Nine Miles
Two Winters of Anti-Road Protest
Jim Hindle

Paperback:  436 pages including 16 pages of colour photos
ISBN-10: -
ISBN-13: 9780955273711

Price: £12.00 within UK

( including postage, packaging and paypal charges )

  In Stock

Nine Miles portrays the fight against the Newbury bypass and other road protests of the British Isles in the mid nineteen nineties.  It was a fight characterised by extreme cold, fire and community, cider, drugs and living simply in the woods.  It was a fight to preserve our natural inheritance, to make the case for sustainable transport in the face of powerful vested interests and in a wider sense, to stand up for the earth herself at a time when our lifestyles were often grossly out of balance with the natural order of things.  Ten years on, that fight has lost none of its urgency. 

“Extraordinary.” – John Vidal, The Guardian.

“Told with candid humanity and a warm clarity that captures the brilliance, the lunacy, the nobility and the haphazardness of the campaigns.” – Merrick Godhaven, author of
Battle for the Trees.

“Deeply moving… managed to catapult me straight back into the midst of the passion, chaos and turmoil.” – Rebecca Lush Blum, founder of Roadblock.

“Beautifully written and wonderfully honest.” – Professor Alastair McIntosh, author of
Soil and Soul and Love and Revolution.

“Enormously historically important.  A cultural landmark.” – The Nail poetry magazine.

Now in it’s second edition, with 16 pages of colour photographs.

To read extracts from the book see the Nine Miles Website.

Reviews

'Nine Miles is an account of Jim Hindle's time on the anti-Newbury bypass campaign, and other protests, in the mid nineties. It's an unashamedly romantic piece of writing, very much rooted in the writer's personal experience, which nevertheless touches on the political and cultural life of that time.

A few books have touched on the Newbury experience, most notably Merrick Godhaven's Battle for the Trees and Kate Evan's Copse. Jim's book has the same up-close-and-personal feel of Merrick's book, while also covering much of the wider ground of Copse: Solsbury Hill, Fairmile, Stanworth Valley, and the fight against the Criminal Justice Bill. As such, it has an epic quality about it. Jim was only a teenager when it was taking place, so it's a rite of passage as well.

The book starts "I don't know how long I'd been asleep for, but when I woke up, I was fifty foot up in an oak." immediately establishing dreams as a key theme. Jim is waking from a dream, the dream of consumerism, into a world more rooted in physical reality, but alive with myth and mystery: "I dreamt of the places I camped: places of starlight and willows and women playing funny looking instruments in meadows in the moon." Barely a page goes by without Jim getting tangled up in the mystery of the woods.

The writing is excellent throughout; well paced, beautifully phrased, and betraying a keen sense of the theatrics of prose. Jim gives us flashbacks, dreams of foreboding, cliff hangers, the works. His descriptions of nature are often stunning: "Most of the leaves ... were rotten and every shade of brown, red and mottled yellow, a damp montage of creeping deterioration." but when called upon to tighten up and describe the more urgent moments, he is remarkably unfussy and ecominical: "The police were pushing the picket fence back and the people on the other side were trying to stop them. A middle aged woman fell over and got trapped between the fence and the trunk of the tree I was in. She was being crushed."

For those that took part in the Newbury bypass campaign, and in the thriving counter-culture that it was part of, many of the cultural signposts of Jim's life will be very familiar, such as 'skipping' (diving in skips to extract out-of-date food), the 'fluffy' versus 'spikey' debate, and what turns 'a lunch out' into an 'energy vampire'. These might be old hat to the initiated, but Jim knows that his book will be around a lot longer than current alternative orthodoxies. Sometimes Jim's serious tone gets a bit much, but there are occasional moments of deapan understatement, such as when the sheriff's climbers at Stanworth realise the full extent of the job before them: " 'Oh my God' one of them said. They didn't want any tea."

Jim's writing has a certain dignity, and as such he doesn't dwell on drug taking, sex (unlike Merrick's Battle for the Trees), or his own brief spiral into mental breakdown. His is a Romantic world, and this is an unrepentantly Romantic book. It's also a book which, against the odds, delivers a happy ending, of sorts.

Nine Miles cuts right into the reader's heart, leaving a bittersweet taste for what is lost, and what is still to be fought for. The writing is accomplsihed and richly soaked with insight. Most of all, its unflinching view into the world of Non-Violent Direct Action is enormously historically important. A personal and cultural landmark."

- Dave Todd, The Nail poetry magazine. 

'This book is a beautifully written and wonderfully honest testimony to the anti-roads protests in which so many of us participated during the 1990's. It took me back to those days, but also reminded me how much we carry forward now that climate change means that even the most industry-corrupted sceptics can no longer deny that our critique of 'the great car culture' was spot on. I remember a protest song that went. 'What did you do in the eco-wars, Daddy?' Read this book - it tells you.'

- Professor Alastair McIntosh, author of Soil and Soul and Love and Revolution.

"Jim tells his story of the protest against the Newbury Bypass and other road schemes in a deeply moving way that perfectly captures the idealism and chaos of this time. The campaign against the infamous Newbury Bypass was enormous, spreading over the nine miles of the book's title, 30+ protest camps, 1000+ arrests, and many thousands pf people's involvement. None of us who were there will ever know the full extent of the heroic input of all those who participated, and I was enchanted to read Jim's perspective from Middle Oak. He managed to catapault me straight back into the midst of the passion, chaos and turmoil. He is a very brave soul for entering back into that painful territory to chronicle what happened to him there."

- Rebecca Lush Blum, founder of Roadblock.