minutes from the latest parish council meeting. Out of the grand total of five attendees, they recorded, one had been a representative of the Yattendon Estate. It was hard to shake the sense that, behind the scenes, order was being maintained by some decorous yet shadowy patrician operating out of the Big House on the hill, like something out of the movie Hot Fuzz.
But it isn’t merely the colour scheme of villages that landowners have sway over. They also control access to large swathes of the countryside. A ‘Right to Roam’ was established by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in the year 2000, but open-access land still only makes up around 10 per cent of England and Wales – a far cry from the situation in Scotland, where the right to roam is now established as the default – and much of that is mountain and moorland. Down south, the countryside is far less open to ramblers. ‘Less than 1.5 percent of West Berkshire, for example, is covered, and many of its glorious woodlands remain inaccessible to the large population of London and the Thames valley,’ notes Marion Shoard, whose tireless campaigning helped bring about Right to Roam. These tiny scraps of accessible woods include Snelsmore Common and Pen Wood – both of which were cut through by the Newbury bypass – and parts of Greenham Common, which had been closed off to the public for decades because of the airbase. So even these fragments of open-access land have been shut off or defiled by some of the county’s major landowners.
