The End of the Affair The Secret Life of the Motorway

In the early '90s the Department Of Transport

began to build a motorway on chalk downland near Winchester.

I chained myself to quite a few machines.

Looking back, I don't know how I did it.

I think it's to do with being 20, and thinking you're invincible!

-'Another demonstrator had used a bicycle lock around his neck.'

-At that moment, it really became

apparent to me that, you know, that I was prepared to die for this cause.

Twyford Down was the catalyst for other protests around the country.

After 50 years and 2,000 miles, it seemed that our love affair with the motorway was over.

There was a time in Britain when there were no motorways.

But, surprisingly, there were already motorway protesters.

I don't think we'd have been tying ourselves to trees, let's put it like that!

-It wasn't the done thing back then, was it?

-No.

Eh, it's probably...

Or standing in front of a bulldozer or anything like that, no.

-No, it...

-It wouldn't have worked in the village!

We weren't so anarchic, or whatever the word is, in those days!

The route of the M1 around Leicester was planned in 1957.

The engineers set out across the country to meet landowners and iron out any problems.

Motorway construction hadn't started.

Civil engineers were welcome in the areas.

I mean, people were nervous about the "not in my back yard" syndrome,

but in general they appreciated

the M1 solution.

Motorway was being heralded as the saviour of the country in those days.

If you got objections, then, you know, they were to be found a way around them or out of them.

I looked out of the window in the kitchen

and I could see these people walking about with sticks with something on,

and I didn't realise at the time that it was surveyors.

And then, when we did realise they were surveyors, we thought, "Ooh, dear,

"I wonder if they're going to build a housing estate at the back of us?"

And then, when the story broke,

it was really devastating

to think that we were going to have a great big motorway

just above our house.

The proposed route ran through one of Britain's oldest natural forests

and alongside Bradgate Park.

This former home of Lady Jane Grey was now a public park

owned by the people of Leicester.

It was a beautiful place with the deer, and to put a motorway through the park

was a stupid thing to do.

It spoiled the whole thing.

Opposition to the route was led by Bob Bown.

He was a local councillor, and all in favour of the motorway.

But in an age when holidays abroad were a rarity, he knew how important the park was to local people.

It was the first time he'd ever campaigned for anything,

but he just felt so strongly. Particularly after the war years

people were getting back to normal living,

and to have something else spoilt...

Bob Bown organised a petition, didn't he?

Yeah, and within a short time... How many signatures did they get?

Er, 33,000, I believe it was.

It was headlines, because it was such a favourite park

for all the people in Leicester.

But it seemed to do the trick, anyway.

Bob Bown took his petition to the Transport Minister,

who was happy to re-route the motorway.

Bradgate Park was saved.

And the M1 opened, to national celebration.

This motorway starts a new era in road travel.

It is in keeping with the bold, exciting and scientific age in which we live.

The first thousand miles of motorway were built across open countryside with little opposition.

They quickly relieved congestion on Britain's A roads and in its city centres.

So, flushed with their success, the motorway planners then turned their attention to London's problem.

Everybody knows that we're being invaded, devoured and practically immobilised by our own machinery.

We want cars, we need cars. Cars are beginning to destroy our civilisation.

The rush hour. The twice-daily ordeal by frustration

which builds up neurosis, causes accidents, and costs millions in wasted time and fuel.

Rising car ownership meant that the protest against congestion was becoming louder.

Something needed to be done.

So the job fell to a new generation of computer-literate engineers.

We looked to the situation in the United States

because their car ownership was ahead of ours.

But there was no reason to think it would be any different.

'The core of the city has been evacuated.

'The car is king.'

We were some of the first British people to study these new approaches to transport planning.

Our numbers were suggesting massive freeways were necessary.

They might require dual four lanes, dual five.

And if there was a flaw in what we were doing, it was too much time

on making the machine produce numbers, and far too little time

on serious, deep thinking about interpreting the numbers,

and what was the reality that they portrayed.

-Were you worried about the motorway?

-Yes, indeed.

-What worried you most?

-That a car would come in the front room

to us at some time or other!

Am I all right for Aylesbury on the A41?

Straight on. You can't miss it!

Residents were consulted, but the reality was that forcing motorways

through London's densely-populated streets was always going to destroy someone's back yard.

# They're going to build a motorway through me back garden

# No-one can explain why I came to be chosen

# They're going to build a motorway, they're rippin' up the trees

# Soon the lorries will be zoomin' through me cabbages and peas. #

They do profess a facade, as you would put it, of democracy,

and no doubt they would argue that there are facilities for you to protest

and have your say on these things.

But, in practice, it's rubbish.

# They talked of urban redevelopment

# Improving the environment

# They says to ease the traffic flow

# A bit of my back garden had to go

# Well, I dunno. #

-We had quite a wide verge here...

-Yes, yes.

..and it was very pleasant when we first moved in,

but it's dreadful now. We... We're all very shocked about it.

And we can't get any satisfaction.

# They've built an eight-lane motorway

# They've ripped up all the trees...

# Now the lorries zoom where once I grew

# Me cabbages and peas. #

When a two-and-a-half-mile section of elevated motorway opened in West London,

residents were faced with six lanes of traffic hurtling past their homes at bedroom level.

PEOPLE SING PROTESTS

I have great pleasure in declaring Westway open...

It's a celebration for you, sir...

PROTESTERS CLAMOUR

..and that the whole matter will be the subject of an urgent review by the Government.

Yes, it's a lovely road but we're living in misery, sir,

we have to do something...

-Who else have you got here?

-Everybody, sir. Mr Clark!

Well, the traffic is pouring past here.

It's light at the moment. By three days, four days, it'll be intensely heavy.

Meanwhile, the families in this road and the 142 children

like the youngster here will have to sleep in the front room because there's no room at the back.

We're planning more demonstrations unless they assure us that something is going to be done.

-All your neighbours are leaving?

-Yes.

-Do you wish you were going too?

-I do.

I've lived in this street all me life and I want to get out now.

But the Westway was only the start.

There was a much more radical plan in the pipeline.

Inspired by American freeways, it was called the Motorway Box.

30 miles of elevated motorway forcing its way through Central London.

'The Motorway Box is perhaps the most controversial of the proposals,

'since it involves a complete ring of four- and eight-lane highways so close to the heart of London.

'The Motorway Box will be driven through densely populated parts of London.'

With the newly-opened Westway there for all to see,

Londoners realised what the impact of the Motorway Box would be.

Well, I object to...having things steam-rolled over me without being able to say what I feel,

and I've found that a great many people felt the same way.

Homes Before Roads campaign believes things have been got out of perspective by County Hall.

Homes Before Roads was a new political party, formed to fight the proposed Motorway Box.

Transport has been boosted up to a position which will dominate London.

The scale of the proposals was extraordinary.

The so-called Motorway Box went through Kensington, Battersea,

Lambeth, Hackney, Camden - tight-built Victorian terraces.

So it was going to be this huge motorway, in many cases elevated,

through all the Inner London boroughs.

How can there be any new roads in London without losing houses?

Well, I think this is obvious. I mean, you certainly will

take down somebody's house in building a new road.

But in fact we're talking here of taking down the houses or the homes of hundreds of thousands of people.

Homes Before Roads succeeded in putting up over 80 candidates

in the 1970 Greater London Council Elections.

This is a borough in which the so-called Motorway Box is expected to cut a swathe through the housing,

and there has been a very great deal of interest to see how many votes the Homes Before Roads candidates

take away from the traditional parties.

The Homes Before Roads people tended to be literary and artistic,

and that sort of thing. I went to Oxford, I'd read history.

The opponents were engineers and, I mean, looking back, you can see it as a conflict

between modernising engineers and reactionary historical and literary people.

But it wasn't just the engineers who disapproved.

The established political parties and their candidates were none too keen on Homes Before Roads, either.

I thoroughly disapprove of the Homes Before Roads.

I think it wrong when educated people who should know better

use elections of this sort, which are concerned not only with roads and homes,

important as they are, but with education, and with the care of old people.

As a pressure group, it seems to me not to be socially responsible,

and I take a poor view of it.

A lot of people have been wondering how the Homes Before Roads candidates were going to do.

-They're opposed to the...

-Well, I'm pleased to say, I'm now going to declare the result of this election.

We had all the enthusiasm and all the energy, and all the optimism of young people,

and I think we probably thought somewhere we were going to do well in the polls.

Cyril Keith Jacker...

-Homes Before Roads.

-..1,037.

We didn't, we were thumped.

-James Anthony Lambkin...

-Conservative.

-..24,400...

-CROWD CHEERS

The Conservatives won the election, and were committed to building the Motorway Box.

It was a defeat for Homes Before Roads, but they would have the final victory.

Day after day, people came to County Hall and explained why

they didn't like the proposals,

and eventually it got to the point

where the Homes Before Roads policy

had been adopted by the London Labour Party.

So when Labour regained control of the capital three years later, they immediately dropped the Motorway Box.

We thought we'd been vindicated

and we were elated, we were thrilled. We thought, "My goodness, in the end we've won."

The author of the Motorway Box scheme, who was a chief engineer,

was sacked from his job, and it was made clear to me that if I tried to resurrect

any form of major road proposals for London, the same fate would befall me.

Opinion was changing about building motorways in London.

Modernism was very destructive.

It was very narrowly focused on getting modern roads built, getting comprehensive development done,

and it didn't pay very much attention to the people themselves.

Around the end of the '60s, beginning of the '70s,

there was a huge flip change in popular attitudes,

from a belief in reconstruction of cities around the car

to a belief

in conservation, preservation of the existing city,

limiting the impact of the car on the city

to the maximum extent possible.

It was one of the biggest

and most sudden psychological changes I've ever observed,

and, I think, that ever occcurred in 20th-century history.

It was clear that building urban motorways was now a non-starter.

But out in the countryside, government plans were still going ahead.

In the early '70s the M25 was known as the M16.

North of London, its planned route ran through Epping Forest.

Upshire was a sleepy little hamlet

where nothing very much happened.

It was basically still agricultural,

and as a result of an enquiry from somebody about a reservoir

we were told there was a motorway projected to come through Upshire,

right through the middle of the village.

People were up in arms.

We had people standing outside their front doors with guns, saying, "They shall not pass!"

I think I've got some photographs of it somewhere.

Anyone that comes here, I'll shoot his guts on that floor.

These are people whose lives were going to be dreadfully disturbed,

and they were kicking against the bricks. They didn't know what to do.

We don't stop progress. I've been in roads and sewers all me life,

but we never went mad like this.

They don't want to come down here because, I tell you, that old gun of mine will do them.

I'll do them, honest.

-With your shotgun?

-Yes, I will.

-I see.

-Yes.

Everyone was absolutely devastated,

because the one thing that you felt in Upshire was secure.

Because we're in the green belt, and Epping Forest is protected by Act of Parliament.

And then, all of a sudden, there was the Government

actually proposing to put a motorway in their own green belts,

and it was a huge sense of betrayal.

It's where the people from East London in particular

used to come out in their breaks and their day off.

They've loved it, they've always loved it.

I mean, this is one of the most treasured possessions of the people of this part of the world.

How could they drive a motorway through it?

So a protest group was formed.

I think without Joyce

we might not have been... quite so brave!

We decided to send a Christmas card to the Environment Secretary.

Went with a poster, which said...

"Not Epping Likely"!

We'd have wanted to do the same things.

The "F"s were very enlarged!

We wouldn't have believed ourselves capable of doing a lot of the things that we did do!

The goat was Vanessa.

She was photographed all over the place.

And to a person from a loving, stable, working-class background

who hadn't really ever had anything to rebel against,

this was an amazing group of people to be swept into.

In the summer of 1973, the campaign headed to London

to deliver a petition to their local MP, Norman Tebbit.

It was in the national press... got a good press.

Got a very good press. It's all very well,

but a good press doesn't impress the people that you want it to!

Joyce's campaign had no effect on the Government's plans,

but because the protest was so vociferous, a public inquiry was called.

Expert witnesses were hired to explain why the motorway should be abandoned.

We were optimistic,

and we thought our cause was just, and that we would win.

It was then that the Upshire protesters discovered a catch

at the heart of the inquiry system that meant their case was fatally flawed.

It was a catch that meant the Government would always win.

Even today, guidance for inspectors makes the limits of their remit clear.

"The inspector shall be careful to confine his or her consideration

"to matters within the scope of the Inquiry.

"The merits and foundations of policies adopted by the Government are not matters for argument."

In other words, whether the motorway should, or should not, be built could never be questioned.

There seemed to be this basic assumption that they were right, and we were just going through a process,

and the further the Inquiry went, the more one felt that.

It felt as if you were playing with a loaded dice.

We were never going to win. It wouldn't matter what arguments we had put forward,

the department had got their plan,

and the department were going to stick to it.

And they weren't going to listen.

We didn't stand a dog's chance in hell.

A key section of the M25 motorway around London was opened today

through Epping Forest. It means traffic from the north...

When that road opened I felt as if something had gone that wasn't ever going to come back.

That was the last time that you would have complete quiet.

It was the last time you would have complete dark.

TRAFFIC ROARS

I was brought up in a very law-abiding family.

I'm also a magistrate.

And I did think that right would out, and I really did believe it.

I don't any more.

I don't.

MUSIC: "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who

The defeat at Epping had an effect around the country,

as Middle England began to realise

that there was no point playing by the rules.

..not a road

that others have decided would fit into a nice, little, neat geographical plan.

There was a loss of faith in public inquiries.

Protesters began to voice frustration at a system they no longer believed in.

..in a call for a motion of No Confidence in the Chair. Thank you.

-Next witness.

-I wish to protest!

This inquiry is a travesty!

Silence in court!

-This is NOT a courtroom.

-It IS a courtroom.

It is not a court, it's an inquiry!

And you are not fit to conduct it.

Well, madam. I am conducting it, fit or not. Now, be silent!

You're a senile old fool!

At Winchester, where the M3 was due for completion,

the planned route for the motorway

ran through some of England's finest countryside.

CHOIR SINGS

Well, at that time I was a master at Winchester College

and the proposed motorway went right across college land.

The water meadows were extremely important,

and then you have this meadow

along which Keats used to walk and wrote the ode, To Autumn.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.

Suddenly, in all this very best landscape they were proposing to build a road,

which just seemed to be wrong.

I couldn't think of any reason, short of warfare, and even then,

for destroying beauty like that.

And for such a poor reason as to give

two or three minutes' saving on a journey to Southampton

just seemed ludicrous to me. So, it seemed to me it was

something essential to fight.

At first, the protesters planned to follow the usual route of presenting their case at the public inquiry.

But then they heard of a radically different approach.

-This is like South Africa!

-Mr Ridge, my solicitor, is locked outside!

This approach wouldn't just question

the need for this particular motorway,

but the legality of any motorway.

And it was one man who led the way.

..but you will allow those people into this inquiry,

or you will close it down now.

Polytechnic lecturer John Tyme was becoming

a familiar figure at public inquiries around Britain.

Their homes are threatened, and they have no...law...to protect them in...this...room.

-Any member of the public...

-He was protesting against all roads,

but he realised that the constraints on the inspector meant that no protest could ever be successful.

He knew public inquiries didn't work.

They have no roads...

John Tyme was, I would think, an obsessed man,

and he certainly saw motorway building as part of some great conspiracy.

To some extent, he probably was right,

but he was very, very determined and very inspirational.

Inquiries into motorway proposals,

which in themselves are monstrously destructive across our countryside,

are wholly invalid.

John Tyme was the obvious voice that had started this,

and I don't know how he came to be invited,

but it was quite conspiratorial when it happened.

Do you hate motorways?

Of course.

-You hate them?

-Of course, yes.

Your ex-wife died in a car crash.

Ccould it be that, subconsciously, that is the basis of your hatred of the motor car and road traffic?

One should never deny the possibility of subconscious roots.

We don't know the springs of our actions.

It may very well be the sufferings that my children underwent.

When I think of the 7,000 people killed on the roads a year,

I wonder what, in fact, the road lobby...how they manage to sleep at nights.

Motorways are constructed on the bones of dead children.

John arrived in Winchester just before the inquiry was about to start, to explain his tactics.

We had this meeting in my living room, as I was a House Master, and John Tyme was there.

There were a lot of people there,

and John explained what he wanted to do.

And what he wanted to do was to disrupt the inquiry to begin with,

as long as possible, to prevent the DoE carrying on in its old way.

So I tell you this, that if you allow this inquiry to open

you will get your motorway, no matter what or who says what.

What I suggest you do, is put every single atom of power you have

to stopping any inquiry being held. Stand on your feet,

and you will defeat this DoE, you will knock them flat,

and they will never get up again.

In essence, John Tyme's approach was to stop the inquiry opening,

because if it didn't take place, building the motorway would be illegal.

That had never occurred to me.

It never occurred to me to act, that the inquiry could actually be stopped.

Inside the Guildhall, Major General Edge, hoping to pre-empt an outburst, slips on stage early.

It was full of expectancy, the whole room.

I don't know whether we really believed we could do it.

We had all been inspired by John Tyme,

but I guess none of us really knew whether other people were really going to do this or not.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

He got to, "Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen."

It's now half past ten. CROWD CLAP AND JEER

The inquiry is now open.

I represent, em...

CHORUS OF VOICES

...and you also are in breach of the Public Building...

It just snowballed, and lots and lots of people were taken out -

eventually, even the Headmaster of Winchester College!

Here was a sort of pillar of respectability, and he had to go!

We shall indeed treat you fairly in the civilised Winchester manner.

But we cannot do that, sir, if we feel uneasy about the roots of our democracy.

To everyone's surprise, the tactics worked.

Major General Edge made an extraordinary announcement.

For the first time, an inspector was prepared to consider whether the motorway was needed at all.

He told the Ministry to think again.

The protesters had won.

The plans were shelved, and Winchester's water meadows were saved.

Now there was a way of stopping motorways being built.

Without George, the Archway Road would now be widened, and we would now have

a great big motorway right through Islington.

George has a piratical view of life. He doesn't take anything for granted.

And he comes from Austria, from Vienna,

so that he wasn't quite as squashed as a lot of English people are,

surrounded by the walls of thought that they set up for themselves.

He's a very free-thinking person.

And he was indefatigable.

If there ever is something like a Nazi government,

which I suppose I experienced in my very young days,

British bureaucrats will carry out that policy far better than the Nazis ever did, and for far longer.

For people living here, it is a fact that Goering with his bombs

was less their enemy than the Department of Transport, which is supposed to be working for us.

In 1976, the Government intended to turn a two-mile section

of the A1 running through North London into a motorway.

Houses along the Archway Road were bought up so that they could be demolished.

The most horrific aspect

is this destruction of homes and the making of other homes, which are not being destroyed,

largely untenable because they'll be next to a motorway.

This is what I find so horrific.

George and Nina had learned from events at Winchester,

and knew that civil disobedience could scupper government plans.

I was thrown out of the '76 inquiry,

generally speaking, an outsider would say, because I was heckling.

I would say I was trying to make a reasonable case, and not being allowed to by arbitrary rules.

And the police were very sweet. They were very, very nice.

The policeman who took my arm to escort me out, apologised, yes!

The inspector there was a man with a conscience, and I think it rather weighed on him.

It wasn't just our heckling of him.

And as the inquiry went on over only about six days, he came in later and later and later.

And then, finally, he didn't turn up at all. He just dumped it.

That was one inspector got rid of.

The inquiry was abandoned.

But six months later the Ministry were back...

with exactly the same scheme.

The new inquiry was a sell-out.

Of course, George and Nina were there.

But this time, GLC Councillor Ken Livingstone was there.

There's every chance now...

Red Ted Knight, Leader of Lambeth Council, was there

along with a host of other protesters.

And all of them wanted to have their say.

But they would be confronted by the finest legal mind that the Government could employ.

Well, I was a barrister at the Planning bar,

and if you were that sort of barrister you tended to get involved

in motorway inquiries, one way or another.

Michael Howard wouldn't get more than a few words out

before a shout of, "Oily lawyer! ",

to kind of distract him. Or, you know, I remember reporting him to the Bar Council at some stage.

George and Nina's awkward squad was so unruly, the inspector couldn't control proceedings.

So he withdrew to a small room to hear each witness.

The protesters, frustrated at not being heard themselves, decided to invade.

And there was a terrific tumult.

Some people were hammering at the door to break it down,

and they did, or they broke the locks, I suppose.

When it seemed absolute mayhem was going to break out,

the inspector went onto a fire escape outside the main inquiry hall.

He was a plump little man, you know,

and he was quite frightened.

And I actually interposed myself to stop either Ted Knight or Ken Livingstone,

I'm not sure I can remember which

at this stage in time, from actually raining blows on this poor defenceless inspector!

Local press described the inquiry as an Orwellian nightmare.

But then, astonishingly, the engineers couldn't answer a basic question.

How would the Archway motorway affect traffic on the surrounding roads?

Wouldn't it simply move the congestion elsewhere?

It was a fair point to make, that it didn't make as much sense as the department were arguing.

Again, the inquiry was abandoned.

But it would be another 15 years before George and Nina could finally stop protesting.

It was when the Ministry started selling back the houses,

in '93-'94 I think it was, that we realised we had really won.

And, you know, curiously, most people remained unaware that there was anything very much going on.

They were vaguely aware of the local paper saying there was some row going on,

but that was about as far as most people's awareness of it goes.

I always say, "That's what we did."

And friends who visit me here, I always take them up to the Archway Bridge and show them.

And I always say, "There should be a statue of George there, going like this."

Protest against motorways at public inquiries was making a difference.

The inquiry system

changed a lot and started to elongate,

and serious consideration was given to alternatives at that time,

by both the people in the offices, and by ministers in particular.

I mean, the change was so marked that, as far as I was concerned,

where everything was popular in '72 and Ministers were dying to get round and open motorways,

by 1976 I couldn't find anyone to open either M62 or York Bypass.

No-one wanted to be associated with motorways.

By the end of the decade, protest against road-building was merging with green politics.

People were waking up to the idea of saving the planet.

..but they're just nice creatures, they're nice.

They wouldn't harm anyone, really.

They're just to live.

# Oh, the Greenpeace is a-sailin', they're crazy as hell

# They'll be riding a big ocean in a hollowed-out shell

# They'll probably get seasick or they'll probably go blind

# They're probably on drugs or at least out of their mind. #

The early '80s did see a change in the

level of support for groups like Friends Of The Earth and Greenpeace.

Greenpeace got lots of publicity

due to the Save The Whale thing.

The kind of romanticism of what they did,

putting themselves on the line between the whalers and the whales,

it fuelled people's imagination.

And then people locally,

involved in small campaigns, could start to see the linkages.

For Joe Weston and his local Friends Of The Earth group,

that link was made when the M40 was scheduled to run through an area of fenland called Otmoor,

just to the west of Oxford.

One of the local members said,

"You know the route goes through

"Britain's best butterfly wood, don't you?"

And that was it, you know?

That was something that would get people interested.

Butterflies and bunny rabbits always do it for people.

41 of Britain's 53 species have been recorded here,

and Friends of the Earth campaigner Joe Weston wages

an uphill struggle to save them from the M40.

We've got some very, very rare butterflies here -

the Purple Emperor and the Black Hairstreak -

fast disappearing from British countryside,

in danger of disappearing if the motorway's completed.

But once we'd made those arguments, and we'd had the cameras out and the press out once,

where do you go from there? What happens next?

Friends Of The Earth have come up with a new ploy

for making life difficult for the motorway planners.

We decided to buy this field, and then

sell it off in small plots to thousands of people,

hopefully all over the world,

-that would then completely

-BLEEP

-up their compulsory purchase process.

But Joe needed publicity for his cunning plan.

Lewis Carroll had been a regular visitor to Otmoor,

and it was the inspiration for Through The Looking Glass.

"For some minutes Alice stood without speaking,

"looking out in all directions over the country.

"And a most curious country it was.

"There were a number of tiny little brooks

"running straight across it from side to side.

" 'I declare, it's marked out just like a large chessboard,' Alice said at last."

And so Joe renamed his field,

"Alice's Meadow".

This wasn't any longer just wildlife,

any longer just landscape. This was cultural heritage as well.

'...home in the summer of many of Britain's rarest butterflies,

'and a scene which, it's said, inspired Lewis Carroll's chessboard landscape in Alice.

'The idea of turning all this...'

'...could frustrate government efforts to complete the motorway.'

One afternoon we had the BBC...

The head of the DoT is the Minister of Transport.

He's a member of a cabinet that can make laws.

..ITV, Breakfast Television...

If the route is approved, then notices will have to be served on all the landowners.

We even had a crew that had flown in from Sidon.

Israeli tanks had been shelling the hotel that they were in the day before.

The next day, they'd flown to Otmoor to film this story for NBC.

This spot of land where I'm standing belongs to Alex Warman

of Oslo in Norway.

And this one belongs to Alan Parker of Melbourne.

This field has been divided into 3,000 separate plots.

Friends Of The Earth have sold those plots to 3,000 different people from all over the world.

We even were interviewed by the Tokyo Times. It was just amazing.

We could have sold England.

It was incredible!

When the M40 was finally built, its route avoided Otmoor.

And today it still remains untouched.

In the early '80s, Friends of the Earth had 15,000 members.

By the end of the decade, we had 100,000 supporters.

That reflected, I think, the enormous increase in awareness

about environmental issues, about ozone depletion, but also

the concern there was for the countryside.

I think it's no coincidence that the opening sequence in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

is the destruction of Earth to make way for an inter-space highway.

Come off it, Mr Dent. You can't win, you know.

You can't lie in front of the bulldozers indefinitely.

I'm game. We'll see who rusts first.

You're gonna have to accept it, you know. This bypass has got to be built,

and it's gonna be built.

-Nothing you can say or...

-WHY's it got to be built?

What do you mean, "Why has it got to be built?" It's a bypass.

You've gotta build bypasses.

At the start of the '80s, there was a new political agenda.

And environmental campaigners would find themselves on a collision course

-with a government committed to car ownership.

-I find some people thinking

of the environment really in quite a kind of airy-fairy way,

like going back to village life.

Well, there's some who might like it, but it really is quite impossible to do that.

For Mrs Thatcher, motorways were crucial to generating wealth for the nation.

Environmental concerns took a back seat, and for the first time in a decade

a politician was proud to open a motorway.

She announced that nothing could stop the great car economy.

# D-D-Doin' up the house is me bread and butter

# Me bird's page 3 and me car's a nutter

# L-L-Loadsamoney is the shout I utter

# As I wave my wad to the geezers in the gutter. #

The Government is doubling its spending on building and improving major roads.

There'll be £12 billion over the next ten years, much of it for widening existing motorways.

In 1989, the Government published Roads For Prosperity.

It announced that over 600 miles of motorway were to be widened across the country.

The Minister Of Transport called it the biggest road-building programme since the Romans.

It was a great, kind of, lobbying coup because all the roads

we were calling for improvements, they were all in this list.

It was a lobbyist's dream.

You know, we couldn't have written that White Paper.

So at the time, you know, it was an absolute delight.

But perhaps we celebrated a bit too soon.

'There are plans to widen almost all the M25

and, on the sections between junctions 12 and 15,

'there are plans for additional three-lane parallel link roads,

turning it into a gigantic 14-lane highway.'

And of course it was just one step too far, as far as the public were concerned.

No-one that I ever talked to socially could ever believe

that anyone in the department in their right mind could consider building 14 lanes.

'The Department Of Transport's plan for the M3 extension

'involves the excavation of a two-mile cutting 100 feet deep and 400 feet wide

'across Twyford Down, disfiguring a Bronze Age village

'and slicing through a designated area of outstanding natural beauty,

'as well as a site of special scientific interest.'

The destruction was immense.

And I think what the Ministers didn't realise

is that they were coming right up against their own constituency.

The very people that had elected them were turning away,

and saying, "No, this is not what we want for our country."

I was a Conservative councillor.

I used cars in the way that any comparatively modern mum

would have done in those days.

I had no view about motorways. They were a convenient method for getting from A to B,

so I had no prejudices one way or the other about them.

The prejudice started with the, what seemed to me at that time,

totally irrational idea of taking the motorway

straight through a completely undisturbed and extraordinarily special bit of chalk downland.

The campaign against the M3 in the '70s had saved Winchester's water meadow.

But when the engineers came back with a different route, to local residents it seemed just as bad.

A unique resource,

-absolutely

-BLEEP. Absolutely lost forever by...

em...lack of forethought,

lack of courage, bureaucratic ineptitude, political expediency...

You name it, it was there.

Barbara had campaigned against the motorway for years.

It's absolutely imperative

that you walk the site.

The heritage and the landscape backcloth

of Winchester, which is

England's ancient capital...

We have a way to obviate the use of the public purse.

...not just the M3, it's a range of road schemes,

and that if the EC doesn't...

But her campaign had little effect.

Frustrated with all the usual forms of protest, she eventually

found herself chained to a fence alongside Friends Of The Earth.

We were quite deep green radicals,

and it took a while for us to realise that we had a common interest and a common culture,

and we cared about the same things.

But we were hopelessly naive about what was going to happen.

We never realised, of course, all the people of Winchester had jobs to go to!

They couldn't spend the time needed to actually prevent the road from being built.

What happened very quickly was, a group of scruffy hippies

from universities in England suddenly turned up.

They were the ones with the time, with the passion,

and could be there every day as was needed

to make the protest work.

I was at a Hawkwind gig in Brixton, an all-nighter,

and I started chatting to the chap dancing next to me.

And he said, "I've just come back from this place outside Winchester.

"They're trying to put a road through it, there's people there."

Sounded instantly like somewhere I needed to go.

We've got graduates and people still at university.

I left a year ago.

We've got crafts people, we've got musicians, we've got artists.

We've got a lot of very, very spiritual people here.

I'd be in this dry lecture and I'd dash out,

grab my rucksack, hitchhike down to Twyford Down and arrive at the camp,

and something would have happened that morning.

If my house was burning, I wouldn't write a letter

and lobby my government. I'd bloody do something about it.

Jason Torrance was a member of direct action group Earth First.

They proposed a permanent camp directly in the line of the motorway.

They became known as the Dongas,

after the Iron Age tracks that ran across the Down.

Well, how do you live like this?

How do you really live like this and survive?

We're cold and wet, it's not a joke, and we've no homes to go to now.

There were moments where it was desperately grim, really dire.

A lot of people got very ill from, you know, very poor hygiene.

We'd be hunched around this little burner pitifully, you know,

in this huge flapping tent, you know, with a goat in one corner.

And bad stomach upsets, that kind of thing. It was quite hard to keep yourselves clean.

I bloody hated the whole thing.

I hated being in a tent. I hated being cold.

My remaining memory is being constantly cold, and wet, and damp.

'Some people might find this way of life rather strange,

'but the Dongas already have the support of the Canon of Winchester

'and dozens of well-wishers all over Hampshire.'

The Bishop of Winchester Cathedral and all the kind of Women's Institute stalwarts came up the hill

and had a church service on the Sunday, had a Sunday service

in our camp. And we were all singing Jerusalem,

this green and pleasant land, you know, dreadlocks waving,

and there's, like, stout ladies in their tweed skirts, and the bishop.

We've got our face paints on and he's doing his God thing,

and it's, there's essentially the Monty Python nature

of the British psyche, really!

MUSIC: "Jerusalem" by William Blake

Just indicates the anger that people

express over what is being proposed.

Devastation of this countryside is unacceptable.

The first time I took direct action, people said, "Right, there's bulldozers.

"They're right here, right now. Come on, chop-chop."

And I just grabbed a tambourine and a drum or something and ran down the hill with all the others,

and thought, "Oh, here we go, here we go, here we GO!" And ran onto this work site.

And I just saw these incredibly brave people running out

at these dumper trucks with wheels taller than me.

And I thought, "I can't do this."

So I kind of stood at the side drumming for a little while

but, the next day, walked out in front of a bulldozer,

looked at the driver, who just gave me a big smile, and that was it.

Stopped and turned off the engine, and that was that.

It was all very well standing in front of machines,

but Earth First were proposing a far more dangerous form of direct action.

All Jason Torrance needed was a volunteer.

I suggested the plan,

held up the the D-Lock and said, "Now, who is going to

attach themselves to the machinery?"

Total silence.

And I just said, "Look, I'll do it."

'Another demonstrator had used a bicycle lock around his neck and fixed himself to the axle.'

Now, it's unfortunate that this kind of radical action has to be taken.

But I feel it's really necessary to save sites of special scientific interest.

I'd just done an interview on Sky News.

Everyone was moved away out of the system and they turned the machinery on.

Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!

-And just one word entered my head at that time, which was

-BLEEP!

'The onlookers became enraged when the crane suddenly burst into life

'with a demonstrator still shackled underneath.

-'They feared for his life.'

-At that moment, it really became apparent to me,

you know, that I was prepared to die for this cause.

STUDENTS ARGUE WITH POLICE

'The police did insist that the vehicle WAS turned off.

'And they decided to try and find the key to that bicycle lock.

'So they started to undress the man.

'And, luck upon luck, they found it on a chain around his neck.'

Some of the actions taken by the protesters were pretty extreme.

I remember one particular protester

holding a very young child,

standing in front of this extremely large bulldozer.

And it was an extremely dangerous thing to do.

I just couldn't contemplate how he would do it.

That was why extreme actions had to be taken regarding security on-site

to actually progress the work.

After nine months of disruption, the government had had enough.

They decided to take action themselves.

It was about five, six in the morning.

I was woken up suddenly by a guy saying, "Quick, quick, out of bed now!

There's a hundred guys in yellow jackets crawling all over the Dongas!

"I think they're here to do surveying!"

You could see this kind of, like, yellow shimmer. And I was, like,

-"What the

-BLEEP

-is that?" And it was a

-BLEEP

-great army.

It became known as Yellow Wednesday because they all wore yellow jackets.

And these guys were just all over the place.

And they were circling the machines, to bring in the machines.

It was like the Romans were coming, it really was!

"Oh, my God. This is it, this is it!"

And then it all just went pear-shaped.

It was just everyone doing their utmost to defend that land.

Through passive resistance, through throwing ourselves in front of the machines,

from climbing on top of the diggers to lying down in front of the security guards -

anything we could think of to try and slow down the pace of work.

We were outnumbered, like, three to one, four to one? I don't know.

Plus they were like three times our size, most of them,

and it got very, very rough very, very quickly.

The security guards were almost going out of their way to hurt us as much as possible.

They would grab you by your hair - I had long hair at the time -

grab you by clumps of hair, and drag you over flints, through hawthorn, through brambles, you know.

Throw you onto metal, that kind of thing. Just deliberate violence.

The media-savvy Dongas quickly alerted the press, and by lunchtime Yellow Wednesday was news.

'50 private security guards and around 30 members of the so-called Dongas tribe fought over land.'

I can't believe I'm in England.

I mean, if you showed pictures like this from Romania or Russia

you'd say, "Oh, terrible." But those are John Major's bullyboys,

that's the only thing you would say.

The camp was destroyed.

Rebecca and Jason were banned from entering the site.

But the following May they returned to the Down to protest again.

By this time, the site looked completely different.

The cutting for the motorway had been done, leaving white chalk exposed.

Rebecca and Jason were soon arrested, and ended up in court.

One by one, we all stood up and made our statements, and I don't think it made

much impression on the judge!

And he said, "You have been quick to snatch the martyr's crown.

"I think you'll find it uncomfortable headgear."

And promptly sent us all to prison for 28 days.

I was staggered, I was absolutely staggered.

All we did was dance on Twyford Down and take part in a peaceful demonstration,

and we were sent to prison.

The M3 through Twyford Down was eventually built, but it opened with little fanfare.

I try and go there as little as possible.

I'd certainly never drive through it, just on principle.

I remember taking a train journey once with Rebecca,

and it was almost like the first time we'd seen it.

We couldn't really bear to look at it.

It was a scar in the landscape, and in us.

Twyford Down had become national news, inspiring a wave of direct action.

It seemed every major road scheme now had its own protest.

'Government road plans have infuriated and united the environmental movement.'

Homes not roads! Homes not roads!

About a dozen people have been arrested in an operation

to move anti-road protesters from the Newbury Bypass.

A 250-year-old chestnut tree in East London which had stood in the way of a motorway extension

has been cut down. In the end, it took 200 policemen and 20 arrests...

Other environmental protests blocked the road to stop a crane reaching the site.

As the morning progressed... The police have been struggling to evict nearly 300 protesters from houses

in East London due to be demolished for a link road to the M11 motorway.

Several demonstrators were arrested.

The operation has cost more than £150,000.

Swampy has been underground for more than 160 hours,

the longest time a road protester has ever spent in a tunnel.

I feel it's the only way to get a voice these days.

I mean, if I wrote a letter to my MP would I have achieved all this?

Would you lot be here now?

After Twyford Down, things did change.

I lived in liberal leftie Islington,

so you didn't really want to say

down the pub or at a dinner party, "Yes, I work for the road lobby."

"Oh, I work in transport." Or something like that.

There's no doubt the road protests have had an influence,

and kind of turned people against motorway building.

When Labour came to power in 1997, it was immediately apparent

that the new government had no appetite for motorways.

Public transport requires a greater priority.

I demand, the public demands, that you provide a public service network

that people can rely on, and can afford.

So within four years we've gone from 600 road schemes down to 150,

and a new government saying, "No more road building." By anyone's standards,

that's a very successful campaign.

Rebecca Lush now works for the campaign group Transport 2000.

This is my job, this is my life at the moment.

Doctor Alex Plows is now an academic specialising in Environmental Politics.

George Stern and Nina Tuckman have continued to campaign against various road schemes.

Joyce, Sue, John, and Betty didn't protest again.

I was young and angry and chaining myself to anything that moved.

I am now Campaigns Director of Transport 2000.

You know, one of those professional experts.

Jason's organisation Transport 2000 agree with the Government

that motorway charging could be the way forward to reduce traffic.

But when this was recently debated there was a huge outcry,

and Tony Blair ended up having to reply to over 1.7 million individuals that had protested.

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