HILL FOUGHT

Last Wednesday (26th August), Hilaire Purbrick was evicted from his second camp on a site at the Whitehawk Hill allotments in Brighton. The week before the council had got an injunction against Hilaire, and he was told to be off the site by midnight last Tuesday. On Wednesday morning they gave him three hours to gather his belongings before bailiffs and contractors with diggers trashed the encampment and gardens.

Hilaire had been on this current site for six weeks, after a similar eviction of his camp on another part of the allotment site, where he’d been working – and for the majority of the time living – since 1993. Having taken a group of allotments which were initially in disrepair and subject to flytipping and vandalism due to it being next to the poor estates of Whitehawk, Hilaire and friends went about the process of reinstating the fences, and eventually setting up a gardeners association to manage the allotments and help promote allotments and self-growing to the broader community. Hilaire began living on the site, to confront those who were flytipping and causing problems.

The council has increasingly stepped down harder against Hilaire, and an injunction was taken out against him in 2002, but after leaving the site for nearly a year, he returned and continued work with the eight allotments, including building a 15ft wide storage chamber 20ft under the ground. Because of this chamber, the eviction of the site this June turned into an international news story after media from as far as Russia came to write stories about the ‘Caveman Of Brighton’, who was evicted from his cave because it didn’t have a fire exit!

He told SchNEWS, “I could see that there was a proper job to be done here, healing the land – and if you want to heal it you have to get intimate with it. To be here you have to engage in the real things in life – real friendships, real work, and healing the land is real – it’s a subtle feeling of unity with the land and it’s something that brings you great joy. You’re sharing the land with magpies and badgers. I can’t think of a happier place that has been destroyed today. People would wonder over here, and immediately got what was going on. They would be lost in their imagination, and kids who might otherwise have been pestering would suddenly stop nagging and just start joining in.”

While some on the Hill support what he’s doing but don’t think people should be living there, Hilaire’s story represents both the broader struggle for those wanting to live a low-impact, off-the-grid life - and the difficulties of doing this in Britain, and the issue of autonomously managing a heritage site away from the clutches of government and institutions.

As he sat in his loaded-up van contemplating driving off from Whitehawk Hill, Hilaire told SchNEWS “This is gone, but all the knowledge that I’ve gained will come with me and will help build something better.”