Big Lunch Street Party: The Eden project is a visitor attraction built in a disused clay pit near St Austell in Cornwall, its name coming from the Biblical garden and with a mission to celebrate plants and the natural world, reconnect people with them and to regenerate damaged landscapes and give the world a better future.
The Eden project launched The Big Lunch in 2009 as “a little experiment: to see what the transformative effect of getting to know our neighbours might be.”
I was invited by a friend to be with him on Sunday 18 July 2010 as the official photographers at the Big Lunch Street Party in Wrayfield Road in North Cheam, part of a typical 1930s surburban development in what was then Surrey and is now a part of the London Borough of Sutton.
The party started with several tugs of war between teams from the odd and even sides of the street
You can find out more about Wrayfield Rd on Streetscan which reports that though in some respects it is close to an average UK postcode, though having rather more married couples than average in these family homes.
Fishing for ducks was popular with children
People here are healthier than the average and with higher household wealth than 89% of England and Wales with low unemployment and significantly higher levels of self-employment and entrepreneurship. There are low levels of deprivation and it is what I would describe as an affluent outer-London suburb.
Some of those present could remember last street party for the 1977 Silver Jubilee street shown in the pictures on one garden wall
And like many such streets, it is visually rather boring. It’s around a thousand feet long, lined mainly by solidly built semidetached houses, with a few detached properties – a little under 60 homes in all, developed by Warner and Watson Ltd, and completed in 1933/4. More details on the estate and the cost of homes back then on my post in My London Diary – now these houses cost around a thousand times as much. Had they just gone up by inflation they would be around £50,000 but in 2025 you are looking at around £750,000. At least one person who had moved in in 1933 was at the party 77 years later.
Several couples had lived on the street for a very long time
But the event was an interesting one and I’ve written more about it on My London Diary. Getting to know the people who live around you is a good idea and I’m sure things like this help.
People look at he original newspaper advert for the houses in the streetThere was plenty of eating and drinking taking place along the middle of the streetA toastSome buntingAnd sun hats were a good idea
The event received sponsorship from some local businesses and organisations – and the fire brigade brought a fire engine for kids to take the driving seat. Th local MP came and spoke, there was a fine singer and as I was leaving a local band came to play. The party was expected to keep going into the night.
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.
Police turned away people coming to the Festival For Democracy issuing exclusion orders.
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.
Erecting the main stage on the festival field
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.
The community aim to respect the forest and live with it rather than destroy it
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.
The electronic music stage for the festival
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.
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 .
Westhumble & Ranmore Common, Surrey – 30th December 2011
The Pilgrims Way – and lower down the valley the railway from Guildford to Dorking
On Friday we went for another walk on the North Downs in Surrey, in a popular area for walking. In Summer it can get rather crowded with walkers but on a rather dull and damp winter’s day, even though many would have been still away from work over their Christmas break, relatively few were out walking the downs.
Leladene and blue plaque to Fanny Burney
The second picture I made on the walk was this one of Leladene with its blue plaque to Fanny Burney. Leladene, later renamed to Camilla Lacey was for some years the home of Burney (1752 – 1840) who came to live there after her marriage to one of the exiles from the French revolution who had made Mickleham their home, General Alexandre d’Arblay. As well as being one of the most notable authors of her age she was also for four years ‘keeper of the robes’ to Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III.
Norbury Park Saw Mill
In 2010 I wrote a brief description of the walk, although I seem to have missed out a line or so when I copied it to My London Diary so I’ve needed to do a little rewriting to make sense of one part of it. So I’ll rewrite it a little rather than simply copying here.
The weather wasn’t great and days are so short at this time of year, so we decided not to go to far for a walk, and did a roughly ten-mile circuit from Box Hill & Westhumble station.
Roaringhouse Farm
It was dry when we started, with some very muddy paths, though parts of the path were sheltered by the trees as we went along through Druids Grove.
Thatched bridge at Polesden Lacy
Many of the old yews (some perhaps 2000 years old) have now been blown down in gales but there are still quite a few on each side of the path. From there we walked past the Albury Park sawmills and on through Polesden Lacy, passing under it’s thatched bridge.
The Causeway, Polesden Lacy
The steep track down from where we crossed from the North Downs Way to the Pilgrim’s Way a couple of hundred feet lower down the slope was a greasy mud slide, but we picked up some hefty sticks to help us keep upright, and from then on the way was easy going, with just a short uphill scramble to join the North Downs Way to take us back to Westhumble.
Hogden Lane
The light, never good, was fading as we walked above the Denbies vineyard and it was getting dark by the time we reached the station around 4.15pm.
I first got to know this area a little as a boy in the 1950s. I had got my first two-wheeler bike to replace an earlier tricycle on my sixth birthday and by the time I was 9 or 10 was going out for longish rides on a slightly larger replacement, sometimes with one or two friends, but for longer rides mainly on my own.
Denbies vineyard
One of those rides I made quite a few times took me across the River Thames at Hampton Court then on south through the ‘Scilly Isles’ roundabout and on to Leatherhead and the the A24 to Box Hill, around 20 miles each way.
My routes were carefully planned with the help of the “One Ihch” Ordnance Survey map. Generally I looked for the shortest way even when it meant cycling along busy major roads like the A3 though the final stretch along the A24 Mickleham bypass built in 1937-8 to Box Hill was on one of the few roads in the UK with a separate cycle path.
Box Hill and Westhumble station – and a long wait for the train with no seats in the dry on the up platform. It had been a good walk, though the views would have been better in clearer weather.
North Downs & the M25: We had our elder son staying with us over the Christmas break and by the 29th the trains in our area were almost working normally and we decided to have a walk on the North Downs.
I didn’t write a lot about it on-line, though some of the pictures have captions, but here is the complete text from My London Diary other than those.
A couple of days later we took a walk on the North Downs at Woldingham. It was pretty enough, but for much of the walk we could hear and see the M25.
Though we were walking along rather less busy roads – the sign here says ‘Public Bridleway. No Four Wheel Vehicular Access.’
Wikipedia begins its entry on the village with “Woldingham is a village and civil parish high on the North Downs between Oxted and Warlingham in Surrey, England, within the M25, 17.5 miles (28.2 km) southeast of London.”
Which isn’t a great deal of help to those of us who have only the vaguest idea of where Oxted and Warlingham are, but this is a part of what I think of as “deepest Surrey“, a few miles out past Croydon. We live in a very different part of the county with few large houses and virtually free of horses and on the other side of the Thames which doesn’t really belong in the county – and until the 1960s was Middlesex, the county which once included London and our town is still a part of it.
There is a steep escaprment on the Southern edge of the North Downs
This year today engineering work on the railway means there would be no way to get to Woldingham by train, but back in 2007 – and at normal times of the year now – it’s a relatively short journey, with a change at Clapham Junction we could be there in around an hour and a quarter. So even with the short December days there would still be plenty of time to walk around ten or twelve miles before it gets dark and be home in time for dinner.
I can’t remember the route we took, but this was a circular walk from Woldingham station Both the first and last pictures I made that day were at Church Farm, just a quarter of a mile south from the station. It’s probably not a walk I would recommend unless for some reason this section of the M25 was closed, as almost everywhere you can hear the noise of the traffic along it.
My shadow taking a picture in the churchyardof St Agatha’s Woldingham, first recorded in 1270
It’s probably not a walk I would recommend unless for some reason this section of the M25 was closed, as almost everywhere you can hear the noise of the traffic along it. There seemed to be some long traffic jams, with cars moving hardly any faster than us.
The final picture I made on the walk. More on My London Diary at North Downs & M25.
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.
Getting the festival stage ready
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.”
Staines, Always Just Staines – Staines-upon-Thames Day, Sunday 20th May 2012.
Councillors ordered ‘Ali G’ look-alike Drew Cameron to be escorted off the site
I’ve lived in Staines since 1974, but it was a place I knew years earlier, growing up seven miles to the east in Hounslow, now a part of Greater London, but then, along with Staines in Middlesex. Staines was out in the country, and I remember watching a herd of cows being driven along one of its main roads. A few boys from there came to my school, and we would sometimes laugh at their country yokel accents.
Staines then was a place we would sometimes come to on Bank Holidays, taking a 116 or 117 bus ride and then walking to the Lammas, a park beside the Thames, with paddling pools and a diving pool into the river. It was here I learnt to swim, though now anyone foolish enough to get in the river here probably gets first-aid treatment.
Staines was a Roman town, Ad Pontes
Staines had its own smell, or rather stink of linseed oil from the lino – Staines’s largest industry occupying a large site to the north of the High Street – but now long-closed and a large shopping centre. The smell hung on for a few years, but I think has now gone. And that High Street had a notorious and ever-present traffic jam, taking the A30, the main route to the south-west, though the centre of the town. That was alleviated by the opening of the Staines Bypass, and later the M3 and M4 which run a few miles to the south and north of the town, but Staines Bridge, despite widening, continues to be a traffic bottleneck.
Drew Cameron as Ali G
Politically, Staines has long been true-blue Tory, one of the safer Conservative seats, and its current MP is Kwasi Kwarteng, though he spends little time in the constituency. In 1965 when almost all Middlesex became part of London, a rebellion by backwoods Tories in the posher areas of Sunbury and Shepperton led to the formation of a new borough, Spelthorne, which broke away to become a part of Surrey, the ancient enemy county across the Thames.
Lord-Lieutenant of Surrey, Dame Sarah Goad cuts a ribbon
While the Thames was the major factor in the development of Staines – a Roman bridging point, Ad Pontes – more recently its proximity to London’s Heathrow airport and three motorways – M25, M3 and M4 have been significantly more important in persuading major companies to set up offices in the area. So it was something of an anachronism when Tory councillor Colin Davis, over a Magnum of Champagne proposed changing its name to Staines-upon-Thames – more appropriate would have been Staines-by-Heathrow.
Kwasi Kwarteng MP at the event
Few if any actual Staines residents backed the change, though it was popular with estate agents and the like. Many voted against it in the local referendum, but most of these votes were disqualified as they came in via the local football club, enabling the Tories to forge a majority. The whole campaign, fired by the anger of a few at the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen whose character Ali G claimed a gangster upbringing in the ‘Staines Ghetto‘ and to be the leader of ‘Da West Staines Massiv‘ showed a massive sense of humour deficit, as well as a whiff of anti-semitism. Ali G had been a huge publicity boost for Staines, and the campaign for the name change attracted more world-wide publicity – and even an article in Vanity Fair.
The London Stone (replica)
Colin Davis won his bet, and the name change was officially made and celebrated at an event in Staines on Sunday 20th May 2012. Since it was taking place a short walk from my home I went to photograph it. As I comment in My London Diary, “An Ali G lookalike who turned up to a Staines event marking the local council’s decision to change the name of the town because of the publicity given it by Ali G was escorted off the site by security. It was further proof that some Spelthorne councillors lack a sense of humour but need to make an ass of themselves.”
Colin Davis is no longer a Spelthorne Councillor, and was more recently chair of the Enfield Southgate Conservative Association in north London. He was this year suspended from the Conservative Party and subsequently “resigned after after a photo allegedly showing him wearing a Nazi uniform at a social event several years ago emerged.”
Waiting for ducks to arrive in the Duck Race
Spelthorne Council has featured in Private Eye and elsewhere on numerous occasions over recent years for its huge borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board to buy office and retail space, much of it outside the Borough, though it does include £385m for the large BP site in Sunbury. The man behind the policy – which the Treasury has said it would ban other local authorities following was deposed as Tory group leader in 2020, after which he and 5 other councillors left the Tory Party to form the United Spelthorne Group.
Their resignations left the Conservatives in a minority on Spelthorne Council, which is not in a position of ‘no overall control’ for the first time since its formation – which is perhaps how local councils should be. Two Labour councillors have also left for the Breakthrough Party, and the council now has a minority administration of Liberal Democrats, Green Party and the Independent Spelthorne Group.
Personally I still live in Staines. If I can be bothered when web sites fill in my address as Staines-upon-Thames I correct it. It’s not really a big deal, unlike Brexit, but it would be nice to go back officially to the old name.
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.
