Root and branch - The battle to save a city's trees

What started outasasmall protest escalatedintoa decade-long battle between Sheffield counciland hundreds of ordinary people, who decided totake radical action to save their neighbourhood trees

- Samira Shackle

LOOKING BACK NOW, IT IS HARD TO PINPOINT THE MOMENT WHEN THINGS GOT TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL. It might have been when council contractors teamed up with police for an operation that Nick Clegg – then the MP for Sheffi eld Hallam, now president of global affairs at Facebook – later described as “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia”. It might have been when the council received a letter from the environment minister, Michael Gove, demanding that it halt the scheme – and chose to ignore it. It might have been when South Yorkshire police had to pay out more than £2 4,000 ($29,000) for wrongful arrests that they had made to defend the council’s work. But by the time a public inquiry was commissioned in 2021, chaired by the former undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs at the UN, no one could dispute that something had gone horribly wrong in Sheffi eld.

It started with a reasonable proposition. Sheffi eld’s roads were in a bad state, and its pavements were wonky. To some locals, Sheffi eld had become known as “pothole city”. Residents wrote to their councillors to complain, and in 2012, after years of planning, the council launched a £1.2bn road improvement project called Streets Ahead. Its aim was to upgrade the city’s roads, pavements, street lights and bridges. The plan involved the mass removal of street trees, which were blamed for making pavements bumpy and cracking kerbstones.

The council did not anticipate any major objections. After all, the felled trees would be replaced with saplings. But in 2014, when residents realised the council was felling trees on an industrial scale, protests started to break out, which grew into a city-wide movement.