Friday 5 June 2009

the New Diggers

The spirit of the Diggers has been invoked once more with plans to seize land in Hammersmith next week in order to create an eco-village.



The Diggers were a group of 17th-century English radicals led by Gerard Winstanley, who has been referred to as the father of both communism and anarchism. Winstanley realised that one-third of England's land was barren waste, which the landowners would not permit the poor to cultivate. He declared:

... if the waste land of England were manured by her children it would become in a few years the best, the strongest and flourishing land in the world.

So on 1 April, 1649, Winstanley and his followers began to dig over a patch of common land in St George's Hill in Walton-upon-Thames. They were soon chucked off, and then chucked off the next spot they tried out. Winstanley gave up in the end, and became a Quaker instead. But the idea had taken root, and has never been killed off since.

The action on Saturday is the latest incarnation of this long-running movement. After the second world war we had ex-servicemen taking over land because of a housing shortage. In the 1970s, the squatter movement used empty houses for the homeless and poor. In the 90s, gardening protest camps flowered at Twyford Downs, the M11 extension, Newbury.

But perhaps the prototype for this urban eco-village was in 1996 when activists occupied a huge plot of wasteland owned by Guinness next to the Wandsworth bridge in south-west London (see the video above). The so-called Pure Genius experiment ulimately failed - the land is now occupied by a large development of luxury flats - but was fun while it lasted.


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