This year marks the 30th anniversary of the party and protest phenomenon’s first high-profile action on Camden High Street in 1995 and to mark the event, it’ll be back on May 17th
~ Anon ~
Although Reclaim The Streets (RTS) had existed in embryonic form for several years before May ’95, that action marked an escalation in tactics, numbers, and publicity.
Several hundred people attended and the action caught the wave of the moment, with an appealing mix of anti-capitalism, anticar culture, new age travellers radicalised during the previous five years, and the rave / free party scene all wrapped into a direct action in an urban area. By the time their third event happened barely a year later, more than 5,000 shut down the M41 in west London with a massive party breaking through police lines, infamously damaging the road surface with jackhammer drills hidden underneath a carnival-style float.
The London organisation only existed for about six years before eventually disintegrating. In that time the messaging developed beyond being about a street party reclaiming the space from cars, and into a wider analysis of capitalism and power structures. This fairly rapid shift led to more confrontational actions such as the J18 event in 1999, where the expressed intent was to disrupt the business of the City. The group’s high profile also led to more traditional leftist and workerist organisations reaching out to forge links, such as the Liverpool dockers and London Underground drivers. Bridges between union and more radical environmental groups were unheard of at the time and this alone would have elevated RTS’s “threat level” amongst the authorities to severe.
There are many reasons behind the collapse of RTS London, and if you speak with ten different people about why, you will get ten different answers. The tensions between an “inner core” group with the knowledge of where and when an action would take place, and then holding open public meetings where suddenly there was a huge influx of new and enthusiastic participants who wanted to be a part of the decision making process and know what was going on but felt frozen out, were never resolved.
This is frequently cited as a reason for its dissolution, but there are others, including burnout, interpersonal dynamics and disagreements particularly with tactics, and a sense amongst many of a lack of direction. The post September 11th 2001 climate also had a chilling effect.
Years after RTS actions finished, including some remnant actions which took place in occupied spaces and on the southbank beach, the truth about one of their core activists Jim Boyling / Sutton was revealed. Boyling was a member of the SDS unit of the Met police, whose purpose was to infiltrate environmental, animal rights, and other left wing organisations. Boyling was a key coordinator for RTS from the very start, often steering the conversations into more radical territory and directing the actions on the day. He also facilitated the delivery and driving of old cars, which RTS used as a publicity stunt to signal the beginning of a demo. Other activists at the time never suspected or uncovered the mole, despite hundreds of police officers being present and prepared at the exact M41 location when participants emerged from the train station. Boyling also had an intimate relationship with a female activist at the time while undercover, causing immense trauma when the details of his true identity emerged.
So why, after nearly a quarter of a century absence, is RTS returning to London? The main idea behind the movement never died – that cars occupy too much of urban space and that it is the cars that are causing the disruption to life, not the revellers – and spread across the world like a franchise, with some cities having a longer-term permanent presence of RTS as a concept, notably Sydney. The coordinators of this London action to mark the 30th anniversary of Camden High Street have put out a long callout, which is an updated version of a past manifesto and analysis. This was put into a photocopied “poster zine” and hundreds of these have been distributed to radical spaces across the city. This goes some way to explaining why this action has been called. The callout demonstrates a frustration with car culture as before, but also bemoans the drift away from human interactions as a result of tech saturation, and says that the street is the last place free of cookies and text mining, where people can interact in a genuine liberated way.
In it, the authors state “In some ways, the world is different, but scratch the surface of various veneers of liberation and community – through the connections of highly regulated and controlled technology platforms, and the underlying issues of isolation and monetisation of human relationships remain the same. Tech enables people to act out the selfishness that has been inculcated in them via decades of capitalist propaganda, according to which human beings are no more than individual, atomised consumers in a merciless ambient marketplace.
Five years ago, lockdowns and social distancing guidance re-drew maps of the public and private spheres, unlocking world historical levels of anxiety. We were at once cut-off from and agonisingly close to others in our environs, alert to our distance from those who we desired closeness with. When the lockdowns ended, there was a huge window of opportunity to reconsider how we value human interaction at a societal level, and to place a premium on creating spaces that facilitate true community. There was also a chance to reconfigure our cities around healthy and sustainable cycling transport. But all these chances were squandered, as usual, by politicians caring more about populist short-term electoral gain, and amping up culture war rhetoric to divide people, cheered on and financed by the car industry.
Cars dominate our cities, polluting, congesting and dividing communities. It doesn’t particularly matter whether they are being powered by fossil fuels or batteries or any other type of supposedly “clean energy” – they still occupy too much space, and have isolated people from one another, and our streets have become mere conduits for motor vehicles to hurtle through, oblivious of the neighbourhoods they are disrupting. Ridding society of the car would allow us to re-create a safer, more attractive living environment, to return streets to the people that live on them and perhaps to rediscover a sense of ‘social solidarity’.”
The call-out goes on at length, wrapping in many of the themes and concerns that have occupied minds and hearts over the last 25 years, such as increasing state oppression with authoritarian legislation, public money being spent on white elephant projects like the Silvertown Tunnel or the Lower Thames Crossing, the weaponisation of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods by the right wing media, and the increasing encroachment into all aspects of the street by tech companies’ tracking through surveillance cookies. Their concluding paragraph seems to be more of a maturer reflection on the past and an acceptance of the limitations of what they achieved, and what can realistically come from a street party – “It will not end capitalism or isolation on its own… but it is one small positive and life affirming step in the creation of situations, that seek to bring us back together”.
Much has changed politically since RTS actions happened in the late 1990s. The recent 2023 revisions to the Public Order Act give police and judges considerable power to arrest any protestors who they deem to be in breach of the Section 7 “Interference with Key National Infrastructure” clause which includes roads. Other revisions include vague, discretionary descriptions such as “creating a risk of serious annoyance” under the Public Nuisance clauses; and “Wilful Obstruction of the Highway”. These revisions have been used to convict peaceful activists from Just Stop Oil to extended prison sentences, and also acted as the driver for crackdowns on groups like Youth Demand. The debate about permitting peaceful yet disruptive protests is non-existent, despite a supposed left wing government in power, which seems in no hurry to strike down legislation created by the extreme right wing of the Tories during their 14 years in power.
Yet it is easy to forget that a similar climate existed in the 1990s when RTS began, with the introduction of the CJA by John Major’s government, criminalisation of alternative lifestyles that had co-existed with mainstream society for decades. and similar repression and surveillance of left wing activists. So perhaps not much has changed after all.
A huge number of posters and stickers have been appearing in public spaces over the past two months advertising the event. The early part of the day begins with a Critical Mass ride, which will meet up with the street party later on. Few further details have emerged as yet, but there is a broadcast Telegram channel where information will be released, including where to go on the day itself
This article first appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Freedom Journal
