Twyford Down

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Template:Mtnbox start nopic norange Template:Mtnbox topo Template:Mtnbox UK Template:Mtnbox finish 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.

Protest

In 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 important chalk grassland habitat. The government did not wish to issue compulsory purchase because they were on good terms with the college and did not want to sever ties. 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. 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 organisations 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. The MoT ignored this order, and when the UK took over the EU chairmanship later that year Carlo Ripa de Meana lost his job. The first protest camp was evicted in a grand style on 'Yellow Wednesday', and the Dongas moved on. 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 days in jail. 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.