Fight for Sites go to Evict Pickles: On Friday 19th October 2012, the first anniversary of the brutal eviction of the Dale Farm Traveller community, activists and some of those evicted marched to the Department for Communities and Local Government to serve an eviction notice on DCLG Minister Eric Pickles.
Gypsies, Roma and Travellers have long found life in the UK difficult for their nomadic lifestyle, and have long been subjected to discrimination. There is a huge shortage of sites where they can legally stop both short-term while they are moving and for longer winter breaks.
Relatively few local authorities had made a real effort to meet their planning obligation to provide traveller sites, and these are often not popular with some local residents. Dale Farm – as the Wikipedia article tells – began with a planning appeal in the 1980s over the right to establish a site there.
Much of the problems that ensued over the subsequent expansion of the site onto a neighbouring plot of derelict wasteland owned by a traveller family came from it being ‘Green Belt’ – despite which it had been allegedly used by Basildon Council to tip waste tarmac and rubble from roadworks for many years.
In 2003 then Secretary of State, John Prescott had made an order giving temporary permission to the site for two years to give the site residents and the local authority time to find a suitable alternative site. But no progress was made, and by 2007 a government report stated that opposition amongst parts of the settled community towards site residents had become ever fiercer.
I went to the site in September 2011 and photographed a flash mob later that month at the DCLG, but was not able to be there for the eventual eviction on 19 October 2011 which was widely covered as it happened by UK and international media.
On the day when I marched with residents and protesters from Wickford Station the three miles to a rally at the site I was surprised at how remote and isolated it seemed to be, and thought it was in many ways a very appropriate place for a traveller site. I felt that Basildon Council had created a fight with the travellers based largely on racial discrimination and had not attempt to come to a sensible resolution.
The Fight for Sites protest on the first anniversary of the eviction was organised by the Traveller Solidarity Network in protest over the evictions last year and the continuing harassment of travellers at Dale Farm and across the country.
As I commented then, a year after the eviction had taken place from what had been “in most respects a highly appropriate, tidy and well-kept site” it was now “an eyesore, filled with stagnant water, sewage and toxic material, while 83 homeless families, mainly evicted from the site, are now living on the approach road to the site without electricity or running water” and facing further threat of eviction but with nowhere else to go.
Minister Eric Pickles response to the lack of sites had been to remove the duty of local government to permit traveller sites and to give them greater power to evict. The protesters met at Victoria Station and marched to the nearby DCLG offices to give him a notice of eviction.
It was a colourful protest and ended outside the offices with a number of scuffles between police and protesters, with some climbing onto a rood with banners and posters, as well as pasting up an eviction notice on the building. Photographers were harassed and moved back by police who were at the same time telling us we had a right to photograph the event, and several protesters were arrested.
I left after the protesters had stopped trying to get in the building and a statement was read out about why the had come to protest. I think the protest was coming to a close; by then it was raining heavily and I needed to be elsewhere.
You can read the text of the eviction notice and find more details about the protest and see many more photographs on My London Dairy at Fight for Sites go to Evict Pickles.
Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos
All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.