Climate Camp 2009 Part I
Posted By fotdmike on September 5, 2009
The feature that made this event unique for me though was the marked absence of police, in distinct contrast to the previous Camps at Drax, Heathrow, and Kingsnorth.
This year’s Climate Camp has to have been a totally unique event in the history of the Camp for Climate Action.
Running from 26th August to 2nd September, it was located at Blackheath (memorable for its association with Wat Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381) on common land.
The feature that made this event unique for me though was the marked absence of police, in distinct contrast to the previous Camps at Drax, Heathrow, and Kingsnorth.
A mobile police station situated some distance from the site, a police van or two parked discretely on the other side of the Heath, and the occasional foot patrol.
Weird! But more of this later.
The Swoop
I arrived on the Wednesday afternoon (26th August), taking part in the “Swoop”… a term that seems to have found favoured usage since its introduction at the G20 protests in London earlier in the year.
The general idea (or so I understood it) was that the Swoop would consist of several different groups (identified by colour) each congregating at different places around London whilst waiting for the last-minute announcement of the intended location for the Camp whereupon all of these groups would rapidly “swoop in” and seize the site.
I’d decided to be part of the Orange or “invisible” group, unaligned and converging on the announced location from various places around the city.
All well and good… apart from one little snag.
The various groups taking part in the Swoop were supposed to assemble at their agreed meeting-points in London (with Orange being “invisible”, which I interpreted to mean nonchalantly but discretely ambling around) at midday and then wait for the site location announcement via Twitter, SMS, and other technological wizardry. Which might happen within minutes, or even hours, later.
Fine. So just how was I (and others who, like me, had come from way outside London) supposed to “discretely” hang about in the city whilst lugging a bloody great rucksack containing kit for a week-long camp plus (in my case at least) all my photo kit, laptop etc (complete with all the cables, chargers etc necessary to make it all work) for maybe two, three, four or more hours? Hardly an invisible presence.
Stupid idea, and one about which I hadn’t stopped muttering since the plan was first aired. (My own fault of course. Had I attended the gathering at which this scheme was agreed I could’ve raised my concerns then. But I hadn’t, and therefore I couldn’t.)
On the other hand, given that the ploy was principally intended to keep the location of the Camp secret (especially from the cops, who’d made determined efforts to scupper previous Camps before they’d even started), it worked remarkably well, with the site being taken and secured practically before anyone knew what was happening.
Well, I say “practically before anyone knew what was happening”, but that doesn’t quite explain the remarkably prompt presence of some mainstream media types who, according to certain folk I chatted with on-site, appeared to have been there right from the start. Curious.
So, following my own previously arranged cunning plan I arrived at Blackheath whilst the fencing was being erected and, having casually strolled onto the site (in marked contrast to previous Camps where one had to run the gauntlet of a police line) plonked my tent down in a conveniently empty spot. Of which, that early in the proceedings, there were quite a few.
Given that the layout of the Camp was to be structured around neighbourhoods (corresponding broadly to different parts of the country) and given that my default state is that of being absolutely clueless about virtually everything, I was fully resigned to the possibility that I may have needed to re-locate when I actually discovered where my preferred neighbourhood (Eastside) was supposed to be.
As it turned out though, and quite unusually for me, I wasn’t too far off the mark. Eastside, it transpired, was just across the firelane from me, whereas I had seemingly parked myself in South Coast. I could almost have justified it on the basis of that being where I originally hail from (as in birthplace).
To be continued
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