Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp

Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was a peace camp established to protest at nuclear weapons being sited at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. The camp began in September 1981 after a Welsh group, Women for Life on Earth, arrived at Greenham to protest against the decision of the British government to allow cruise missiles to be based there. The first blockade of the base occurred in May 1982 with 250 women protesting, during which 34 arrests were made. The camp was active for 19 years and disbanded in 2000.

The first instance of the Greenham Common Peace Camp came about when, on September 1981, 36 women chained themselves to the base fence in protest against nuclear weapons. On 29 September 1982, the women were evicted by Newbury District Council but set up a new camp nearby within days. In December 1982, 30,000 women responded to a chain letter sent out and joined hands around the base at the Embrace the Base event.

The camp became well-known when on 1 April 1983, about 70,000 protesters formed a 14-mile (23 km) human chain from Greenham to Aldermaston and the ordnance factory at Burghfield. The media attention surrounding the camp "prompted the creation of other peace camps at more than a dozen sites in Britain and elsewhere in Europe". Another encircling of the base occurred in December 1983, with 50,000 women attending. Sections of the fence were cut and there were hundreds of arrests.

On 4 April 1984, the women were again evicted from the Common; again, by nightfall many had returned to reform the camp. In January 1987, although Parliament had been told that there were no longer any women at Greenham, small groups of women cut down parts of the perimeter fence at Greenham Common every night for a week.

The camp consisted of nine smaller camps at various gates around the base. The first was called Yellow Gate and others included Blue Gate with its New Age focus, Violet Gate with a religious focus, and Green Gate, which was women-only and did not accept male visitors.

The last missiles left the camp in 1991 as a result of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, but the camp remained in place until 2000, after protesters won the right to house a memorial on the site. Although the missiles had been removed from the base, the camp was continued as part of the protest against the forthcoming UK Trident programme. The last four protesters to leave the site included Sarah Hipperson, who had been part of the camp protest for a total of nineteen years.

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