Runnymede | >Re-PHOTO

Police Close Down Runnymede Magna Carta Festival – 2015

Police Close Down Runnymede Magna Carta Festival: A couple of weeks ago I got on my e-bike and tried to cycle from Egham up Coopers Hill Lane which goes steeply up the wooded hill above the Thames flood plain at Runnemede. It wasn’t a great success as although the motor could cope with the gradient with a little more than usual help from my pedalling, the surface of the lane – here just a footpath was far too uneven and broken and I kept having to stop to prevent myself coming off the bike, eventually having to give up and get off and walk, pushing the bike for the final hundred yards or so.

Close to the top I reached the metalled section of the lane and cycled on, past the fence I had gone through a gap in in ten years ago on my way to visit the Runnymede Eco Village and past the road leading to the expensive private estate that now occupies the site. On Friday 12th June 2015 I had cycled up the same route by pedal power alone, locked up my bike and walked to the Eco Village.

There I was warmly greeted and shown around the site, as you can read on My London Diary. The residents were busy getting ready for the Magna Carta weekend four day free ‘Festival For Democracy’ which was due to start the following day, celebrating both the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta in the nearby meadows 800 years earlier and the third anniversary of the setting up of the village.

Although I’d not lived there I found it – as I commented in 2015- “seemed a great place to live so long as you were able to put up with a slightly spartan lifestyle. At my age I feel a need for hot and cold running water and a more pampered existence, but at least in summer a more open existence in the woods has its attractions.” It was a community that felt truly positive.

During my time there that day it became increasingly obvious that the authorities had decided that the free festival was not going to take place, although it was an entirely legal event and would have caused no distress to local residents with whom the villagers have good relations, and some at least were looking forward to the event.

Orders had clearly come down, possibly from royalty itself via our government that the festival must be stopped by any means whatever the law. And police had come telling lies that they about a cock and bull story of a ‘rave’ that was going to take place on a neighbouring football field that they had come to ‘protect’ the village from.

The invented story of an illegal rave was used by police and Surrey County Council to justify an order under Section 63 of the The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which allows police power to restrict access, remove people and issue exclusion orders, and they used this to stop and turn away those coming to the ‘Festival For Democracy’.

*Kettles on the fire for tea – and all were offered various infusions*

Section 63 is specifically aimed at stopping illegal raves and should only be used to prevent ‘amplified music’ being played during the night, and certainly not for the festivals such as this one – hence the need for the authorities to spread rumours of an illegal rave. As well as being turned away, people were being given exclusion orders banning them from coming within five miles of the village, and several arrests were made for breach of this. The police action seemed a clear abuse of a law intended for quite different purposes, and I will be surprised if any of those arrested ever reach court.

*One woman had built her home around a fallen tree*

At the time I wrote:

It would indeed seem a travesty if at a time when we are celebrating 800 years of freedom under the law against the arbitrary power of the state achieved at Runnymede, the authorities should abuse the law by using those arbitrary powers to prevent a people’s celebration of freedom.

*The festival starts, but police are turning people away.*

This wasn’t the only action by which the state tried to stop the festival – and you can read more on My London Diary in Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta festival which was at the time also posted on the now long defunct Demotix website. They didn’t entirely succeed, but it was on a rather smaller scale with so many being prevented from attending, though others managed to climb over the fences around the area. The account there also has many more pictures of the Eco Village.

I also write about this here on >Re:PHOTO at Celebrating Magna Carta, where I concluded:

Perhaps rather than celebrating Magna Carta we should all now be out on the streets and demanding a new charter for the freedoms we thought had been won 800 years ago.

Since 2015 we have instead seen governments introducing yet more restrictive public order laws and used them to take action against political protests and used to imprison peaceful protesters for long stretches, and Labour has continued these policies .

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Boxing Day Walk – 2014

Boxing Day Walk: Most years this century we have walked from Staines to Old Windsor for a family lunch, at first at my sister’s house, but more recently at a pub in Old Windsor where we have been joined by other members of the family. We are hoping to do the same today, though perhaps we might need to take a bus, a few of which are rumoured to be running, though I think likely to be cancelled at zero notice.

It’s not a great distance, though in earlier years we often added a few miles to the more direct five or so to develop more of an appetite, and sometimes we had too when the path beside the River Thames was flooded.

On My London Diary you can read more about some of these walks, and in particular about our walk on Friday 26th December 2014, ten years ago, when I wrote about it in rather more detail than usual. Here I’ll just post a few of the pictures from that walk with some captions, mainly those I wrote back in 2014. The pictures follow the order of our walk.

*The 1910 water intake to the Staines aqueduct takes water to reservoirs and treatment works.*

*Rosehearty has been moored here for years. The name is a town on the Moray Firth.*

*Houses on The Island in Wraysbury – many here were flooded in February 2014*

*The Thames at Runnymede, where we crazily swum in the buff when young after an evening in the Angler’s Rest Hotel. Then there was a diving board here too.*

*R G Bargee – most boat owners seem unable to resist a pun. We were almost there.*

Boxing Day Walk

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Swan Upping – 2008

Swan Upping: On Monday 14 July 2008 I caught a train back from Hull so as to be back in Staines in time to meet the Swan Uppers as the last boats in the flotilla were leaving the Swan in Staines (or Egham Hythe) after stopping for lunch.

Every July two groups of Thames Watermen make their way upstream from Sunbury to Abingdon following a tradition established not long after the Norman conquest, though the earliest clear written records only date back to 1186.

Ownership of swans is still controlled by ancient laws, with the Crown claiming ownership of all unmarked swans on open water.

In medieval times, swans, or rather cygnets, were an important source of food and many had the right to own swans. Upping in those times was a way of establishing ownership and taking some cygnets to be fattened for the tables, but leaving enough birds to maintain the swan population at a healthy level. The upping was done in July when the cygnets were still too young to be able to fly away and escape.

Today only three bodies apart from the Crown have maintained the right to own swans, a family with a Swannery on a lake in Abbotsbury and two London Livery companies who exercise their rights on those on the Thames.

The Vintners were officially granted their rights in 1472 and the Dyers at around the same date, though their right was then granted ‘by prescription’, a legal term meaning they had had the right as long as the law could remember – officially since the accession of Richard I in 1189.

Over the years chickens and ducks which could be easily farmed replaced swans as a source of food, and swans are now a protected species and it is illegal to kill them. The Royal Family may still retain the right to eat them, along with the fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge but neither body now does so.

In more recent times, Swan Upping has come to play “an important role in the conservation of the mute swan and involves the King’s Swan Warden collecting data, assessing the health of young cygnets and examining them for any injuries.” The cygnets claimed by the Dyers and the Vintners used to have their beaks nicked with distinctive marks, but now the birds are simply ringed and their weight and length recorded before being returned carefully to the river, where they swim away apparently unaffected by their experience.

Six Thames skiffs rowed by watermen, two boats each for the Royal Swan Uppers, the Dyers and the Vintners make their way upstream, keeping a lookout for swans with cygnets. They wear red shirts for the Royals, blue for the Dyers and white for the Vintners.

Back when I first photographed the Uppers, most of the scouting for cygnets was actually carried out by an elderly man on a bicycle who I got to know slightly, and I rode along behind him. When Eric saw the birds he would try to entice them to a suitable spot on the bank with the help of crushed digestive biscuits.

In more recent years, a small dinghy with an outboard motor carrying the Warden of the Swans, on Oxford professor, has often driven a little ahead of the fleet to locate the swans. The ancient post of Keeper of the Kings Swans had been split into two new posts in 1993, the other part being the Marker of the Swans, who is rowed in one of the Royal skiffs.

Following behind the skiffs is a small flotilla of river cruisers, which includes a launch for the press. I did once book a place on this, but my place was cancelled shortly before the event when the major agencies and newspapers took an unusual interest, I think because the royals were taking an unusual interest.

But for most purposes, cycling along the towpath is the best way to cover the Swan Upping, and I was often there on the bank minutes before those on the press launch were able to land and join me. And the bank was usually the best place to be, closer to the action than the press launch could get.

At the end of the day the skiffs line up together in Romney Lock where the men put on their jackets and stand up in their boats to toast the Sovereign’s health.

From Romney lock I ran around a quarter of a mile along the riverside path where the Dyers and Vintners stand in their boats with oars vertical to salute the Royal uppers who go past between them with their oars raised, before all six boats row off to the boathouse at Eton, with another 4 days of upping ahead of them.

More pictures from the 2008 Swan Upping on My London Dairy where you can also see many more pictures from previous years:

Shepperton-Staines, Jul 2001
Shepperton, Staines, Egham, Old Windsor, Jul 2004
Shepperton, Staines, Egham, Old Windsor, Jul 2005
Chertsey, Staines, Egham, Jul 2006
Laleham to Windsor, Jul 2007

Details of this year’s Swan Upping which begins on Monday 15th July 2024 are on the website of the Swan Marker to His Majesty the King. If the weather is good I might stroll down and take a few pictures.

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Magna Carta, Cleaners & Detention – 2015

Magna Carta, Cleaners & Detention: 15th June is Magna Carta day and Monday 15th June 2015 marked 800 years since King John was forced by the barons to sign the great charter at Runnymede. Most years the date is mainly marked by a local fair on the closest Saturday in Egham High Street the nearest town to Runnymede, but in 2015 there were various more national celebrations.

Unless you were a king, archhishop or baron in 1215, Magna Carta was of little relevance to you. Contrary to popular opinion it gave no rights or protection to the common people and, as Wikipedia tells us had little immediate effect in any case, as “Neither side stood by their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons’ War.”

Back in June 2012 I had sat around in a circle with the Diggers, then camped at Runnymede, on the grass next to the US Bar Association’s Magna Carta Memorial, where we had listened to a history lecturer from nearby Royal Holloway University about the charter and the lesser-known but more relevant to the common man ‘Charter of the Forest’ which came shortly after. It was at this meeting that plans were made to celebrate the event in 2015 with a people’s free festival in the woods on the hillside above Runnymede.

Unfortunately the establishment thought otherwise and in a clear case of ignoring the rights supposedly granted to us in Magna Carta, police swooped on the eco-village where the festival was being prepared three days before, suppressing the event in an unfair, arbitrary and almost certainly illegal manner.

So while I might otherwise have been enjoying myself at the free festival, instead I travelled up to London to photograph several events there mainly connected with Magna Carta Day.

Truth & Justice Magna Carta Day Protest

I began outside the Royal Courts of Justice where the Campaign for Truth & Justice was accusing the judiciary of unlawful convictions, false imprisonment, denial of access to court & perverting the course of justice over child abuse, forced adoption and paedophilia.

Above their heads was a banner with its message superimposed on a St George’s flag citing Magna Carta. Some of those taking part had been victims of child abuse, while others claimed to have been treated badly in the family courts where gagging orders had been used to prevent them from talking about their cases or seeking any redress. And we have certainly seen many cases of miscarriages of justice – including the convictions of the Guildford Four (1974), The Birmingham Six (1975), The Maguire Seven (1976) and Judith Ward (1974) as well as many others which have received less publicity.

But as the trial and conviction of Carl Beech for perverting the course of justice and fraud in 2019 made clear, many of the allegations over paedophilia against public figures have been unfounded.

Voice for Justice UK Magna Carta Protest

From there I went to Old Palace Yard opposite Parliament, where the right-wing Christians For Justice UK were holding a Magna Carta Day rally against the increasing human rights legislation which right-wing Christians feel maginalises and prevent them expressing their faith.

I reported that I listened to “ two speeches which appalled me, and appeared to have no connection with my idea of freedom, reminding of various short-lived ultra-right political groups such as the Freedom Party, formed in 2000 by ex-BNP members” and concluded “that this was a rally that was protesting the freedom to be a bigot rather than any real idea of religious or other freedom.”

Cleaners International Justice Day

But the day was not simply about Magna Carta. The protest by the PSC trade union outside HM Revenue and Customs in Whitehall was one of protests in over 50 countries on the 25th International Justice Day for Cleaners and Security Guards.

This remembers the day in 1990 when Los Angeles janitors were brutally beaten up by the police during a peaceful demonstration against their contractor trying to get union recognition and better rights. Since 1990 this day has become international, spreading to over 50 countries and with protests -some very small like this – now taking place in over 70 cities around the world.

Close Yarls Wood, End Detention!

This was also the International week against detention centres, calling for the closure of all immigration detention centres with protests taking place in eleven cities in the UK, USA, Belgium, Greece and Spain.

The London protest was led by the All African Women’s Group who held a rally in Parliament Square before marching to Downing Street with a report on rape and sexual abuse in Yarl’s Wood.

Among the speakers was whistleblower Noel Finn, a former mental health nurse at Yarl’s Wood who revealed publicly details of the abuse of women there after his complaints through the proper channels at the detention prison were not acted on. A number of members of the All African Women’s Group spoke about their own experiences when held in the detention prison. Others who came to speak in support included MPs Dianne Abbott, Kate Osamor, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell as well as Antonia Bright from Movement for Justice, Peter Tatchell and Selma James.

The protest demonstrated in several respects the increasing limitations on our freedom to protest. Protests are now prohibited on the main grass area of the square and they had to hold the rally on the narrow pavement area, inevitably spilling over onto the roadway because of the large number of people present.

After the rally had been taking place for around 20 minutes a police officer came to try and stop them using a public address system, now illegal in the square without authorisation from the Greater London Authority or Westminster Council. They argued and refused to stop, and with several MPs waiting to speak the officer finally left.

And when the protesters tried to had in a letter at Downing Street it was initially refused. Apparently you now need to give a week’s notice to hand in a letter. After some discussion a police officer agreed to take the report and ensure it was delivered to No 10. I don’t know whether it did eventually get there.

Close Yarls Wood, End Detention!
Cleaners Internati o nal Justice Day
Voice for Justice UK Magna Carta Protest
Truth & Justice Magna Carta Day Protest

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Magna Carta Under Threat

Magna Carta Under Threat – Runnymede Eco Village 12 June 2015

*Police question people and refuse to allow them to enter the site*

On 15th June 1215, rebel barons forced King John to sign a royal charter of rights at a meeting at Runnymede, just a short bike ride from where I live. According to Wikipedia, “it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown.” While good news for the church and the barons, it had little to offer the common men, and neither side took much notice of it and was in any case rapidly annulled by the Pope.

*Tea and cakes inside the Long House at Runnymede Eco-Village*

Two years later after the death of John and a war by the Barons a revised version was part of the peace treaty, and this was then given the name Magna Carta, as there was another smaller Charter of the Forest also agreed between the parties in 2017. This re-established the rights of free men in royal forests which the Normans had largely removed, at the same time making about a third of the land in the south of England into royal forests, giving rights to collect firewood, burn charcoal, graze pigs and other animals and cut turf – all vital activities for keeping alive.

Although the legal significance of Magna Carta soon faded away, it re-emerged from the 16th century on as it became seen as the basis for the English constitution, restoring the freedoms that the conquering Normans had removed, and it became widely seen as the basis for “the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus.” Various British monarchs tried to supress even its discussion but it remained “a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries.” And these discussions had a powerful effect on those writing the US Constitution.

*Vinny wears a badge “Who Protects Us Form the Police?”*

The only clauses of Magna Catra that remain in force are those protecting the Church and the City of London and Clause 29 which stated “The body of a free man is not to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way ruined, nor is the king to go against him or send forcibly against him, except by judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” But when Occupy London tried to make use of this to resist eviction their argument was unsuccesful.

*The Eco-Village was a friendly, peaceful and welcoming place*

More recently Magna Carta “truthers” have unsuccfully tried to use it against various legislation, including the Covid laws, particularly over wearing masks. But without any chance of success. Freedom to flout the law seems mainly to be granted to those in government. And much of the legislation being pushed through the UK parliament now by a large Tory majority does go against our principles of freedom, such as severely restricting our rights to protest and deporting asylum seekers.

*The Magna Carta celebration is proposed 3 years earlier – Runnymede, Surrey, Sat 16 Jun 2012*

Back in June 2012 I had sat on the grass with ‘Diggers’ camped on Cooper’s Hill close to the US Bar Association Magna Carta memorial (and possibly close to where King John and the Barons met, though that may have been rather closer to Staines.) The original Diggers or ‘True Levellers’ were founded in 1649 after the first English Civil War by Gerard Winstanley who stated “England is not a free people, till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons.” His ideas of the sharing of property came from the New Testament.

*Luke, trained as a forester, says the woodland had been sadly neglected*

This year it is particularly appropriate to recall the Biblical idea of ‘Jubilee’, where after 49 years there would be a ‘Year of Release’ when slaves and prisoners would be freed, and debts would be forgiven. The land would be allowed to lie fallow and all land and other properties (except houses in walled cities) would be returned to the original owners or their heirs.

*One home was built around a fallen tree running across the floor*

Land ownership in the UK has changed relatively little since the Normans took it away from the inhabitants after 1066, with the same families still owning the great majority of English land. A minute fraction of the UK population – 0.65% – currently own more than two thirds of the UK land area. Land ownership is the foundation of our class system and while a revolution seems unlikely in the near future, any reforming government should be putting a land tax at the centre of its programme.

The Diggers at Runnymede in 2012 had heard a discourse on Magna Carta and the Diggers from a historian at the nearby college of London University, and talked about more recent occupations of disused Land by ‘The Land Is Ours’ at the Wandsworth/Battersea Guinness site in 1996, at the Kew EcoVillage in 2009 and at Grow Heathrow.

*A TV Crew set up a picture of one of the residents playing guitar*

My post Diggers at Runnymede Call For Freedom gives some detail on the 2012 event as well as the setting up of the Runnymede Eco Village. At the meeting people agreed to hold a celebration of the 2015 anniversary of Magna Carta at the village site.

*Police watched me closely as I came out of the gate to take this picture. They were stopping people entering.*

Many in the local community welcomed the presence of the Eco-village, and the community work they had done over the three years. What little trouble there had been had been caused by outsiders, thought by some to have been encouraged by landowner and police. And although the celebrations were planned to be entirely peaceful, police, urged on by Surrey County Council and almost certainly some government ministers, laid on a huge and almost certainly illegal exercise to prevent the event taking place.

*The festival began – but police stopping people coming & threatening them with arrest*

I wrote: “Police surrounded the Runnymede Eco Village as the Magna Carta weekend Festival For Democracy was to start and prevented some people entering, issuing some with exclusion notices covering a wide area.“

“The police action appeared to be an entirely politically motivated action against the community and its many friends to prevent their long-planned celebrations of Magna Carta, a charter supposed to represent freedom under the law but here at its very source 800 years ago it was being suppressed in an unfair and arbitrary manner by the forces of the Law.”

As well as my account of what I saw on Friday 12th June at Runnymede on My London Diary, Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta festival, you can also read the post I wrote the following day here on >Re:PHOTO, Celebrating Magna Carta.

Boxing Day Pictures

Boxing Day Pictures I took in earlier years – mainly on our normal annual walks from Staines to Old Windsor. It’s a family tradition, a walk we’ve made most yearssince we moved here in 1974, though not always taking the same route. This year is one of the few years we won’t be making it.

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

There are more pictures from all of these walks – except that in 2020 – on My London Diary. Click on the picture for any of the other years to go to more about the walks and more pictures.

Christmas Eve, Christmas walks

Christmas Eve, Christmas walks. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on Christmas Eve. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to be able to help with the final preparations for Christmas – things like going to collect our order from the butcher, wrapping presents… But there is sometimes time for a walk.

*Sculptures and the Old Town Hall, Staines*

For many years we’ve invited people to visit on Christmas Eve, to come in and share some home made cakes, biscuits and drinks. Linda has made mulled wine which has gone down well, or mulled apple juice and some of us shared a decent bottle of red, though I often had to drink most of it myself.

Our smallish front room often got rather crowded though most of the younger visitors would be upstairs in a bedroom making large and complicated layouts of a Brio railway. There was a lot of talking, sharing news and sometimes some singing together; it is a small room, but still has a piano. We’d often run out of chairs, though we brought more down from upstairs.

It had rather run down in more recent years, partly because our own two children had left home, but also as friends moved away. But this year it won’t be happening at all. Omicron has made us all rethink. People are wary of inviting others or of responding to invitations. We’ve still got the large Stollen and I expect several different varieties of biscuits will be made, but on Christmas Eve we will be eating them on our own, though we are expecting just a little help from close family in the few days that follow. But then there’s the Christmas Cake to eat as well.

But it will be a rather different Christmas to usual. We decided too that we should cancel the family Boxing Day pub meal that had been booked. That means also we won’t be making the five or six mile walk to get there which we needed to get back an appetite after Christmas Day. I’ve already missed the carol service where Linda was in the choir – it seemed an unnecessary risk. And the concert by her choral society last Saturday was cancelled at short notice.

But we still will have a Christmas dinner with some family – if rather fewer of them than previous years, and I’m sure we will still go out for some walks. We will still have presents to share and still enjoy ourselves, but it won’t be quite the same.

The pictures here are from our walks in 2013. Since there is no public transport here on Christmas Day and little or none on Boxing Day our walks are all close to our home. You can see more of them in Walks around Staines.

Time for a New Magna Carta

*Police stop a man entering the Eco-Village*

Six years ago I went to the start of an event being held to mark 800 years since the Barons forced King Young to sign Magna Carta which placed important limitations on the power of the king and state and set in law important freedoms – at least for Barons. It was followed not long after by other charters which made those freedoms apply more widely.

*Police watched me as I took pictures at the Runnymede entrance* *earlier in the day*

The signing took place somewhere at Runnemede, though there seems to be no agreement at exactly where on this relatively wide are of flood plain between Staines where the barons stayed the previous night and Windsor where the king had his castle, though my own choice (on no historical basis) would be Ankerwyke, a little east of Magna Carta Island and to the north of the River Thames which I think back in those days proabably made most of that flat plain the National Trust calls Runnemede uncomfortably muddy.

Back on 16th June 2012 I’d sat in a circle of Diggers camped nearby on Cooper’s Hill next to the Magna Carta Memorial erected by the US Bar Association listening to a lecturer from Royal Holloway about both Magna Carta and the ‘Charter of the Forest’ issued shortly after, and discussing their plans for the future. A friendly police officer and a man from the National Trust came along to see what was happening and gave us some information about the area

*One of the well-organised public areas of the eco-village*

There are pretty large areas of unused land in Surrey and the Diggers had come out from a community allotment in Syon Lane in Brentford to make a widely publicised occupation of a small neglected area of Windsor Great Park. Local residents assured them that nothing had been done on this land for many years, but they were served with injunctions and the Crown Estate produced someone to say he was shortly to crop the dense growth of nettles for silage. They moved on, camped overnight at Runnymede and then occupied a piece of land owned by Royal Holloway College. RHUL were fast to serve injunctions though I think 9 years later the land is still not used, but the diggers found a better site a short distance away in the grounds of the former Shoreditch College, which had been sold to a developer in 2007, who had not yet been able to find the cash or get planning permission.

The 2012 meeting decided enthusastically they would hold a people’s celebration of the popular celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta on their site and had done a great deal of planning for it as I saw when I arrived on 12 June 2015. There was also a general agreement that something needed to be done to reclaim civil liberties that have been eroded over recent years with various suggestions for action and perhaps a new people’s charter. The events of 2015 made this very clear – and things including the current Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill now make this far more urgent.

*Vinny’s badge says ‘Who Protects Us From the Police’*

What we saw on Friday 12 June 2015 was a completely politically motivated operation against the community and its many friends to prevent their long-planned celebrations of Magna Carta, a charter supposed to represent freedom under the law but here at its very source 800 years ago it was being suppressed in an unfair and arbitrary manner by the forces of the Law.

Police or state security had put about fake rumours about a planned ‘rave’ on the football field next to their camp, and claimed to be ‘protecting people’ but I’d seen them clearly refusing entry to visitors to the fenced-off Eco-Village which was a clearly safe place. I listened to one of the officers in charge talking with Phoenix, one of the event organisers and it was very clear not only that he was lying but that he knew he was lying. Reading the Surrey police web site later that evening it made it clear that the police action was a deliberate attempt to prevent the planned festival from going ahead. Together with Surrey County Council they had made an order under Section 63 of the The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which allows police power to restrict access, remove people and issue exclusion orders. It seemed a clear abuse of a law intended for quite different purposes, of stopping illegal raves, and though a number of people were arrested after having been given exclusion orders banning them from coming within five miles of the village, I don’t think any of their cases came to court.

*Luke, a trained forester tells me the woods have been neglected*

As I left, despite my press card I was also handed a notice of exclusion, though it would have banned me from my home for three days. At the time I wrote:

It would indeed seem a travesty if at a time when we are celebrating 800 years of freedom under the law against the arbitrary power of the state achieved at Runnymede, the authorities should abuse the law by using those arbitrary powers to prevent a people’s celebration of freedom

Although police stopped many and arrested some, others found ways in over the fence and the festival continued though on a reduced scale. The Eco Village residents were summoned to court on the Monday of their festival, when the Queen was attending official celebrations at Runnymede. Few attended and the court refused to listen to their case, simply making an order for eviction, apparently on the basis that the right of private property trumps all other rights. But again the state acted clumsily, and a a few days later Mr Justice Knowles in the High Court ordered a stay of execution accepting that many matters raised by the applicants might not of been dealt with adequately by the lower Court. Interestingly their case included the assertion of rights granted by Magna Carta and its 1217 companion Charter of the Forest as well as the rather more recent European Convention on Human Rights. But they failed to convince the courts that these were a part of our Law, and three months later the High Court issued an order for eviction , which was carried out rather brutally. The site is now a luxury gated village with prices starting around £1.2 million for a 1-bed flat. Some of the residents came to Staines and occupied a former adult education centre which had been empty for some years. They were evicted after around six weeks despite considerable local support for their plans to make the building a local community hub – six years later it remains boarded up and unused.

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