Introduction
Remembering and lessons we can learn from the Occupy London / Occupy LSX 2011 protest camp by the author Anna Feigenbaum. This article first appeared in the London Society Journal in 2015. The author has kindly shared a preprint version of the article.
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“Protests should not morph into tent cities.” Liberal Democrat MEP for London, Sarah Ludford, told The Guardian, commenting on the eviction of the 2011 Occupy London protest camp that gave new life—and controversy—to area around St. Paul’s Catherdral. Ludford said, “The right to protest is too precious to be undermined by long-term encampments which disrupt normal life to an unacceptable extent, beyond the inevitable and legitimate inconvenience of a one-off demo.”
Echoing similar sentiments in the high courts, The Corporation of London described the Occupy encampment as a magnet for criminals, alcoholics and drug addicts. On November 22, 2011, a Daily Mail headline declared, “Desecration, defecation and class A drugs: Children found living in squalor at St Paul’s protest camp.” While Prime Minister David Cameron told a House of Commons committee, “I think protesting is something you, on the whole, should do on two feet rather than lying down – in some cases in a fairly comatose state.”
According to most of the major newspapers and city officials, the 2011 Occupy London Stock Exchange encampment was nothing more than a nuisance, a detriment, a leech on society. Full of class As, alcoholism, vandalism and uncleanliness, the site was more like a drug den than a political demonstration.
But are protest camps really as bad as these authorities would have us believe? Is the disruption that public occupations cause always to be reviled? What would happen if, before we dismissed these sites as nothing more than shanty town clutter, we stopped for a cuppa tea and a chat? What might we learn about our city and our fellow Londoners from protest camps?
To understand what lessons we might learn, we must first understand how protest camps like Occupy London come about.
Remembering Occupy LSX
On 15 October 2011, about 2,000 Londoners took to the streets around Paternoster Square, home of the London Stock Exchange, in part, to protest against the ever-increasing gaps in wealth that rifle their city. Greeted by double rows of metal barricades, riot police, dogs and horses, it soon became clear that the demonstrators were not going set up camp as planned in the concrete courtyard outside the Exchange. After circling all of the entrances in the hope of a back way in, protesters found themselves in the square outside St Paul’s Cathedral – the only space in the area big enough to handle such a large crowd. Without a central organising committee, people decided that they would camp right there, in the middle of the square outside the cathedral. Calls were made to start co-ordinating food, shelter and sanitation.
Over the next week, arrangements were made with the council for sanitation, and donations poured in for the kitchen, library and media centres. A tech hub and supply tent provided 24-hour support, while a prayer tent, wellness tent, ‘tent city university’, arts centre and later a women’s space offered additional support and activity.
Also forming part of the camp’s infrastructure was the local Star- bucks, which served as a camp toilet, electronics charging station, public Wi-Fi hotspot, space for meetings and conference calls, and a personal escape where campers could get warm. Starbucks also served as a media hub for both mainstream and independent journalists and sold coffee to onlookers and as an occasional occupier indulgence.
Using existing urban infrastructures, Occupy LSX, like many urban encampments, took up space that was normally used for commuters and tourists, turning it into a civic centre, a space for meetings and political exchange out in the streets.
Causing a disruption to the usual commercial flow of the area, led to the camp’s condemnation by some members of the Church of England and by the Corporation of London for causing a reduction in both tourist visits to the cathedral and the profits of the many chain restaurants and shops that lined the periphery of the occupied square (including, serendipitously, a Blacks camping store).
These tensions played out in legal battles involving the Corporation of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Occupy protest campers. Trying to keep the church onside, protesters aligned their cause to Christian values, at one point erecting a banner reading ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ In a legal context, the camp also started questioning the legitimacy of the City of London Corporation, which became one of its main adversaries, standing in for how privatization and the pursuit of profit was pushing everyday people out of the city of London.
Banners at the moved Occupy London protest in Finsbury Square in the City of London. Credit: Alan Denney, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Lessons
Lesson 1: Profit Should Not Come Before People
From a purely financial perspective it is easy to see why business owners might crackdown on urban occupations. However, one of the most important lessons we can learn from protest camps is that profit should not come before people. Putting people first, protest camps confront commercial landscapes—the motorways, shopping malls, tourist centres and privatised squares that dominate our urban life—and re-create them as places that are designed for dialogue—without the need to buy anything, or sign any forms, or be wearing a specified outfit.
Protest camps carve out city space, creating what urban planners call ‘desire paths’—only these new walkways are not for taking shortcuts, but for finding human interaction.
By building temporary villages that disrupt the routinized order of working life, protest camps create a new rhythm and flow of urban movement. Strangers stop midday to talk to each other. Passerby became temporary participants in political debate. Even a drunken police officer can find new late night friends to offer refuge in a protest camp, as an Occupy London media story gleefully reported.
Lesson 2: We are Responsible for Each Other
Of course, all this open-ness and welcoming also leads to conflict. But rather than dismiss these spaces as chaotic drug dens, it is important to pause and try to understand why protest camps become temporary shelters for people living without homes and dealing with drug and mental health problems. For critics, the failure of protest camps to deal with social care serves as proof that the camps are savage and reckless spaces, unsafe particularly for women and children.
But in reality, the camp is functioning as a mirror, a reflection glass held up to the problems of the larger city and its struggles—or increasingly its refusal—to enact functioning operations and structures of care.
Cuts to health care, social work services and housing leave more and more people without the support they need. Protest camps are ‘magnets’ precisely because they offer people something the city fails to adequately provide—shelter, food, company and a sense of belonging to something bigger.
Lesson 3: Democracy Must Be Lived
As part of the much wider Occupy movement, Occupy LSX reached millions. Its public act of reclaiming and occupying city space and its attempts to establish alternative methods of living and decision-making together, demonstrated a public demand for more direct forms of direct democracy.
It reminded us that when people get to participate in politics, and not just watch them play out on television, they are far from apathetic.
In place of the removed, remote world of parliament, still dominated by a wealthy Oxbridge elite, people in protest camps attempt to govern themselves, to construct their own methods of decision-making. It is from this lived democratic experience of camping together that people write—or refuse to write—their own demands. This sentiment was emblemised in the popular Occupy mantra: ‘This is a process not a protest.’ And while it might not be a process defined by success and concrete accomplishments, it points toward the thirst that people have to be more involved in making the decisions that affect their lives.
So next time you walk by a splattering of tents taking over the tarmac, considering stopping by for a cuppa tea and a chat. You might just learn a thing or two about what it means to live in this city together.
Occupy London
– Tents in front of St Pauls, London Sunday 16th October 2011. Credit: Neil Cummings, CC BY-SA 2.0
Books
Read more about protest camps from the author Anna Feigenbaum in collaboration with others.
Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance, 2018
Edited by Gavin Brown, Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy
“From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements’ activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state.
Drawing on over 50 different protest camps from around the world over the past 50 years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective – a story that, until now, has remained untold.
Taking the reader on a journey across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest, and drawing on a wealth of original interview material, the authors demonstrate that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists can enact radical and often experiential forms of democratic politics.” – Source
Protest Camps, 2013
by Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy
“From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies from five continents, this topical collection is the first to focus on protest camps as unique organisational forms that transcend particular social movements’ contexts. Whether erected in a park in Istanbul or a street in Mexico City, the significance of political encampments rests in their position as distinctive spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Written by a wide range of experts in the field the book offers a critical understanding of current protest events and will help better understanding of new global forms of democracy in action.” – Source
- Book Extract (Bloomsbury Publishing)
- Book Extract (The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Issue 9)
- Book Preview (Google)
- Borrow from a library near you (Worldcat)
- Protest Camps: Experiments in Alternative Worlds
The project blog associated with the book which includes reports, discussions and case studies up until 2018.
Explore Further
- Occupy London
- Some reflections on a day at Occupy LSX at St Paul’s Cathedral, 10/11/2012
- Occupy LSX may be gone, but the movement won’t be forgotten, The Guardian, 29/2/2012
- The Long History of Protest Camps
- Protest Camps: Case Studies
- Protest Architecture: Barricades, Camps, Spatial Tactics 1830-2023, 2024
- Protest Camps: Experiments in Alternative Worlds
- Feminism and Protest Camps: Entanglements, Critiques and Re-Imaginings