On a summer’s day in a park near station, a string quartet is playing Mozart as an appreciative handful of ‘rebels’ rest in the shade. A mother and her toddler weave through an encampment of tents that have just been erected, picking up litter. Everyone is relaxed and smiling in the soporific heat – but there is also a sense of excitement in the air.
Not since 1817, when the Duke of Wellington first planted a polished leather boot on Waterloo Bridge, has SE1 been quite so fashionable. But for one week only, this dry little park is home to the colourful climate change activist group Extinction Rebellion and their festival-like base for the week’s action. Founded a year ago in October 2018, Extinction Rebellion’s rise – politically and socially – has been extraordinary.
Their red-robed representatives appear everywhere, from to Stella McCartney’s latest ad campaign; their coffers are filled by scions of the Getty and Kennedy families, their paraphernalia collected by the V&A. Hannah Rothschild’s cousin is an active member of XR (for short); so too is Tamsin Omond, the granddaughter of a baronet, who spoke in July about the fast- industry at Port Eliot Festival. And Greta Thunberg, who chose for her companion Pierre Casiraghi ( ’s son) to sail across the Atlantic to attend the UN climate summit in on 23 September.
Even is in on the act in his own way, delivering a speech, barefoot, at the luxurious Verdura resort in Sicily this summer on the effects of clim.
