Down With The Fences, South London Radical History Group, 2005
Dotted across south London, as with many other places in Britain, is a network of parks, commons and woods, some mere patches hemmed in by houses, roads and railway lines, others extending over many square miles. This network is what remains of the great wilderness of uncultivated land which once covered huge swathes of the country, providing a valuable resource to the poor, affording grazing for livestock, a supply of firewood, a place to grow vegetables. Many people squatted on these commons. From the 16th century onward, however, landowners began enclosing the commons for intensive agriculture or building. As enclosure increased, so did resistance to it. Later, when the agricultural and industrial revolutions had forced hundreds of thousands into towns and cities, these commons came to provide a meeting place for the lower orders to talk politics, to agitate and to air their grievances. As conditions for the urban poor worsened and agitation grew, so there was another impetus towards the regulation of public space, into fenced off, well-ordered public parks.
Down with the Fences is a short, very readable history of how and why the people fought, over a 400-year period, to protect the common land against encroachment. As the introduction states, ‘Many, if not most, of the open spaces of any size that remain today…exist because they were preserved from development by collective action. Whether by rioting, tearing down fences and reopening enclosed land, or by legal agitation, much of the commons and parks that make life in the Smoke just about bearable wouldn’t be there if they
hadn’t been actively defended’.
This pamphlet manages in 32 pages to cram in an impressive amount of research and offers a real sense of social forces at work. It details individual fights to preserve particular commons, particularly in the early 19th and early 20th centuries. There are vivid descriptions of the battles of Plumstead, Wandsworth and Sydenham Commons as well as the riotous actions of the fence smashers who saved One Tree Hill in Honor Oak from becoming a private golf course just over 100 years ago. There are contemporary engravings, propaganda material and maps showing the locations of lost commons overlaid on the topography of modern London.
The pamphlet shows how local movements fed each other and came also to feed into more general, often law-abiding campaigning movements, such as the Commons Preservation Society, which often ran in parallel with more spontaneous, violent uprisings. Recent campaigns against the development of a multiplex cinema complex at Crystal Palace and against the destruction of the 8,000-year-old Oxleas Wood are cited as evidence of the continuing battle.
This history from below illuminates a neglected and fascinating area of the radical past and deserves a wide readership.
Owen James
FRFI 185 June / July 2005
