The runway protest that really took off
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THIS time 20 years ago Manchester Airport had just opened its second runway at a cost of £172million, heralding what was trumpeted as a bright new era for aviation and a jobs bonanza fuelled by no-frills budget airlines.
Civic leaders hailed it as an important milestone for a city with ambitions to become an international player.
Two miles of concrete carpet unfurled onto rolling Cheshire countryside, it came at a cost that was environmental as well as financial. But it undoubtedly helped create thousands of jobs aimed at satisfying our lust for more and cheaper air travel.
And long before Greta Thunberg was born, it helped cement the star status of Swampy, perhaps the first celebrity eco-warrior.
Real name Daniel Hooper, he first hit the headlines in 1996 when he spent a week living in a complex of tunnels he’d helped to excavate to stop an extension to the A30 in Fairmile, Devon. A year later, he joined a vocal band of protesters – a curious mix of anarchists, environmentalists and concerned local residents – determined, at least on the face of it, to halt the construction of Runway 2 on prime Cheshire greenbelt land to the south west of the airport.
Once completed, it was supposed to boost the number of people flying in and out of the airport from just short of 15m each year to 30m by 2005, a milestone which now seems vastly over-exaggerated, because in 2021, pandemic aside, it still hasn’t been surpassed.
The son of middle-class parents in Berkshire, Swampy has been back in the news again recently, this time trying to stop HS2 in its tracks.
But in 1997 he became the face of a six-month protest in a vain effort to stop Runway 2. He and his accomplices set up four camps with names like Flywood dotted around the River Bollin.
The stand-off between protesters and the security team brought in by the contractors – with the police trying to keep the peace in the middle of them – became headline news almost every night that summer.
In the end the bailiffs removed the campers, the diggers moved in and Runway 2 finally opened on February 5, 2001. It was the UK’s first new runway in 20 years.