For most, 2020 was a year of solitude—one that will go down in history as the year the world locked down in response to a global crisis, with community and group activity limited to zoom calls and camaraderie relegated to socially distanced hangouts. But my Pandemic Year didn’t pan out quite like this. While the world was consumed by the impacts of COVID-19, my life revolved around another invisible threat: the capitalist pursuits of the United Kingdom government epitomized in a destructive rail infrastructure project and a fleet of grassroots resistance.
If you’re not from the UK, the acronym HS2 probably means very little. Some may have a vague association of the term with trains, but rarely does mainstream knowledge encompass more than that. Despite living in what many would regard as a prime example of democracy, very few Brits are aware that our government is currently funneling billions of taxpayers money towards the unnecessary infrastructure project High Speed 2 that is decimating our countryside and countless communities, all whilst our health services are left to collapse under the weight of a pandemic. HS2 is being pushed through under the guise of ‘sustainable development’ when the reality of it couldn’t be further from that.
“The amount of life that’s contained in a single branch of an Oak tree… and the lack of respect that they’re shown. If it actually benefited people, working people, then at least there would be some justification,” says one protester who goes by the name Jellytot who, earlier this year, officials behind HS2 attempted to imprison for peacefully resisting the project.
I have witnessed this firsthand when I worked and lived with the communities that live and breathe their resistance to HS2. Having spent the previous year working full time as a media coordinator for Extinction Rebellion, lockdown had given me yearning for a more local and immediate cause to throw myself into. As a result, In May of last year, just as lockdown eased enough to allow me to escape London, I moved to an outdoor adventure center turned resistance camp. The land, owned by one of many locals having their property seized by HS2, is on the banks of a chalk aquifer that will soon be drilled into in order to construct a viaduct over which the rail line will run. In doing so, HS2 will risk contaminating the drinking water of around two million people in the West London area. This isn’t something they’re quick to admit to, however, as doing so may damage their meticulous public image.
For months, Hillingdon Outdoor Activity Centre (or HOAC) served as one of a number of occupied sites between London and Birmingham, the route of Phase 1 of the train line. In squatting on land intended to be used for the project, protesters are able to delay work and cause financial disruption, in the hopes of preventing the vast amounts of destruction that HS2 will entail.
By my second day at the site, I was learning to climb and had made my way 40 feet up an ash tree that now no longer exists. Climbing and occupying trees due to be felled is one of the central tools of resistance used by the campaign. In woodlands across the country, groups have set up sites, partly on the ground and partly suspended in the branches of ancient Oak trees, Beach, and Willows—all threatened by HS2. In my time on the campaign, I have stayed in easily a dozen of these trees, in anything from hammocks to two story treehouses. Living within the habitats and ecosystems set to be destroyed by this project has given me a newfound understanding and appreciation for all that we must defend on this planet.
Thanks to my parents’ work in Green Party Politics and Environmentalism, I spent most of my upbringing in and around activist spaces, making this line of work somewhat in my blood. I came to the campaign aware of the possible complexities and challenges faced by living and working in this way. However, nothing could have fully prepared me for the impact of moving from a London house share to a transient woodland community. The sites, having grown out of a decade long fight against initial plans for HS2 in the form of the StopHS2 Campaign, attract groups and individuals from a broad range of backgrounds—and with an even broader range of incentives, tactics, and ideals. From local pensioners to middle class ‘hippies’, families with young children to working class folk, young anarchists and veterans of the Environmental movement that have been at it since Greenham Common—this campaign is a true microcosm of left spaces in our society.