Diversionary tactics - the imaginative campaigns protecting the countryside from developers

Local campaigns are helping to reclaim the countryside from developers and create new conservation sites
View showing reed beds and wetland area, Otmoor RSPB reserve, Oxfordshire. November 2005
The reed beds and wetland area of Otmoor RSPB reserve, Oxfordshire. Photograph: Ben Hall/RSPB Images.com

During the recession of the early 1980s, Joe Weston, then a sociology student, was sitting in an Oxfordshire pub with other members of the local Friends of the Earth group, thinking up ways of trying to stop the M40 ploughing through the middle of Otmoor. The Department for Transport had ignored a public inquiry, which had ruled against the government's proposed route for the motorway, and was determined to drive it through important woodlands and wetlands.

"We'd run a standard campaign with a few stunts," Weston recalls. "Now we wanted to take the case to the European court of human rights, but we had to show that individual rights had been infringed. A field on the road's route came up for sale, so, nervously, I borrowed some money and bought it, and we divided the hectare up into 3,500 plots and sold them for £3 each. It was decided to call it Alice's Meadow because of the link with Alice Through the Looking Glass [this landscape inspired Lewis Carroll] and the chessboard.

"The plot owners were anonymous, and if the government wanted to compulsorily purchase the land, each owner could in theory have forced a public inquiry and taken the case to the high court. The response was amazing. We were successful in getting the route changed, and this produced the biggest bend on any motorway in this country."

The motorway's diversion also provided an opportunity for ecological restoration.

David Wilding, the RSPB's site manager at Otmoor, says: "We began restoring wet grassland and arable fields and planting reedbeds on the moor in 1997. Since then we have expanded the reserve to 400 hectares, and during April we will release 5,000 rudd, the silvery fish of reedbeds that are the food source for bittern, which we are confident will be breeding at Otmoor in the next couple of years.

"I went to the reserve [recently] and it was fantastic, with redshank piping away, curlews, and the tumbling flight of lapwings. The otter has come back, and there are 50 brown hares on the moor. This is such a large area without roads for south-east England, and none of this would have been possible with an eight-lane motorway running through it."

Otmoor is a good example of a place saved from development by imaginative local campaigning to become a site of national conservation value. The Alice's Meadow campaign was a cunning plan with obvious similarities to the campaign against a third runway at Heathrow, where Greenpeace's "Airplot" involves purchasing a field on the runway's proposed route.

However, Weston, now director of the MSc spatial planning course at Oxford Brookes University, says: "The bonus for Alice's Meadow was that, at that time, there was no compulsory land registration; the owners were anonymous and from all over the world. Since the government changed the law in 2008 on land registration, it has made it easier for compulsory purchase. The planning system is more top-down now, with limited local discretion. My advice is to protect sites through ownership; it offers more rights and the ability to challenge the course of events at centre stage, because protecting property is part of the mentality of the British legal system."

"The tide is turning against these big projects, and local campaigns are key," says Julian Branscombe, director of the Gwent Wildlife Trust and a member of the Campaign Against the Levels Motorway (Calm). "They are not nimby, but instead are concerned with the imperative to reduce our carbon footprint."

Branscombe is campaigning to save the Gwent Levels in south Wales, an area of grassland with drainage ditches that include 5,148 hectares classified as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI ). Along with the Somerset Levels and the Norfolk Broads, the Gwent Levels are a unique landscape, now threatened by the M4 motorway extension first proposed during the recession of the early 1990s.

"Urban regeneration has seen the countryside as an asset to build on," Branscombe says. "What this campaign is doing, apart from showing that the motorway scheme is over the top and too expensive, is to value the Levels as a unique landscape. A quarter to one-third of the area has been lost to development, and it's time to say no more loss. I hope what is left of the Levels provides a critical mass for the survival of its flora and fauna, but that's not certain. What is certain is that losing more of the Levels will mean losing species."

However culturally important wildlife might be, it has rarely stopped any large development, but there is an important recent example. It was a rare species of fungi that stopped a housing development on the outskirts of Bangor, north Wales.

Amateur naturalist Maredudd ap Rheinallt joined the campaign to save Eithinog and Brewery Fields, overlooking the Menai suspension bridge, from a housing development. In 2006, after many years campaigning, ap Rheinallt decided to survey the fungi in the fields. In 2007, he found species classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List, as well as nationally scarce varieties, and one species of coral mushroom, Ramariopsis crocea, that had never been recorded in Wales before.

"The land had been surveyed by the Countryside Council for Wales," says ap Rheinallt, "but species of European importance had been missed because the survey wasn't detailed enough. It needs local people with knowledge to turn up day after day."

Because of these discoveries, the Eithinog and Brewery Fields were confirmed as an SSSI last month and saved from development - illustrating how local campaigns that connect with wildlife value can be very powerful in protecting important sites for the future.

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