From the 12th September 2022 until 31st June 2024, we worked with our sister project, Scary Little Girls on a project designed to explore the lasting legacies of key Greenham Women campaigns 40 years on, creating a heritage narrative that did not exist and would otherwise be lost.
Originally called ‘Carry Embrace The Base Home’, as conversations developed, we found ourselves referring to the project as ‘Common Ground‘. The project saw us running events all over the UK – from Cardiff to Glasgow and the Isles of Scilly to the Isle of Wight – for all ages, backgrounds and abilities, with a focus on rural exclusion. It was designed in consultation with partners, including women who lived at the camp, traditional venues, community centres, and local businesses in the regions we were targeting.
We wanted to find out where Greenham Women went next, and what they had done – and we wanted to use this to inspire the younger generations of activists today and in the future – we wanted to demonstrate the ‘common ground’ that these generations had between them. We knew that the amount of energy so many Greenham Women had poured into the camp would have spilled over into other parts of their lives. We also knew that some Greenham Women considered themselves to have left their activism behind them, but were still making a difference, running charities or other organisations, supporting people, driving change. If the Greenham Common women’s peace camp formed the roots and the trunk, we wanted to collect and collate as many stories as we could, to see how far the branches spread, and what new shoots were emerging’s.
Specifically, our aims were to celebrate and promote:
1. Living heritage: While these events happened in the 1980s, their spirit lives on within UK communities today. This project aimed to ensure they remain part of our collective historic memory, outlining their cultural relevance, while community-building for future generations.
2. Cultural archaeology: Unearthing, presenting and preserving still-untold stories of surviving Greenham Women; feminists, lesbians, socialists, environmentalists and pacifists from diverse backgrounds, showing how their collective-action campaigns changed and shaped local communities and our nation.
3. Heritage crafts: Championing Greenham Women’s ‘craftivism’, inspiring and empowering participants to explore their world view, community or self-identity and express themselves through song writing and recycled-textile arts (including banner making).
The results of this project were phenomenal and we turned them – in part – into a permanent, interactive and interrogable resource and record, here on our website. Available freely to anyone, and with pathways into the information aimed specifically at different levels within schools, this and The Impact Tree share some of the day to day detail of lives at Greenham – how to weave a web or build a bender, songs and poems, and the spectacular Telephone Tree – mass communication in the days before WhatsApp!
Our project may have ended but the need for protest has not. It is our hope that this resource will inspire young activists, and equip them to fight for the things they believe in, just as the Greenham Women did.