None of us had ever paid much attention to the tree before. ‘It was just a tree,’ as Terry told the woman from Radio London during the height of the stand-off, ‘until all of this.’
Everybody knows about the tree now – this beech tree, to be exact, whose 204 years put it at the same age, if he were still alive, as Charles Darwin. The 204 figure was initially contested by Pridehaven, but it became so frequently circulated that Pridehaven stopped contesting the tree’s age to focus instead on the more pressing matter of the legal challenge. The tree – ten storeys high, so, roughly the same height as the building scheduled to replace it, and rooted deeply beneath the pavement of the development’s only through road – was given a name at the outset of the protest: the Gooseberry Finch Tree. It was named after the old estate pub, over which its highest branches shed their autumn leaves into the little abandoned beer garden like a scattering of eviction notices. The pub had already been quietly closed down, following a successful Compulsory Purchase Order, and was earmarked for demolition in the spring. The Gooseberry Finch Tree, however, was due to be exterminated first, the tree’s removal date – the twentieth of November – pinned at head height to the trunk on a piece of laminated A4.
Even before the removal notice was posted, a vigil started forming in front of the hoardings that screened off the pub: the Gooseberry Finch Community. On weekday lunchtimes the group expanded to twenty or more, milling cheerily around the bottom of the tree. There was a tea and cake stall, a bucket of chalks for children to draw on the pavement, and an occasional guitarist. And there was Piers, the Gooseberry Finch Tree’s only permanent resident. People often forget that the Community had existed for several weeks before Piers and his friends arrived; that if Piers had never joined us then it might have all turned out so differently.
Piers was rarely on the ground with the others; he was usually to be found in the tree. He constructed a makeshift treehouse out of a wooden pallet he found in a skip on the Phase 2 lower site, which he roped to the tree’s lower boughs. Then he tied a large sheet of fish-belly-white tarpaulin to the higher branches with bits of coloured twine. Each afternoon, when the estate’s few remaining children from the last inhabited residential block, Fairfax House, were let out of the primary school, Piers would sit cross-legged in his treehouse and call hello to them or, if the guitarist was still there, play along with a tambourine.
Piers took it upon himself to act as the tree’s spokesperson, fielding the ever-increasing media interest as well as conducting the fractious dialogue with Pridehaven and the council. It was not, though, as some have wrongly remembered it, Piers who set up the petition. That was Terry, just before Piers arrived, but it was Piers who put a printout of the petition’s statement of purpose inside a document pouch and gaffer-taped it onto one of the hoardings:
WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, DEMAND THAT THE GOOSEBERRY FINCH TREE BE SAVED FROM DESTRUCTION BY THE SIXGLADES CROSS GENTRIFICATION PROJECT, A PLANNED ACTION THAT GOES AGAINST THE WILL OF THIS COMMUNITY.
The petition was already gathering steam, but Pridehaven deliberated until Halloween before publishing their official response:
Pridehaven understands and has taken into careful consideration the strength of feeling, both locally and amongst more recent parties, for this tree. After consultation with local community groups, the local council and the Greater London Assembly Housing Committee, the decision has been taken that this tree will be removed in order to enable the safe and unimpeded development of the Vista Park Apartments. The construction of this residence, which would be prevented by the proximity of the tree, will create over 70 new homes as an integral part of the Sixglades Cross Regeneration Project. Furthermore, eight other trees of a comparable age and size will remain, incorporated into the Regeneration Project. As such, the removal of this tree is to go ahead, as planned, on November 20th.
By the time that came out, the petition already stood at 21,472 signatures.
* * *
Aunt Florence used to live up on the eighth floor of Elman House, the now-deserted mid-rise behind the Gooseberry Finch pub. She lives in Ipswich now, in a slightly larger flat beside a supermarket car park, although she followed all the media coverage. In her new living room, with its long, dark crack in the ceiling from which intricate whorls of mould grow towards the sofa, Florence would sit and wonder what her old neighbours, the Kamanis, were making of all the sudden fuss. She would have liked to talk to them about it over one of their delicious, sweet teas, but the Kamanis were rehoused somewhere in the Midlands and in all the commotion of their removal she was not able to find out their new address. She didn’t even have a phone number. They had never needed telephone numbers because all they had to do was knock on each other’s doors. So Aunt Florence rang me and Terry, who had already begun feeling uneasy about Piers. Florence was simply fascinated that this young man who had not grown up on the estate, like Terry and me, could be so impassioned about the pub tree that he had made himself a home in it. Terry signed the petition for her on his phone. After he had done it, Aunt Florence let out a long sigh of satisfaction, smiling, as if she thought that her voice, finally, had been heard.
From Florence’s old balcony in Elman House, where her nasturtiums had been left to mulch into the cold soil of her still-hanging baskets and railing tubs, there would have been a perfect view of the scene down below: a little festival of bright woolly hats and the misty voices of Piers’s university friends gathered around a blazing chiminea, the tree trunk adorned with ribbons, its reachable branches with baubles. At night, if Florence was still there, she would have been able to see the tarpaulin of Piers’s treehouse in the glare of the security lighting, gleaming through the thinning leaves like a bald spot.
* * *
Piers began searching for baby birds. He knew from his research that the developer had an obligation to not intentionally damage or destroy the nests of any wild birds. This law, he told us, had already caused a delay to the Phase 2 completion schedule because the scaffolding around the duplex apartments facing onto the canal was mandated to stay in place for a period of six months, after pigeons were found to be nesting inside the metal tubes.
Piers couldn’t find any pigeons, or any other birds, nesting in the Gooseberry Finch Tree. He did have other ideas, though. With fourteen days to go, a rumour started that a celebrity was going to join the vigil for a couple of hours. Piers posted a flurry of confident tweets, without revealing the celebrity’s name, that intimated he was a friend, somebody with a big heart and huge audience reach. As the days passed, and Piers’s tweets quietened, it became clear that, for whatever reason, the celebrity appearance was not going to happen. But Piers, undeterred, had something even better up his sleeve.
One night, a renowned but still-edgy graffiti artist, another person known to Piers, visited the site in secret – no mean feat, given all the security lighting around the tree – and spray-painted an eight-foot portrait of the Gooseberry Finch Tree on to the hoarding in front of the derelict newsagent’s. It really was a striking artwork. He had turned the tree’s red leaves into hearts, all of them bleeding, with a single drop of blood running down the trunk. In defiance of the security arrangements, the artist positioned the tree directly beneath one of the bulkhead lights that lined the top of the hoarding and he painted a shadow on the pavement underneath the tree, in the shape of China. By lunchtime the following day, a photograph of the Blood Tree had been viewed half a million times and the petition, with eleven days to go, increased to 78,301 signatures.
In response, Pridehaven scaled up their security deployment. Looking back on it now, Piers’s Blood Tree was probably a step further than they had anticipated, the increased security a warning, to keep him in check. But at the time, we couldn’t understand the point – the Gooseberry Finch Community had never been anything but peaceful – and it seemed from these young men’s blank expressions as they stood in a hi-vis line along the hoarding, doing nothing, that they were unsure too. If Pridehaven had hoped to contain the protest – and Piers’s own ambitions – they failed. The vigil swelled to fifty or more during peak times, and there were always more protesters than security men, except for the morning when the whole crowd moved down the road to the edge of the proposed Orion Quarter to watch the demolition of Elman House: three short detonations and the entire building fell with the easy, sliding collapse of a sandcastle.
Terry went digging on the council’s website and discovered that their local amenity plan had been surreptitiously reworded. In light of the rewording, the Gooseberry Finch Community made an appeal that the Phase 3 development should submit a new planning application – a request that was granted with nine days to go. Piers exhorted the Community to keep the protest concentrated on the tree, to keep it focused, but he was outvoted. Four representatives from the Community – including Terry and, obviously, Piers – were invited to make two-minute statements at the mandatory planning meeting.
The council scheduled it at the town hall, reasoning that it would be unsafe to hold it on what was now essentially a giant building site (forgetting, perhaps, that there were still residents in Fairfax) but two of the remaining Fairfaxers objected. It was a public meeting and since most residents did not have cars, it would have required a two-hour journey there and back by bus. They wanted it to happen in the still-untouched community hall at the foot of Fairfax House instead. Pridehaven – whose on-site footprint consisted solely of their sleek marketing suite and the blue, corrugated shipping containers around the construction wasteland from which the smell of frying bacon carried on the morning air towards the noses of the children on their way to school – offered no suggestion. The council therefore acceded to the residents’ ‘demands’, as they worded it in the letter, and rescheduled the meeting to be in the community hall.
For so many years a place of polling booths and councillor surgeries and children’s birthday parties, the hall had never been as full as on that night. It steamed with bodies. The Planning Committee sat together behind a long fold-out table at the front. At a separate table beside them sat Pridehaven’s only representative: a thin young man with the golden hair of a cartoon prince. By the time the Committee Chair invited him to stand up and speak, his face had blossomed in the muggy heat of the small hall. He gave a short, prepared speech about sustainability, energy conservation, symbiosis with the natural environment, 3,000 new homes – language so close to the sales pitch of the Regeneration Project’s marketing brochure that he may as well have been reading from it. The Committee Chair spoke next, then the tree officer, who explained how removing the tree was a demonstration of good arboricultural practice, before proceeding to outline the compensatory measures that would be implemented in the development: the additional tree planting and the Tree Preservation Order on the London plane tree beside the canal that Pridehaven used on the home page of the development website. Finally, the planning application officer described, at great length, the wider benefits that overrode the status of the Gooseberry Finch Tree (although the council have never, even to this day, given the tree its name) as an amenity tree. She was still speaking when Piers stood up and walked to the front. He thumped the printout of the petition on to the committee’s fold-out table.
‘Nobody in this room,’ Piers declared loudly, turning around and speaking for everybody in the room, including Terry and the other nominated Tree Defenders whose speeches would be forgotten about in the mayhem that followed, ‘believes any of these words you are telling us. It’s all bullshit. And we have heard enough.’
The next morning, there were orange barriers around the Gooseberry Finch Tree. The barriers were semi-permanent, a line of paving slabs taken out on either side of the tree so they could be inserted into the ground. At first, we congregated behind them, not attempting to gain access to the blocked-off area around the tree. The ‘safety zone’, the council called it in a tweet, ‘for the protection of pedestrians, motorists and the tree itself since large crowds have been encroaching on the road and hindering the pedestrian function of the pavement.’ At 10 o’clock, Piers came down from the tree and, together with several of his university friends, uprooted the barriers. The security personnel watched on awkwardly, speaking into their walkie-talkies, gradually multiplying.
The barriers were not replaced, nor the paving slabs. And, with four days to go, the security guards disappeared. A new boldness rose up in the Community. We took down the High Court injunction papers, which had been posted on to the condemned tree after the meeting, and burned them. We planted flowers in the ground where the barriers had been. Children stuck up drawings of the tree on the hoardings all the way down the road and someone painted Honk for the Gooseberry Finch Tree! on a bedsheet and nailed it up next to the Blood Tree mural. At once, the chilly air resounded with car horns. Our excitement built at the approach of every vehicle – each new honk unique, revealing – as though a parade of naked bodies was coming through.
The council closed the road, dug out the flowers, and put back the paving slabs. Pridehaven brought back the security guards and put up a galvanised fence across the pavement and the road on both sides to create an exclusion area seventy metres long.
Piers, in a final act of resistance, chained himself to the tree.
It was a long chain, wrapped twice around his body and the trunk. He refused to speak, except to his own small cohort, who climbed back and forth over the fence with a ladder and let it be known that Piers intended to remain chained to the tree for the final three days and beyond. He would, however, eat and drink – this nourishment to be administered only by his trusted companions – and he would be unshackled three times a day in order to relieve himself.
With the road closed, the only noise was the straining of the contractors’ machines and the buzzing of the golf buggies darting about the Regeneration Project with parties of Chinese and Singaporean investors. They stared through the fence as they went by, bewilderment on their faces at the spectacle of Piers swaddled to the tree. How the Pridehaven guides explained it all to them is anybody’s guess.
Two days before the deadline, Pridehaven issued a statement confirming that the Gooseberry Finch Tree would be eradicated on November 20th, although with no details about the method or timing. There was a resurgence of media interest. Journalists arrived and mingled with the crowd behind the fence. Photographs appeared in several news outlets of Piers in his chains holding up a mug of tea for the camera. The petition’s full list of signatories, 132,252 names, was taped to the hoardings. The night before the removal, the High Court injunction papers – freshly reapproved – were attached to the tree again, on the other side of the trunk from Piers, where they shone under the lights like the public notice for a hanging.
*
When me and Terry arrived, there were only the security guards and the Fairfax residents who had alerted us. The guards stood in the early-morning light, still behind the fence, and peered through the metal at the Gooseberry Finch Tree lying on the road – and at Piers, on top of the stump, a chainsaw at his feet.
Within half an hour, a hundred or so people were massed behind the fence – activists, bystanders, security – all standing in shocked silence, gazing at Piers. He was sitting on the stump, completely motionless, as if in a trance, his eyes fixed on the chainsaw beside him on the pavement. Only when the police arrived – Piers had, after all, committed a crime – did he stir. He got to his feet. He stepped away from the chainsaw and turned to look directly at the crowd behind the fence. A slow, manic smile played on his lips.
‘Treehuggers!’
His voice rolled down the hoardings in the cold silence of the morning as two officers put him in handcuffs and took him away. There would be much discussion of this word. Treehuggers! Even now, as it echoes on, some hear in it a note of solidarity. Most people, however, hear only mockery.
One of the security guards opened the door in the fence and we moved slowly towards the tree. Nobody spoke. The guards formed a luminous ring around the tree and the people as we placed our hands on to the bark – from the toppled crown to the tree’s first thick limbs, still attached to the battered treehouse, all the way down its trunk to the amputation, where dark sap ran through our fingers like honey.
We stayed like this, holding the tree, all day, while hundreds of others passed through: children, students, the last remaining residents of Fairfax House. Piers’s friends were nowhere to be seen. The security guards and police let the fence stay open on both sides, and the pilgrimage carried quietly on until the dark set in.
The next day, the Gooseberry Finch Tree was gone. Its fallen leaves blew about on the street. A slow vein of sap ran down the stump into a sticky pool on the blistered pavement.
*
We planted the first sapling that day: Day 1. Terry, to a great cheer, slid the first one into the ground; Florence, with my hands guiding her, the second. As our numbers have grown since, so too have our trees. A circle of them now surrounds Fairfax House, greening with the gathering spring, expanding with every month of legal deadlock that goes by. Our trees have now surpassed the five-cubic-metre threshold. The donations for the legal fund keep pouring in and our claim for them to be declared as amenity trees, which according to the council’s own local plan must therefore be retained, lodges deeper. Pridehaven and the council continue to argue that the protection legislation is invalid for new trees and that they should fall under the existing Phase 3 planning permission regardless. But construction has ceased, investors are turning away, and Pridehaven and the council now find themselves in the same legal stew of court proceedings and delays, legalese, that they used in their favour last year.
And now, of course, Pridehaven’s position has become compromised by the photographs that have emerged of Piers protesting at other sites in recent years – Piers inside the clock tower of a woollen mill, Piers glued to a road – and the argument being pressed by our legal team that Piers, for all that his own ambitions would get the better of him, was being paid by Pridehaven to disrupt genuine protest movements, an undercover employee. Or, as he has been labelled in some quarters, a posh cuckoo.
All the while that the dispute carries on, we become stronger. At the present time, on Day 95, we occupy fourteen developments across the country. Fourteen communities scheduled for demolition, all now growing with the tender green shoots of new life.
