This is the second in a selection of chapters from the book King of the Squatters by jaybo which we are delighted to be able to share on Winter Oak. The whole text can be found as a pdf here.
For me, the 1990s mostly consisted of diy culture, under the umbrellas of the FINs (Free Information Networks), EF (Earth First) and Reclaim the Streets (RTS). RTS was genius in my opinion. The first one happened around about the same time as the CJA (Criminal Justice Act). A small mini car was prepared by cutting it in half and having its engine and floor removed. Four people inside ran the car to Camden high street, an extremely popular and busy area of London.
The little mini car just happened to completely break in half. A tripod made from long scaffolding poles was rapidly erected, and somebody climbed to the top and refused to come down, in the middle of the busiest street. A sound system and about three hundred people turned up, and a party began, as the street was temporarily reclaimed for a party, sand pits for the kids and all.
RTS was all about reclaiming the usually dirty and dangerous streets and turning them into a party. ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ were secretly planned, by a consciously anarchistic team, who produced some beautifully inspiring literature, and incredible actions. The first Camden action lasted for hours. It was such a refreshing success that other street parties followed shortly afterwards, exploding across Britain, before spreading globally.
My favourite RTS, the biggest and most notorious, occurred in 1996. RTS locations were always kept secret, with only a date, time and meeting point publicised on their artistic, anarchistic posters and flyers. When an RTS was planned for central London in summer, we had to be there. A very large crowd gathered in a train station at eleven am, waiting for a signal. The crowd got bigger and bigger, until we were bursting out of the station. The police watched and tried to anticipate what we would do. The atmosphere was electric. One guy decided to get naked, jump onto a car, bend over and shake his ass at the police.
Then people started running, getting faster – tens, hundreds, thousands of people, stronger and braver together, fearless. Where was the party? Near the front, I could not believe my eyes. We were running towards the end of the M41 motorway! Only a few stray cops were there. Presumably they never thought a motorway could be on RTS’s radar. We ran through the few hopeless cops, laughing as they were powerless. Tripods and three big sound systems were being rapidly set up along half a mile of the motorway. They could not stop us setting up three sound systems and getting tens of thousands of people onto the last half-mile of motorway into central London.
RTS was theatrical at times, and here one woman, walking on huge stilts and wearing a very large dress down to the ground, carried out quite a direct action stunt. Someone hid inside the dress with a pneumatic drill and drilled holes in the fast lane on the motorway, into which tree saplings were planted.
When the world’s most powerful leaders met for the G7 in 1998, in Birmingham, England, a bunch of us went from Liverpool for an anti-G7 RTS party and protest. Resultantly, we closed down central Birmingham’s road network, causing absolute chaos, and approximately fifty thousand people surrounded the building containing the world’s leaders. They had wanted to hold a meeting to further globalise the world with neo-liberal economics but fifty thousand of us had different ideas, wishing for a world beyond capitalism.
So, Tony Blair et al were surrounded by a fifty-thousand-strong rabble, containing people from all walks of life, fluffy pacifists to spiky anarchists. What would happen next? The world leaders shat themselves, cancelled their meetings and all flew away from the top of the building in their helicopters, leaving an elated and jubilant crowd below to party the night away, to the sound of illegal repetitive beats.
Obviously the G7/8 were not slow to learn from that eye-washing experience. They never again arranged meetings in city-centre locations. They had been deeply humiliated, and the world knew. Subsequent meetings were arranged in isolated rural locations with huge security fences extended for miles around the venues, with masses of police, security, dogs and helicopters, of course. They felt like militarised zones.
Perhaps the craziest weekend of my life consisted of a wedding, or more accurately a pagan hand fast ceremony, on the Saturday and an RTS on the Sunday. A friend called ‘Blowpipe’ had wanted to marry Jenny, on top of Glastonbury Tor, on summer solstice. They wanted to write their own vows and renew them each year if so desired. No church or standardised vows were required. We hired a van and filled it with twenty lunatic friends, and I drove us south to Glastonbury. As one of only two drivers, I agreed to drive to Glastonbury, and Sharon would drive to Bristol for the RTS on the Sunday.
We arrived late afternoon. The hand fast in the evening was surreal, on a beautifully sunny, mid-summer solstice. As well as our colourful crew, many other assorted nut-cases were on top of the tor to watch the sunset. After the ceremony, we drank a big bottle of brandy, and some of us took very small doses of magic mushrooms. I would never recommend drinking strong alcohol with mushrooms, but that night we did.
Most of us were awake all night and took great pleasure watching the sunrise on Sunday morning, until the extremely angry landowner appeared screaming that we had to move our van. At this point, I realised Sharon was in absolutely no fit state to walk, never mind drive. The only option I saw, before the police came, was for me to quickly drive us all away from the tor to Bristol, so I did.
Thankfully, Bristol is not so far from Glastonbury, and I coped with the drive smoothly, until we hit Bristol. The usually bad traffic had almost ground to a halt, because of an RTS that had just started. Most of our eager crew got frustrated and decided they wanted to walk, as it would be quicker. So, most of them got out, leaving me and ‘Orange’, who was suffering horribly from the night before. His orange mohawk had flopped, and the make-up on his face, so carefully applied the night before, was now a total sticky mess. Only a few minutes later and in my wing mirror, I saw a lone policeman running up from behind us, through the traffic. Instantly I knew he was coming for us and he was.
When he got alongside my door it was hard for me not to laugh, as he wore a small Dennis the Menace badge on his tie. He was convinced that we had a sound system in the back of the van. RTSs would often have more than one sound system, especially the big ones. In the crawling traffic, I opened the side door for the cop and he jumped backwards when he was greeted only by Orange’s deranged face and smile, mohawk all stuck in his melting make-up. We were allowed to go on our way, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief that I had not been breathalysed, for I would have been seriously over the limit.
We eventually parked up and met our crew. But this RTS felt different. You could feel the electricity in the air. Class War’s founder, Ian Bone, lived in Bristol, and there were many spiky anarchists fed up with ‘hippies on drugs’. The street party soon turned into a full-blown riot. As my partner and I ran from the police in the central shopping area, a full brick flew over our heads and shattered a whole shop window right next to us. As we ran, someone shouted at us, “You’re all sheep on drugs!”
During the summer or autumn of 1999, something happened that disturbed many anarchists and activists, deeply. RTS’s London office was raided. That was bad enough, but the fact that it was raided by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation felt like a paradigm shift in British protest. Shortly afterwards, it became public knowledge that every phone conversation between Britain and Ireland had been monitored, throughout the nineties, and that every email in Britain was being monitored, by GCHQ in England and the National Security Agency in America. Surveillance gone mad, or less subtle.
A documentary was made about RTS, called Reclaim the Streets – The Film.
Jaybo is currently living in a cave in southern Spain and has no access to a bank account, but if you can help him out in any way, please write to winteroak@greenmail.net and we will forward your email to him.
winter oak 