Eco-capital of UK that’s like Notting Hill in wellies
THE Stroud climate change march started yesterday with just one man in a crisp Panama hat, pink short-sleeved shirt and wonderfully flamboyant goatee, who arrived early and waited patiently under the antislavery arch in the Paganhill area of this staunchly liberal Gloucestershire town.
‘You’ve got to be here today, otherwise you’re not a human being, you’re an idiot,’ says Roy, a 66-year-old retired railway worker.
‘The environment is going to implode and we can’t ignore it any more. They do it well in Stroud so I wanted to be early to watch it unfolding.’
Soon Roy was joined by the organisers of Stroud Earth Strike, who started unloading dozens of hand- painted signs from the boots of their cars, the Stroud Red Band who marched up with their shiny instruments and eclectic head gear, the town’s women- only Morris dancing troupe, an array of shopkeepers and local business owners – and a spattering of jolly ageing hippies with flyaway hair and shark-tooth necklaces.
The crowd swelled into well over a thousand people. Veterans of the Greenham Common anti-nuclear protest, teachers, care workers, solicitors, cafe staff, nurses, members of over 25 local businesses that had shut down for the day and schoolchildren of all ages.
KAIA is a slip of a thing in a floral dress clutching a homemade cardboard sign bearing the words ‘We have to act! The Government isn’t acting so we will’ in scrawly black felt-tip pen. She is passionate, aware, anxious and just ten years old.
‘Some kids are here because they just want to miss school, but I’m here because I care and I don’t want the Earth to collapse,’ she says. ‘I am very, very worried there could be a terrible flood and hurricanes if we don’t stop and do something. I worry about the animals a lot.
‘The Government has to do something. We’re just kids – we have no power so all we can do is help raise awareness.’
Rather alarmingly, Kaia is already a veteran of the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations that brought London to a standstill back in april. ‘That was a bit violent – a bit hectic,’ she says. ‘a lot of my friends went, but this is much nicer.’
She’s right. The atmosphere is friendly, noisy and jolly. It’s no surprise so many turn out. Known as ‘Notting Hill in wellies’ and the ‘ Brighton of the Cotswolds’, Stroud, which has a population of about 33,000, couldn’t be greener, more right- on, eco-friendly or plastic-loathing.
It was one of the birthplaces of the organic food movement. Extinction Rebellion was actually conceived in Stroud – in the front room of a council house just yards from today’s muster point.
Several of the group’s key members – who have a penchant for supergluing themselves to things by way of protest (including to Jeremy Corbyn’s gate and the revolving doors of the oil giant Shell’s London headquarters) – live in Stroud.
as we march (rather slowly) through the town, the drums beat, the band plays, a woman walks beside me with a giant cuddly octopus on her shoulder and I chat to Hannah Dingley, academy manager of the world’s only vegan football team (yes, really) – local side Forest Green Rovers. ‘ The pitch is fully organic, the mowers are solarpowered, the food and wine and beer are all vegan and our top seller is a Quorn pie – it’s delicious,’ she says.
Wow. apparently all the players’ meals are vegan too. Striding along behind her, they look very well on it, if a bit shifty when asked if they’re vegan at home as well.
Trish Dickenson, an incredibly youthful 82, is wearing purple and pink and tells me she wants to ‘change international law so that destroying the climate becomes a crime’. Trish, who credits the spring in her step to ‘an ancient way of moving energy around your organs’, is a Greenham Common veteran who, like so many others I talk to, moved to Stroud for its free-thinking, earnest eco- credentials and enthusiasm for protesting.
Because it turns out Stroudies will demonstrate about pretty much anything and have been at it since the weavers’ riots of 1825.
There are so many protest groups here it’s dizzying – so far they’ve saved the post office, town hall, maternity hospital, the ancient hornbeam tree in the town centre and put a stop to a proposed ring road.
Lord knows how a McDonald’s snuck through in 2005.
NATURALLY today there is a lot of chat about Greta Thunberg, the 16- year- old Swedish schoolgirl who started it all off by striking on her own outside the Swedish parliament and has been busy since tearing strips off politicians around the world and sailing across the atlantic in a solarpowered boat.
Kaia is a massive fan: ‘ She’s my role model. I would love to meet her.’ Happily today there is no supergluing or aggro of any kind.
Mostly it’s all jolly drumming, singing, a bit too much manic shouting into a megaphone by a girl in lilac socks, followed by some rousing and moving speeches by the children.
When it’s all over, there’s a slapup lunch for all in the sun, accompanied by mountains of artisan sourdough bread.
As Roy said, they really do protest well in Stroud.