2020 is the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. The camp started in 1981 when a group of women from the peace group Women for Life on Earth chained themselves to the fence at the RAF Greenham Common Base to protest against the installation of nuclear missiles at the base by NATO. The initial camp — tents and caravans — was evicted by Newbury council, and then reformed; this time, it stuck, with women instead living in ‘benders’, tree branches bent over and covered with sheets of tarpaulin. The DIY and organic nature of the protest camp was central to its identity.

Greenham grew into an interconnected series of protests, each sited around a gate and named after a colour of the rainbow. Each had its own distinctive culture: Yellow gate was the oldest and most established; Blue gate started off as a New Age focused space and became more politically anarchic; Red and Orange gates were for artists and musicians; Green gate was the space deemed safest for children and the only consistently women-only space.  

Greenham had first been the end point of a protest march from Cardiff for Women for Life on Earth, who had walked 120 miles to the American airbase. This was in the grand tradition of the annual CND Aldermaston marches, which had begun in 1958; the marches had taken place over the Easter weekend, and had been a non-violent performance against nuclear weapons and, for many of the protestors, war itself. The CND protests had often involved more theatrical events, too, such as the ‘die-ins’ organised across the country. The Committee of 100 had embraced more direct action, including demonstrations at nuclear submarine ports and sit-ins on airport runways. 

Greenham built on this tradition, and clearly developed out of a British response to anti-nuclear protesting that fused pacifist principles with a broader left-wing rejection of American superpower dominance and Britain’s complicity in Cold War power politics. Greenham, though, was distinct for its feminist approach. Feminism suffused every level of the Greenham actions: from its aims and justification, to its culture, to the women at the protest themselves. 

‘Embrace the Base’, women were told: a chain letter was circulated among feminist groups from the small peace camp, asking women to come to the base on 12 December 1982. The letter was first sent to a thousand women, who were asked to copy it and post to ten friends; the tactic worked, and 30,000 women arrived to hold hands around the 9-mile perimeter of the base to protest the cruise missile installation.  After this, many of the women remained in the camp, and it grew. The letter had inspired women to come out and protest because it framed women’s participation on their own terms. Rather than a leader directing a march or an organisation promoting an event, this felt organic, spontaneous, and feminist.

The Greenham Common camp had a focus on peaceful protest, but it could be spirited: women blockaded the entrance to the base, lay down in front of lorries, ran after military convoys (increasingly deployed under cover of darkness), and put sugar in petrol tanks. The women arranged themselves around the gates and held signs asking soldiers to come and talk to them about peace. But they also cut chain link fences and invaded the military space: on New Year’s Eve in 1982 the women gained access to the base and danced on top of weapons silos. When they were arrested, for trespassing or criminal damage, they used the courts as public spaces. They read testimonies and poems, conducted a citizen’s arrest on one of the American military men called to give evidence, and they sang and danced in court. At one point they tried to flood the jails with Greenham women to put a strain on the prison system: when a number of protestors were incarcerated in Holloway, another group of women climbed onto scaffolding and held a peace banner up against the prison roof. 

Thatcher dismissed the protests and the protestors as an ‘eccentricity’. Greenham has a reputation as a New Age hippy commune, and that is certainly part of its history. The women’s movement in the 1980s was pushing against male expertise, scientific ‘neutrality’, and the patriarchal norms of established religions and social structures. The women of Greenham were building a new politics, responding to the threat of the end of the world.