Combe Haven

18 February 2014Feature

Prosecution suffers numerous defeats in Combe Haven trials




Grannies Are In Action (GAIA) set up a ‘car wash’ in the
floodwaters of Combe Haven, East Sussex, on 12 January.
Photo: Marta Lefler

Over half the charges against Combe Haven Defenders (CHD) anti-roads protesters have been dropped or abandoned, or have resulted in not guilty verdicts, in the four trials so far concluded. At the time of going to press two trials were still underway, continuing into early February.

CHD, an East Sussex anti…

8 March 2013News

Combe Haven Defenders, the Hastings anti-roads group trying to stop the building of the Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (see PN 2554), have moved their focus from the actual site of the road-building (in East Sussex) to a demand for transparency from the department for transport (in London).

The DfT were forced by a freedom of information request to release their (unenthusiastic) recommendations on the Link Road, but the document was redacted, with sections blacked…

4 February 2013Feature

PN’s Gabriel Carlyle reports on the sometimes shambolic, always peaceful and often heroic resistance to the tree-felling in Combe Haven for the Hastings-Bexhill Link Road, and the lessons learned.

‘I think we may be about to get steamrollered.’

Fellow activist Emily Johns and I had just returned from a packed public meeting in Crowhurst, the small village northwest of Hastings that would be severely affected by the planned Bexhill-Hastings Link Road (BHLR). In the final evaluation the participants had been near-unanimous in saying how energised they felt by the meeting. One man even said that he’d never felt more optimistic about our prospects for stopping the road.

16 October 2012Feature

One of Britain's most effective environmentalists explains how the government's roads programme could be stopped in its tracks at the very beginning.

Road building is back on the national agenda. Courtesy of the chancellor, George Osborne. It had been assumed that major new roads were a thing of the past, killed off by the 'anti-roads' protests of the 1990s. But, in an attempt to pull the country out of recession, the treasury has been looking to invest in infrastructure projects, including new roads.

The first major scheme to come on-stream could be the £100 million, 5.6 km Bexhill to Hastings Link Road. It would cut straight…