The Big One 21-24 April - Climate and Nature Protests at Parliament Square, London - my trip from Settle

   Over 60,000 people attended the Biodiversity March on the Saturday.  More people attended the demonstrations on other days. Each of us will have our own story.

    I have now found four people who went down from the Settle area and two people I know who went from Skipton (along with several more from Skipton who I don't know) and will include notes and links to stories of three of these at the end

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   I considered going to London to the first two days (21, 22 April) of the Climate and Nature Protests coordinated by Extinction Rebellion  (21-24 April).  

   I have been to demonstrations planned by other organisations before before, including Birmingham (on Debt cancellation) and Edinburgh (Make Poverty History 2005 with 225,000 people). The press had given these previous events little publicity,  in spite of them being attended by tens /100s of thousands of people. The Edinburgh event was dwarfed by a Pop concert somewhere the same day. Would the press take any notice this time? This London event was scheduled to be peaceful, no law breaking.  

   The first day involved a service at St John's Church Waterloo, organised by a good number of church groups.

   The Second day was a march for Nature. This day was also Earth Day (22 April).

   In the end, I took the train down on the Thursday evening (carrying the poles to be used by the Green Christian banner) and stayed at the excellent St Pancras Youth Hostel just outside Kings Cross Station.

   On the Friday morning the service organised at St John's Church Waterloo attracted over 1000 people. Then we marched / pilgrimaged - via Shell House  and over Westminster Bridge to Parliament Square, accompanied by the Salvation Army Band. Our number grew to 1400 by the time we were on the bridge.

   At Shell House we (fronted by former Archbishop John Sentamu) attempted to give the Director of Shell a letter asking for discussion, but Shell would not receive the letter.

   At Parliament Square we joined tens of thousands of people already gathered there - with activities and stalls from just about every environment organisation you can think of. (Maybe 30,000 people on the Friday and 60,000 on the Saturday).  

   Saturday was the Biodiversity march.

 

   I hope to add pictures shortly

   You can read the Green Christian report of events here.  Here are below are mentions of people I know who attended - I hope to write more later.

   Sarah Wiltshire and her partner went down for one day by train and picketed at a government department office.

   Margery and Heinz Toller were there all four days and campaigned Badgers against Bombs on the biodiversity day.  They went with the Iona Community.  Margery wrote:

   "Every major government department was picketed with messages specific to their areas of responsibility for adding to greenhouse gas emissions and to reducing them. This gave a very clear picture of how intersectional and indivisible the issues in this crisis are. "

   There is an article in the Craven Herald this week of 18 May. written by Alex Johnston-Seymour, musician from Skipton : He gives numbers as: Fri (30,000) Sat (50,000) Sun (wet marathon day) ( 20,000) , Monday (15,000). He was involved in the organising of the whole event so it was interesting to read his story.