The Anniversary Of Saving Epping Forest

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Mark Gorman, author of Saving the People’s Forest: open spaces, enclosure and popular protest in Victorian London celebrates the anniversary of the decisive battle to save Epping Forest as public open space which took place on Wanstead Flats.

One hundred and fifty years ago today, on 8th July 1871, thousands gathered on Wanstead Flats, the southern boundary of Epping Forest. They were there to protest against the fencing-off of a large section of the Flats by Lord Cowley, the Lord of Wanstead Manor and a major landowner in the forest.

Cowley’s action was just another in a series of enclosures of Epping Forest as local landowners sought to cash in on the rising value of land near London. Commerce and industry were driving a huge expansion of the city and villages like Walthamstow and Leytonstone were being transformed into bustling suburbs. London’s population, which had been just over one million in 1800, reached seven million by the eve of the Great War.

This unprecedented growth proved a mixed blessing for Londoners. The new suburbs provided affordable housing for many better-off workers but it was not just the affluent middle classes who were new residents of the growing outer London districts. Many who lived in the inner east London parishes also aspired to houses with gardens and the arrival of the railways made living at a distance from work a possibility.

At the same time, London’s spread was swallowing up the green spaces which for centuries people been able to enjoy. One after another urban commons were eaten away by housing and industrial development. By the mid-nineteenth century, even the once-remote Epping Forest was under threat. For East Enders “the People’s Forest” was their time-honoured playground. Summer weekends and holidays saw thousands take the roads eastward to the forest. Wanstead Flats, just north of the village of Forest Gate, was the closest part of the forest, with a railway station that opened in the eighteen-forties giving direct access from inner London.

The enclosures were a direct threat to this freedom to roam and not something Londoners accepted easily. On a wet February night in 1866, a meeting in Mile End formed a local branch of the Commons Preservation Society. While the committee was made up of prominent businessmen and politicians, the core group were all local political radicals, veterans of campaigns calling for the right to vote for the working class.

In the face of enormous odds, at a time of economic crisis, the campaigners mobilised local support for efforts to save the forest from development. A series of meetings across east London and in the forest promoted the cause. Workers at Truman, Hanbury & Buxton, local schoolchildren and many other East Enders raised funds. Nevertheless, as the enclosures continued, outrage was increasing and it was clear that direct action was required.

In the summer of 1871, the enclosures of Wanstead Flats proved to be a watershed. East Londoners gained a powerful ally in the City of London Corporation which, sensing the public mood, sided with the popular cause. Using their position as Epping Forest commoners, with the right to graze cattle across the forest, they warned Lord Cowley against infringing this right with his fences.

The City’s motives were mixed. At a time when they were being widely criticised as self-interested and unaccountable, this was a calculated effort to burnish their image. Yet it was also an act of altruism whose motivation was summed up by J T Bedford, the City’s leading campaigner for Epping Forest. By helping to save the forest, he said, ‘they would get the whole population with them. It would extend their influence, and it would be a gracious thing to do for the East End of London’.

While the City of London threatened legal action, campaigners called a mass demonstration on Wanstead Flats for July 1871. In the week before, public meetings were held in Hackney, Mile End, Stratford and Shoreditch. Though distant from the forest, these meetings were packed by those determined to defend their open space at all costs. “Shoreditch to the Rescue!” was the clarion call advertising the meeting there.

On 8th July, thousands descended on Wanstead Flats. By this stage, the gentleman leaders were increasingly nervous about the box they had opened and posters appeared warning against damaging the cause by destroying the fences. The formal meeting was moved off the Flats to the grounds of a local house. This was not to the crowd’s liking and, amidst a storm of booing, the wagon on which the speakers stood was manhandled onto the Flats.

A police presence seemed enough to keep order and, after polite speeches and appeals not to break the law, the leaders left. But hours later a single fence rail was broken and, within minutes, a huge crowd was laying waste to hundreds of yards of fencing. The police were hastily recalled, made one arrest  – Henry Rennie, a Bethnal Green cabinet-maker – and fended off the crowd’s efforts to free him.

The press condemned the destruction of the fences, though some pointed out that the action grew out of frustration at the failure of the government to protect open spaces from rapacious landowners. Indeed, within a month parliament had enacted the first of a series of Acts to protect the forest.

Parliamentary and legal action was played out amidst vociferous public protest. A new campaigning group, the Forest Fund, organised petitions, lobbied MPs and held public meetings to keep the “Epping Forest Question” alive. The Fund’s annual meetings, often held in Shoreditch Town Hall, “the finest public building east of Temple Bar” were opportunities to highlight the campaign locally.

Local radicals continued to play a key role. In particular, Shoreditch vestrymen (forerunners of local councillors) were prominent vocally at meetings and in organising petitions. They helped create a groundswell of protest which could not be ignored. One local politician who did so, the Tower Hamlets MP Acton Ayrton, was heavily defeated in the 1874 General Election, blamed for his inaction over Epping Forest.

Finally in 1878, the last of the Epping Forest Acts was passed and it was revolutionary. It was the first legal declaration of the right of the public at large to use an open space for leisure. This had implications not just for Epping Forest but for all threatened open spaces across the country. It is hard to argue with the conclusion of the great ecologist and historian Oliver Rackham that “the modern conservation movement began with the campaign for Epping Forest”.

Yet the role played by ordinary Londoners in this campaign has been forgotten or ignored by history. The focus has been on the efforts of elite campaigners to save open spaces such as Epping Forest, which tells only part of the story. It misses out the grass-roots activism of working class people whose protests played a decisive role in the defence of their green spaces.

The sheer number and determination of the crowd on Wanstead Flats one hundred and fifty years ago created a groundswell of protest that pressured government into challenging landowners’ rights to enclose land and exclude the public. This and other campaigns contributed significantly to what has become our modern-day “right to roam.” 

The story of one hundred and fifty years ago is also today’s story, as struggles for open spaces continue, all too often against the very public bodies who should be their guardians. Indeed a warning from history is contained in a leaflet issued by a successful 1946 campaign against an attempt to build housing on Wanstead Flats by a local council. “Once done” it said, “it can never be undone, and history will condemn the folly of those who allowed it to happen”.

Leytonstone c1870 (courtesy Walthamstow Vestry House Museum)

Poster for the 1871 demonstration (courtesy Newham Heritage Service)

From The Leisure Hour, 1860

City of London warning against enclosures (courtesy Newham Heritage Service)

Police on Wanstead Flats, July 1871 (courtesy Essex Field Club)

Poster warning against fence destruction, July 1871 (courtesy Essex Field Club)

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