Tea, sit-ins and solidarity: Inside Greenham Common's radical protest

In 1981, a Welsh peace group, Women for Life on Earth, arrived at Greenham, a Berkshire RAF base. The small group had walked 120 miles from Cardiff to protest the British government’s decision to store nuclear weapons at the base. Realising nobody was taking their homemade banners and message of global peace seriously, they decided to set up what would become an enduring symbol of radical left-wing protest movements: Greenham Common’s Women’s Peace Camp.

The missiles arrived in 1983 sparking renewed protest, including the formation of a 14-mile human chain wrapped around the military base. Janine Wiedel, an American documentary photographer and visual anthropologist, arrived that year too; her intimate black-and-white pictures from her stay in the camp from 1983 to 1984 are now being released in a new photo book Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp 1983-1984. The camp would last 19 years in total, long after the missiles had left, only disbanding in 2000.

The camp soon became bigger than the issue of nuclear weapon storage. “Living in makeshift dwellings alongside the fence, the women created an alternative existence, separated by barbed wire from the nuclear weapons and military personnel,” writes Wiedel. “The camp transformed the lives of many participants, offering the space for the growth of radical and feminist politics.” Similar camps began to form not only near other bases in the UK, but across Europe.

At the peak of the materialist 1980s, the camp was mocked by the tabloid press; Margaret Thatcher dismissed them as an “eccentricity”. But as Extinction Rebellion block off cities and women’s marches explode in the wake of Trump’s election, it’s easy to see the radical blueprint of peaceful but stubborn endurance Greenham laid out for protest movements to follow.