About the speech
As part of the 2025 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Epping Forest Heritage Trust, there is a panel discussion on Campaigning to protect Epping Forest over the years, with following panels:
- Mark Gorman, EFHT Member, Author, Saving the People’s Forest
- Sue McKinley, EFHT Member, campaigner against roadbuilding in the 1970s – M16/M25
- Ishmael Tickly, EFHT Policy and Campaigns Manager
- Noreen Niazi, EFHT Community Engagement Lead
Below is Mark’s full speech on Saving People’s Forest in the 1860-1870s.
The full speech by Mark Gorman, October 2025.
The 2020s is a decade of significant anniversaries for Epping Forest. We are marking 150 years since the great battle to save the forest from enclosure and development. One of those key moments occurred almost exactly 150 years to the day – on the 14th October 1875 the Lord Mayor of London & 600 guests journeyed out to Fairmead house near High Beach for what the newspapers described as a “dejeuner”.
They were there rather belatedly to celebrate the legal judgement of December 1874, in the case brought by the City of London corporation against the Manorial Lords of Epping Forest, challenging their right to fence off large parts of their forest manors. The judgement decisively ruled in favour of the City of London, opening the way to their eventual acquisition of 5000 acres of Epping Forest and to the Epping Forest Act of 1878.
At the lunch event, despite a day of pouring rain, many speeches were made & toasts drunk to various individuals & groups who had played a role in the action to save the forest. MPs & lawyers, & respectable campaigning groups like the Commons Preservation Society (CPS) as well as the City of London corporation itself were praised effusively.
However one group conspicuously absent – both from the lunch table & the speeches – were the ordinary people of London. In fact they were not quite absent that day, as along the route to High Beach hundreds had gathered to watch the procession, many wearing the colours of an east London pressure group which played a key role in saving the forest, the Forest Fund.
This reflects the reality that many voices were raised to save Epping Forest from development in the 1860s & 70s.
- MPs who kept pressure on reluctant, even hostile administrations, opposing enclosure bills & promoting legislation to protect Epping Forest
- Campaigning groups – the CPS, the Forest Gate-based Forest Fund & the radical Commons Protection League
- And the City of London Corporation itself, whose dramatic intervention from 1871 was decisive in the rescue of Epping Forest.
Underpinning all this legislative & judicial action were the voices and actions of ordinary Londoners, who over centuries had been coming to Epping Forest in their thousands.
For them Epping Forest was “the people’s forest”, and a watershed moment in the campaign to save this much-loved open space was the summer of 1871. In June of that year a large section of Wanstead Flats was fenced off on the orders of Lord Cowley, Lord of the Manor of Wanstead. This seemed to signal enclosure of the whole southern forest and prompted a huge upsurge of protest among east Londoners. Tumultuous public meetings culminated in the largest political demonstration ever seen in Epping Forest when thousands gathered on Wanstead Flats to save the forest.
Despite pleas for calm from the gentleman leaders & the presence of 600 police, the crowd smashed the hated fences that day, prompting the press to unite in condemning the violence, and declare that it had seriously weakened the campaigners’ cause. Yet the demonstration brought two outcomes which profoundly affected the struggle for the forest.
One was that within a month the government rushed through a much-delayed Epping Forest Act, the first of the series through the 1870s. Secondly, a week after the demonstration the Forest Fund was founded in Forest Gate. The Fund became a hugely effective campaigning group in east London, holding public meetings, developing publicity (with vans in the streets and forest carrying the Fund’s slogan “Save the Forest”) getting local authorities to gather petitions to parliament & lobbying during elections in favour of candidates who would stand up for Epping Forest.
Their greatest success was in the 1874 election in Tower Hamlets. In a sensational result Acton Ayrton, the minister in Gladstone’s government held responsible for the supine policy in defence of Epping Forest, was heavily defeated by the Conservative candidate, who had campaigned on a platform of saving the forest.
So elite campaigners both appealed to & drew on a deep commitment to open-space preservation among a wide cross-section of Londoners. Campaigners ranging from the CPS to the City of London quickly understood the power of publicity & the advantage to be had from demonstrating popular support. The East London Observer noted that the City corporation had a dual motivation in saving the forest. ‘It was a great act…A suspicion may have flitted across the mind that there was some selfish motive…coming forth in a crisis as the defenders of threatened public rights?’
Campaigning in parliament & legal action in the courts played a key role in the rescue of Epping Forest. But so too did popular action at key moments, forcing the government’s hand and creating the conditions for the successful outcome in 1878.
Reviewing the tumultuous summer of 1871, an editorial in a newspaper of the time pointed to the combined effect of the public anger vented in the Wanstead Flats demonstration and the intervention of the City of London in the government to pass the first Epping Forest Act to begin protecting the forest. As the editorial wryly commented, “In this queer island [government] always requires to be kicked into doing anything useful”.
Mark Gorman, October 2025.
Note:
Mark has previously been a guest blogger and shared a brief overview of his book: Saving the people’s forest: open spaces, enclosure and popular protest in mid-Victorian London. To read the blog, please visit: Saving People’s Forest – Epping Forest Heritage Trust