Anon 3

There was a lot of opposition locally to the traveller sites so like support for the eviction, so there was quite a lot of like hostile – it was a very hostile environment what we were doing was sort of building barricades and then also like helping with like court so we were – there was a whole load of people who were doing the court stuff; people who’d been involved long term, and the traveller community, they were involved in that and then yeh, raising awareness and there was kind of protests in town, Basildon umm, and I don’t know whether it was a week before or a couple of days before, but there’d been a…sort of false alarm so we had like built all these barricades…so some people had moved their caravans out, quite a few families had moved out um, onto the next door plot umm, so down, so everyone was very squashed in that um, like the other side that did have planning permission.

Yea and I think there was a false eviction and we all got prepared and people were locked on and stuff um, and but yea then they didn’t come.

There’d been….., that week –  just trying to remember – I can’t remember the time scales, but you can look it up on line because there’s like information about the court case and stuff but they’d um – yea, they’d ruled that the judge has had ruled that um evict, the evict, the eviction wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be disproportionate so yeh an eviction was kind of allowed to happen – after there’d been an injunction, and there’d been all these other things to stop it.

Um what happened is that like really early in the morning, the police came round the back, though not the way that the – we had sort of barricades round the back as well but not so that they came sort of like through the field umm knocked down some of those barricades and the police came in and tasered some people umm cause then the alarm was sort of called and people rushed over to sort of form a human barricade to stop them from coming in, so once the alarm was called , those of us who were gonna be locked on all sort of went to our like the places (sigh) that we’d built um…so it’s, it’s a way of slowing down like bailiffs or police from from getting through somewhere or or or being able to remove you easily so you can cause an obstruction for longer, there are lots of different ways of doing it but like you can get a sort of tube, metal tube and put a ur um a gert padlock, a lock inside that that you lock your wrist to um and then you’re so you’re inside this, you can be like one in one side and one in the other umm and then you cover that so you can’t access that lock, someone can’t just access that lock and undo it and then you cover that, well you don’t have to, but we covered that with lots and lots of concrete.

Recorded 1010.2018 by Carmen Talbot

Transcribed by Carolyn Purslow.