Twyford Down
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Twyford Down is an area of downland lying to the southeast of Winchester, Hampshire, England. The summit, known as Deacon Hill, is at the western end of the hill. The M3 runs through the area in a cutting.
| The [Neutral point of view>neutrality] of this article is [NPOV disputedisputed]. Please see the discussion on the [ ProtestIn the early 1990s it was the site of a road protest against the building of the M3 extension. The Dongas and Earth First!ers set up camp on the site at the end of 1991. This was the first anti-road protest camp in the UK.The Ministry of Transport (MoT) had trouble purchasing the land required to bypass Winchester. The land they wanted, on Twyford Down, east of the city, was owned by Winchester College, who refused to sell the land to the government because it was an water meadow. The route was also chosen to avoid St Catharine's Hill an ancient hill fort. Proposals were made for a tunnel through Twyford Down, but because the estimated cost for this was £75 million more than the estimated cost for a cutting the government dismissed the plans. However the final route chosen ran through important chalk grassland habitat and 1.91 hectare of a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) were lost.[link] In 1990 a link between Southampton and the southern end of Twyford Down was completed and soon after work began on clearing the route across the down. Environmentalists gathered on the down making a camp to hinder work. A coalition of locals, and environmental organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth took the MoT to the high court stating that the road was against the government's own environmental protection laws. The case failed, but European Union Commissioner for the Environment, Carlo Ripa de Meana looked into the case and ordered the project to stop because it violated British and EU laws. Previously there had been a 20 year local campaign to save the down.[link] The first protest camp was evicted in December 1992 on Yellow Wednesday, named after the uniforms of the Group4 security guards who performed the eviction. Rather than quash the protest the eviction had the opposite effect and resistance to the road intensified and soon the Dongas moved on.[link] Earth First! set up a new protest camp down in nearby Plague Pits Valley which continued to obstruct the work both on the water meadows and up on the Down. As well as many actions big and small, there was an injunction-defying mass trespass, which resulted in 6 people spending some weeks in jail. Perhaps the most unusual arrest was for criminal damage to a piece of string. It is claimed that 5000 people attended the protests and occupations.[link] The link was completed in 1994, but it had been the spark for a whole anti-roads movement that got the UK roads programme slashed three times by a third, resulted in some road schemes being cancelled, and fanned the flames of an ecological direct action movement that had ripples across the globe. The old route of the A33 were planted with 7.2 hectares of species-rich grassland.[link] External linksFurther reading
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