People Against the River Crossing

July the 8^th 1993, central government withdraws the Oxleas Woods section of its infamous Roads to Prosperity scheme. The hill is saved!

I’ve been asked whether I’d like to investigate this, and since this is quite possibly one of the most significant things to ever happen here, it seems like a good idea for this site to cover this part of the Shooters Hill story.

Since this is a relatively recent episode, and an example of people power, I’m hoping to include some thoughts from those who participated in and observed the saving of the woods. So, if you were there, and would like to reminisce, I would like to hear from you. If you are interested please get in touch via the email address at the foot of the page.

The map shows how the bypass would have run right through woodlands farm, oxleas wood, and sheperdleas wood to meet the a2

At some point this year a post on this will appear, but for the time being, here’s the oxleas section of an alarm uk publication from 1995 (taken from the limited online information I’ve found so far):

“Whenever I used to visit Oxleas Wood I would visualise the proposed road cutting through it. It’s hard to believe that the woods are now safe. But safe they almost certainly are!

My involvement in the campaign against the East London River Crossing began in earnest in the late eighties. By this time the road had been scheduled for construction for many years and had already been approved by the longest Public Inquiry ever held into a road scheme. That inquiry had lasted 194 days; the transcripts of the proceedings contained 9.5 million words!

Local people, in the form of People Against the River Crossing (PARC) and Greenwich & Lewisham FOE, were fighting a determined and exhausting battle against a scheme which would not only cut a swathe through 8,000 year old Oxleas Woods but would also take out several hundred houses in the quiet and pleasant suburb of Plumstead. But with approval in principle granted, and with the Government, developers and some socialist local authorities strongly supporting the scheme, the odds against stopping it were getting bigger all the time. To achieve victory, a concerted strategy was needed to make Oxleas Wood a big issue locally and give it wider significance – a strategy to make it a symbol of the environmental damage that the road programme was causing and a rallying point for the environment movement. If that could be done, then, given Oxleas Wood’s proximity to Westminster, it might force the Government to back down rather than risk confrontation with a united community and environment movement, in its own “back yard”.

Like all the best campaigns we fought on every level. There were letter-writing stalls at the popular Greenwich market, politicians were systematically lobbied and a well-presented public transport alternative was drawn-up. We organised an “Adopt-a- Tree” scheme; the aim here was to get every tree in Oxleas Wood adopted. As well as bringing in funds and publicity, it would give supporters a real stake in the campaign. And if the worst came to the worst we could invite tree adopters to turn up to defend their tree.

In order to make Oxleas a “line in the sand” for the environment movement, we got some of the large environmental non-government organisations (for example the Wildlife Trusts and World Wide Fund for Nature) to take part in an Oxleas Strategy Group. This helped lock them into a campaign that was ultimately run by local people, but which made the best use of the resources of the national campaigns.

A couple of legal lines of last resort helped propel the campaign into the national news. The Government had failed to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment for the scheme, as required by European Community law. The heroic European Commissioner for the Environment, Carlo Ripa di Meana, took up this complaint causing Prime Minister Major to hit the roof and interrupt a Commonwealth conference to condemn the EC’s action. The complaint was never seen through by the EC, but the publicity was invaluable, as was that which resulted from a High Court case where the “Oxleas 9″ (nine local people) put their assets on the line to take the Department of Transport to court over their failure to provide adequate land in exchange for the damage to Oxleas woods. The case was lost, but Oxleas had caught the public imagination and the pressure on the government was intensifying.

Meanwhile, campaigners were preparing for the worst. A “Beat the Bulldozer” pledge was launched, with the aim of getting 10,000 people to pledge to be there if the bulldozers went in. With the TV pictures of direct action at Twyford Down fresh in their minds, as well as the vivid pictures we had painted of what would happen if they violated Oxleas Wood, the Government backed down.

For me the Oxleas campaign had meant hours of hard work in meetings held in draughty halls on dark, rainy nights trying to get the best campaign that I could. For hundreds of local people it had been years of struggle. Was it worth it? Definitely. Oxleas was a turning point. We’d shown how people power could stop roads, a lesson that was quickly learnt right across the country. We’d shown that the environment movement, when it’s focused and working in harmony with local communities, could win. And of course the peace and beauty of OxleasWood has been preserved.

Jonathan Bray, founder and convenor of the Oxleas strategy group

East London River Crossing Trunk Road

From the oxleas woodland management plan:

The Hedgerow on the eastern side of the meadow is composed of mainly hawthorn (Crataegus spp) with some self-seeded oak. This hedgerow is rather special as it contains some examples of butchers broom (Ruscus aculeatus), which is used as an indicator of ancient woodland, as it rarely grows in regenerated woodland. It was the presence of this plant that aided the campaign to stop the East London River Crossing putting a road through Oxleas Wood. This hedgerow was re-laid in 2004 by the GLLAB New Deal project.

Coat of Arms of John Lidgbird Sheriff of Kent, 1741 - from which the park takes its name

The modern name for Eaglesfield is derived from the coat of arms of John Lidgbird, who was made High Sheriff of Kent in 1741 and owned the site. His coat of arms displayed two eagles. The current play park there has seen a number of changes over the years, but as features go, it possibly started out as a dew pond, formed to collect drinking water for the Oxen grazing on deforested areas (hence the name Oxleas)¹.

At some point it became the yacht pond, as seen in the postcard pictures below, and later still a paddling pool, before being transformed into a play park around 1994.

There’s also pictures of the (hopefully) soon to be reinstated Lily Pond.

Update – plumstead-stories.com sent me another nice one of the park, can’t quite figure out whereabouts it is though:

Shooters Hill is a marginal voting area (with the red-blue margin being less than 200 votes in the last council elections – see table below), and the so-called chicken run has been a feature of politics in this area for a while; Tory Bottomley fled to the relative safety of Worthing in 1997, and now Labour Hyland has been accused of performing a similar stunt by shifting to the labour stronghold of Abbey Wood for this year’s council elections on May the 7th. Just goes to show that being a party animal is a job just like any other.

Emigrations such as these free up a bit of elbow room in the local scene, and furthermore, Labour Kelly looks set to stand down, creating even more room for maneuver. Councillor Kelly’s departure is a shame as he’s on record as considering local (as opposed to bridge builder’s) interests during the latest river crossing fiasco. Judging by the figures, he was also the most popular candidate at the last election, a possible indicator that he was actually the local choice? That’s two situations vacant then, the third is currently held by councillor Danny Thorpe, who probably will stand again, but presumably with less support now as he spent a year in oz, I hope he was on a solidarity mission with our namesake! Apparently he had offered to resign, but for reasons best known to the local labour party was persuaded to continue his duties from down under – since his return I spotted him in his role as envoi to climate camp, although according to the council press release, it appears the most significant thing to come out of that was confirmation that the camp was actually being held in the borough of Lewisham, who’s kite field must have been good for all those wind turbines! That authority does have a few green councillors though, so they were probably quite pleased, certainly more than mayor bullock anyway, who was very grumpy about it. He’s an unpopular figure anyway so no matter; for example after Millwall got to the FA cup final in 2004 they had a big party in Lewisham, and at one point he attempted to address the crowd, but was drowned out with calls of “who are ya! who are ya!”

So, with two current councillors leaving, the local tories have sensed their chance, and are raising their game; for instance local tory Maureen contributed to the push for a pedestrian “refuge island” beside woodlands farm – which shows that they are about more than just attacking labour all the time. Another game raising approach has been for tory hopeful Emmett to publish an eponymous website. Actually it’s quite a busy site and certainly contains more material than that of his superior, the parlimentary candidate Dave Gold, who previously tried to get elected in Brighton. An experienced blogger Emmett has a history of writing on national issues, and his preference for this topic led charlton average to express frustration as to why Emmett doesn’t narrow down the 2:1 ratio of national to local stories on his site. That was in May 2009, so I decided to take another look to see if there’s been any change.

Emmett's posts - click plot to zoom titles, ^esc to return

The plot illustrates increments over time of posts tagged either gordon brown (a favourite subject of Emmett’s) or shooters hill since the beginning of his blog last February. Broadly speaking dynamics in brown related material seem to follow the twists and turns of media coverage in general; there’s a steady flow of brown copy through from feb to may, followed by a flurry of activity in june, incidentally on both brown and the hill – which shows some synchronisation between the two themes. Things then go rather quiet, roughly around the time of the summer recess in parliament, and the holidays in general, so that’s probably nothing to worry about, except that there was actually loads going on locally at the time. From the start of july to the end of november 3 posts about the hill are counted, which is a slightly surprising finding as we had the architectural digs and lily pond events at eaglesfield park, the open day at shrewsbury park, the neighbourhood watch party, the shelving of the river crossing, and a whole series of events at the farm: key moments in the life of the local community that went completely unreported. The start of the conference season sees a steep increase in posts about brown, with no concurrent increase in local affairs, unlike the june spike, this suggests, if anything, a step away from local coverage.

Local coverage on the blog does not seem have to have improved since charlton average scrutinised it. It’s fair to say that as well as running for council, local tories probably do help the parliamentary campaign, so attacks on the incumbent leader are presumably part of the grand plan, but hopefully there’s still time for the candidates to show more interest in the area they want to work for!

Difficulties with this analysis
This plot does not illustrate activity across all tags, it only contrasts on two things, my favourite topic (the hill) at the local level, and the blogger’s favourite topic at the national level (the pm). In recent times his coverage of greenwich council issues has started to shape up a bit better in comparison to rants about gordon brown, so i could look at that as well. For example, various local issues have been discussed such as greenwich time (which is in big trouble at the moment) and thames clipper, so perhaps it is now getting more into local affairs. The other thing to say is that although he misses out a lot of important happenings on the hill, he is at least the only candidate providing potential voters with a public showing of his position via regular posts and tweets.