Chainsaws, disguises and toxic tea: the battle for Sheffield’s trees
Looking back now, it is hard to pinpoint the moment when things got totally out of control. It might have been when council contractors teamed up with police for an operation that Nick Clegg, then the MP for Sheffield Hallam, later described as “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia”. It might have been when the council received a letter from the environment minister, Michael Gove, demanding that it halt the scheme – and chose to ignore it. It might have been when South Yorkshire police had to pay out more than £24,000 for wrongful arrests that they had made to defend the council’s work. But by the time a public inquiry was commissioned in 2021, chaired by the former undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs at the UN, no one could dispute that something had gone horribly wrong in Sheffield.
It all started with a perfectly reasonable proposition. Sheffield’s roads were in a bad state, and its pavements were wonky. To some locals, Sheffield had become known as “pothole city”. Residents wrote to their councillors to complain, and in 2012, after years of planning, the council launched a £1.2bn road improvement project called Streets Ahead. Its aim was to upgrade the city’s roads, pavements, street lights and bridges. The plan involved the mass removal of street trees, which were blamed for making pavements bumpy and cracking kerbstones.
The council did not anticipate any major objections. After all, the felled trees would be replaced with saplings. But saplings – which might take 30 or more years to mature – are not a like-for-like replacement. Mature trees, which can grow to a height of 15 metres (50ft) and live for hundreds of years, are visually spectacular in a way that saplings, shorter than the average person, are not. In 2014, when residents realised the council was felling trees on an industrial scale, protests started to break out – at first in small pockets on streets where trees were being targeted, and then on a larger scale. These protests would grow into a city-wide movement.
It was in December 2016 that Paul Brooke and Carole Sutherland learned the council was planning to cut down half of the trees on their road. The couple had moved to Sheffield about a decade earlier when their daughter left home for university. For Brooke and Sutherland, who worked in social care and housing, Sheffield’s trees were one of its great attractions. A third of the city sits within the Peak District national park, and it is estimated to have more trees per person than any other city in Europe. The couple moved into a Victorian terrace house on Meersbrook Park Road in south Sheffield, which was lined with 43 mature limes that stood 4.5 to 6 metres tall. As Brooke and Sutherland settled in Sheffield, they never tired of walking past the trees, watching the leaves change with the seasons. So it was a shock to hear that the council was planning to cut down almost half of them. “We started asking neighbours: ‘Do you know about it?’” Brooke remembered. When they looked it up online, they were astonished by the scale of the tree-felling that was taking place across Sheffield.
Brooke and Sutherland, who are now in their 60s, had always prided themselves on being unconventional. Brooke wears flat caps and waistcoats, and has a dandyish goatee and handlebar moustache, while Sutherland has cropped hair, dyed bright red, and favours vibrant colours and statement jewellery. But their most recent foray into activism had been in the 1980s, when they went to a few CND peace rallies. When the trees dispute came into their lives, they surprised themselves with just how extreme their involvement became. Within months, they were protesting weekly, sometimes even daily, putting their bodies in harm’s way to prevent tree surgeons from using their chainsaws. “It almost became a compulsion,” Sutherland said. “The belief in why you’re doing something overrides the anxiety about going to court or prison.” They were not alone. Hundreds of people in Sheffield, with no prior experience of protest or environmental activism, found themselves radicalised, giving up their lives for months to protect their trees.
In the face of council intransigence, the battle over the trees would become one of the longest-running and most divisive disputes in Sheffield’s history. “Obviously no one [at the council] went into the contract thinking: ‘Eventually we’ll need to pay a private militia to actually get this policy through’,” said Lewis Dagnall, who was a councillor in Sheffield from 2015 until 2021. “They