Introduction

The security preparations for the London 2012 Olympic Games not only involved ‘air security’ in the form of surface-to-air missiles stationed on the roof of an East London tower block; organisers also had to reckon with the possibility of protests within the Olympic Park itself. After all, there had been recent waves of social unrest and peaceful occupations in the capital, from student demonstrations via the August 2011 riots to Occupy LSX which had encamped outside St Paul's Cathedral that previous winter. In a bizarre twist, for the purpose of delivering a ‘safe and secure’ Games, Home Secretary Theresa May thus had ‘tents and camping equipment’ banned from Olympic venues. The police were advised to deal swiftly ‘with anyone who tried to flout the ban’ (Home Office, 2012). That tents and camping equipment were explicitly highlighted as potential tools for civil disobedience tells us something about the nature of protest post-Occupy.

The symbolic value of the ‘tent’ as signifier of some form of ‘radical protest desire’ is not however universal, the act of camping fulfilling a different organisational role in different instances. This chapter reflects on the tent becoming not only a signifier – a potential weapon of opposition to government policies and national event management in Britain – but a refrain. Whereas the ‘tent’ may have been a symbol of protest in Occupy and post-Occupy Britain, the ‘camp’ had played a more vital function in the cycle of struggle that had come before it. Focusing on the Camp for Climate Action in Britain (climate camp hereafter) this chapter argues that ‘camping’ exceeded its role as either movement repertoire or protest symbol, becoming a central movement refrain that ultimately constrained the possibility of a development in political praxis.

The climate camp was a UK-based environmental direct action network which staged large-scale protest camps and actions between 2006 and 2011. Unlike previous protest camps in the UK which had been defensive or reactive in nature, the climate camp consciously set out to choose the time and location of its activity based on its own political agenda in an attempt to break from a previous cycle of ‘summit hopping’. The climate camps set out to combine ‘high-impact activism with low-impact living’ alongside education on the root causes of climate change.