The earth in our garden also seemed to have magical properties. It was both a source of new life, alive with green shoots and shiny beetles, and a window onto the distant past. Once, I found a medieval silver penny in our vegetable patch, glistening in the dark soil. Something about that childhood experience of being close to the earth, of having a patch of ground to which I feel a sense of belonging, has stayed with me all my life.
I was ten years old when they decided to drive a bypass through nine miles of countryside to the west of Newbury. In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had spoken of her admiration for the ‘great car economy’ and boasted of delivering ‘the largest road-building programme since the Romans’. In pursuit of this goal, the government gouged a motorway cutting through the ancient chalk downland of Twyford Down, and bulldozed hundreds of homes in East London for the M11 link road. Now the woods and water-meadows of West Berkshire were in the road lobby’s sights. To shave a few minutes off motorists’ journeys, it was deemed necessary to put a bypass through four Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
The government had reckoned without a huge outpouring of opposition from local residents and activists from across the country, who flocked to Newbury and staged one of the largest environmental protests ever seen in the UK. My parents took me on the 8,000-strong march organised by Friends of the Earth along the route of the proposed bypass, snaking past beautiful heathland and through a civil war battlefield. I remember looking longingly at the protesters’ tree-houses perched high in the great oaks that were destined to be felled, and pleading with Dad to let me go and join them. ‘Maybe when you’re older,’ he’d said.
Jim Hindle, one of the protesters who was old enough at the time to go and climb trees, later recounted: ‘The land to be lost to the road was meant to be compensated by the gift of other land elsewhere. But once it was gone, that was that.’ A new plantation would take years to grow and could never make up for the loss of ancient woodland, or the history that the road would obliterate. Where Hindle camped, ‘the rest of the Snelsmore reserve backed away over the Lambourn Downs in a primordial soup of ferns and birches and moss. It seemed like another country, stretching away further than we could rightfully imagine; half wild and ancient and vast.’
Perhaps the potential to halt the road lay in gaining control over the land. A previous plan to put a motorway through Otmoor in Oxfordshire had been thwarted by the cunning of local Friends of the Earth members. They had bought a field along the route of the road called ‘Alice’s Meadow’ – a reference to Alice in Wonderland, whose author Lewis Carroll had been inspired by the landscape of Otmoor. Dividing the field into 3,500 separate parcels, they had sold each one to a different person. This made compulsory purchase by the authorities virtually impossible, since they would have had to do deals with every single one of the landowners. Instead, an alternative route for the road was chosen, and Otmoor was saved.
Could opponents of the Newbury bypass count on the support of local landowners in halting the scheme? A young environmentalist, George Monbiot, initially hoped so. A huge swathe of land in the path of the bypass lay in the ownership of Sir Richard Sutton, a wealthy baronet who claims a lineage dating back to the Norman conquest. As Monbiot later recounted, ‘The Sutton Estate, just to the west of Newbury, covers some of the most exalted watermeadows in southern England. In 1983, when I was waterkeeper there, the manager told me not to cut too much of the bankside vegetation. The estate was the guardian of the countryside. As such it had a duty to preserve its ancestral character.’
Hoping that this sense of noblesse oblige would make Sir Richard an ally against the bypass, Monbiot approached him to make common cause. But then the estate manager published his plans. ‘Claiming that he was powerless to stop the road, he requested that he be allowed to supply the hardcore: he would dig out a further 100 acres of the meadows for gravel. Beside the road, he proposed building 1,600 houses, a hotel and an 18-hole golf course. As the new bypass was likely to fill up within a few years, he suggested that a second road should also pass through the estate.’
Other landowners along the route of the road were similarly craven. The Earl of Carnarvon, owner of Highclere Castle to the south of Newbury – made famous as the setting of the series Downton Abbey – told conservationist Charles Clover that ‘he had been behind a bypass for the past 40 years’, but admitted that he ‘did not know how much his son, Lord Porchester, had received for the sale of the site of a service station on the proposed new bypass.’ To Clover, ‘the saga of the Newbury bypass is about more than a road … It raises questions about whether we place sufficient value on our country’s human and natural history.’ The threat of a road, he felt, ‘has the ability to bring out a love of land in the strangest people.’ Just not, it seemed, in the people who actually owned the land.
The defence of the trees fell instead to a rag-tag army of courageous commoners, many of whom travelled from far and wide. Their tactics delayed the road for months, costing millions; police ended up making over 1,000 arrests. ‘Why don’t they save their dole money, go to South America and save the rainforests?’ sneered one local businessman in a letter to the local paper – a copy of which I pasted into my school project on the bypass, as an example of the calibre of the debate. I remember my mum shedding tears when we went to see the scene of destruction left by the bulldozers, saying it reminded her of images of deforestation in the Amazon. Ten thousand trees were felled along its route. My tree-climbing being strictly limited to trees in our garden, I did what I could. I saved a pine-cone from a tree destined for the chop and grew it into our family Christmas tree.
The unseen influence of other landowning interests may also have been at play in helping determine the route of the road. When the Highways Agency and their private contractor Costain came to my school to tell us what a great job they were making of the bypass, I remember putting my hand up to ask a question. ‘Why are you building the bypass through all the nature reserves on one side of Newbury,’ I asked, ‘when you could just build it through the racecourse on the other side of town?’
I didn’t know it at the time, but questioning the sanctity of horse racing in West Berkshire is a bit like doubting the existence of God in the Vatican. Breeding horses is big money here. Newbury Racecourse is one of the country’s largest horse-racing tracks, and Lambourn, a village to the north of Newbury, is second only to Newmarket for its stud farms. When I was growing up, classmates at school would joke about folks who lived in Lambourn being inbred. They stopped taking the piss when they got to sixth form and started partying: it was some of the Lambourn stable hands with their ready access to horse tranquillisers who could supply the ketamine.
Venturing out into horsey territory for Sunday walks, it was always obvious how rich the area was. Colonnaded mansions with sweeping driveways sat among rows of stables and well-manicured paddocks. What I didn’t know at the time was that most of the racing studs and surrounding fields were owned offshore, in tax havens, and that many of them also receive generous taxpayer-funded farm subsidies. One, Earl’s Court Farm Ltd, with an estate of 2,600 acres and an address in Bermuda, was handed £304,300 in 2015. The vast majority of this was as a Single Area Payment, a subsidy calculated on the basis of how much land you own, with few additional strings attached. But when I tried to find who was the ultimate beneficiary of such public largesse, it proved impossible to do so. Combing through a welter of offshore shell companies, the only records I could find indicated that the parent companies were called the Millennium Trust and the Racine Trust – two mysterious organisations with no apparent internet presence, and no named directors or owners.
‘Horseyculture’