Remembering the radical anti-nuclear Greenham Women’s Peace Camp

Coming of age in the shadow of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Janine Wiedel remembers the ​“duck and cover drills” of her childhood years, where students hid under school desks, head in hands, practicing quiet surrender to nuclear Armageddon. 

By the ​’80s, Wiedel was living and working as a photographer, documenting working-class life in the UK. With Ronald Reagan in the White House, Cold War tensions reached a fevered pitch. Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher, Reagan’s ​“comrade-in-arms”, welcomed the NATO bequest of 96 US-manufactured, nuclear ​“cruise missiles”, which were to begin arriving at RAF Greenham Common in 1983. 

As NATO and the USSR ran up their arsenals, a grassroots resistance movement sprouted in Greenham, in the English county of Berkshire, taking the shape of a ​“women’s only” peace camp in 1982. Despite evictions, fences, and spies organised to bring them down, the resistance stayed the course until the American forces packed up their weapons and went home following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

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Their struggle made headlines, with even the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev paying homage to the ​‘Greenham women and the peace movement of Europe’ at the signing of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But those initial media reports, Wiedel remembers, were ultimately disparaging of the women, so she decided to visit the camp for herself in 1983. 

“I was fascinated by the community that had evolved as a result of it being ​‘all women’ – there were no leaders,” Wiedel says. ​“The women built homes out of wood they collected, and they lit and tended the fires. They attended and spoke at conferences. They represented themselves in court when they were arrested. Everyone had an equal voice. Confidence grew. The actions were spontaneous and flexible; the authorities and police never knew what they would do next.” 

The lesson became clear: don’t stop until the job is done. Now, Wiedel revisits this historic chapter of protest history with Life at the Fence: Greenham Women’s Peace Camp 1983 – 84 (Image & Reality). Through transportive imagery and interviews conducted at the time, the book brings together Wiedel’s masterful reportage as she takes us through the camps, which were built along the nine-mile perimeter of the RAF base, while paratroopers perched in lookout towers, binoculars in hand. Against the backdrop of gnarly barbed wire, the women sorted themselves out among different camp sites, each named for a different colour of the rainbow. It was a world of striking contrasts. 

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Drawn to women who had given up everything to live in primitive, volatile conditions, Wiedel listened to the women, recording their testimonies, songs, and remembrances which she weaves alongside documentary, portraits, landscape, still life, and reportage of non-violent direct actions. 

“At the time, as a ​‘women only’ protest, it was subjected to every form of abuse and ridicule by the media,” says Wiedel. ​“Its presence at the base also became an embarrassment to the Thatcher government. The women, however, managed to remain at the base for 19 years. Everyone I spoke with said it had transformed their lives.”

Life at the Fence: Greenham Women’s Peace Camp 1983 – 84 by Janine Wiedel is published by Image & Reality.

Miss Rosen is a free­lance arts and pho­tog­ra­phy writer, fol­low her on X.

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