This page was updated in April 2022
This guide was originally written by the No Expressway Group, based in Horton-cum-Studley, Oxford
Many organisations and groups campaigned against various aspects of the Oxford-Cambridge expressway until it was finally cancelled in 2021. Below is a by-no-means exhaustive list of the major players involved in that initial campaign, given in more or less chronological order of their origins, or of interest in the expressway by already existing groups, such as CPRE, the Wildlife Trusts etc. The Stop the Arc Group is one of very few Arc-specific groups that continued after the demise of the Expressway.
Expressway Action Group, EAG.
Peter Rutt of Cuddesdon became aware of the expressway threat long before most of us, and started the EAG in late 2017, originally focused to fight against the expressway in Corridor A only.
EAG was against any new expressway, and instead promoted the use of existing roads for the expressway, i.e. the A34 around the West of Oxford City - what others called the ‘least worst’ option of using existing roads wherever possible.
EAG spread awareness of the expressway threat through its website, and through talks at village meetings, claiming a membership of 30 - 40 villages, mostly in the southern part of the expressway corridor in Oxfordshire.
EAG was recognised by Highways England (HE) as an official Stakeholder (a list of interested parties, businesses, Local Enterprise partnerships, bus companies and potential investors in the expressway - including British/American Tobacco!). Relatively early in Highways England planning, only a small group of registered stakeholders were invited to periodic Highways England presentations on the expressway.
Apart from the companies, investors etc. on Highways England's stakeholder list, you will also find CPRE, FoE, BBOWT, the Ramblers' Club etc., and these, too, were invited to the periodic Highways England meetings.
Later on, Highways England allowed Parish Councils and even individuals to register as stakeholders (meaning they would automatically be informed of progress), but no further meetings were held, or presentations given.
Highways England’s dedicated web-page for all expressway documents can be found here
Its email address is OxfordtoCambridgeExpressway@highwaysengland.co.uk
The EAG website was last updated before the 2019 General Election.
Campaign to Protect Rural England, CPRE
CPRE campaigns against un-necessary development of the countryside and is a strong critic of inflated housing targets. Its useful analysis of Objectively Assessed Needs (a standard method for predicting the number of houses each Local Authority should provide) can be found here.
The official CPRE position was given in a January 2019 press release that sets this out and argues for wide-scale public consultation on the growth and expressway proposals.
Early in 2018, CPRE produced a simple map showing possible routes of the expressway around Oxford. This map was published in the Four Parishes Newsletter (covering Beckley, Forest Hill, Horton-cum-Studley and Stanton St John) in early 2018. It was the first time we in Horton-cum-Studley became aware of the expressway threat and led very quickly to the foundation of the Horton-cum-Studley Expressway Group (later renamed the No Expressway Group (NEG) and later still - with many new additions - the Stop the Arc Group).
CPRE continues to campaign against all the excesses of proposed Ox-Cam Arc developments and has a dedicated ‘Challenge the Arc’ website here.
Need not Greed Oxon, NNGO: Planning for Real Need not Spectacular Greed in Oxfordshire
As its name suggests, this group, chaired by Peter Jay and currently run out of the CPRE offices in Watlington, focuses only on Oxfordshire. It is a strong critic of what is happening to housing in Oxfordshire, and campaigns for more social housing. It produced an excellent list of questions to ask of Councillors for the 2021 Local Elections in Oxon. You can find them here.
Save Otmoor
This campaign was started by Beckley villagers around about the same time as the no Expressway Group. It produced an excellent website at a very early stage, and the ‘Save Otmoor’ petition that managed to get 10,000 signatures within the space of about 6 months or so.
The website had some excellent and charming Save Otmoor pictures done by the junior school children of Beckley School, and some beautiful landscape and wildlife videos made by Steve de Vere in 2018. Sadly it is no longer available.
No Expressway Group, NEG, formerly known as the Horton-cum-Studley Expressway Group (HcSEG)
Peter Rutt of EAG and Michael Tyce (CPRE Trustee) gave a talk in Horton-cum-Studley (Oxon) in March 2018 and, very soon afterwards, we established the HcSEG. You can read about our early activities by clicking the links at the top of this page.
Our website explains the philosophy of our campaign and the archive gives most detail of our early activities. This includes YouTube clips of two major events in 2018:
The extension of our campaign all the way along the Arc in 2019 led to our day in Westminster in February 2020 when we presented a petition to 10 Downing Street and held a drop-in event in Portcullis House, to which all MPs and many aides were invited. You can see a short video of our day in London here (the first video on this webpage).
On the same webpage you can see our Expressway Stories - short videos of the environments that are threatened by proposed Arc development. The first concerns the beautiful wetlands of Otmoor, the second is based on a working farm of one of our supporters in Chilton, Bucks. Surveys carried out on this farm revealed a rich variety of birds, including a number on the Red List of endangered species. At least some of these were probably nesting on the farm and in its vicinity, showing that farmland is not the wildlife ‘desert’ that some professionals believe it to be. The third Expressway Story concerns Wotton House at Wotton Underwood in Buckinghamshire and its Capability Brown landscaped gardens that were rescued from many decades of neglect by its present owner David Gladstone and his estate manager Michael Harrison. Fine estates such as this are threatened by developments such as HS2, the Ox-Cam Expressway or similar major infrastructural projects.
During the expressway campaign we put up roadside posters first across greater Otmoor, then across a much wider area, into Buckinghamshire (usually on request of the Local Parish Councils). We leafletted in affected areas, took our expressway pagoda (information tent) to a number of local village fetes and gave many talks in village halls to make local people aware of the Ox-Cam Arc plans. Few knew the details of these and all were horrified by the scale of what is proposed. Several local NEG groups sprang up as a result of these meetings and we finally had a ‘Stronger Together’ team working across the Arc from Oxford to Milton Keynes.
We like to think that our activities plus those of many others, including Save Otmoor (above), caused a change in the original Corridor B to one that in Highways England’s 2018 Corridor Assessment Report excluded greater Otmoor (the area within the M40 loop around Oxford City). Raising awareness during 2019 may also have contributed to the official ‘pausing’ of the expressway in March 2020. We know our campaign did make a difference because general public opposition to the expressway, especially at its western end, was acknowledged by both the Chair and a member of the National Infrastructure Commission.
After the expressway was officially cancelled in 2021 the campaign re-grouped and re-oriented itself to the wider issues of Ox-Cam Arc development. A poll of our supporters chose the new name of the Stop the Arc Group for our continuing campaign.
You can get in touch via our Contact page. Signing up for the Newsletter is a great way to stay in touch and you will then be the first to hear about recent developments.
The Stop the Arc Group became a Community Benefit Society (Reg. No. 8806) in 2022 and you can read more about this and how to become a member on our ‘About Us’ webpage here.
No Expressway Alliance, NEA
This was an alliance of anti-expressway individuals and groups, under the umbrella of the local Friends of the Earth group. NEA aimed to catalyse the activities of local groups across the whole Oxford-Cambridge Arc, with the combined aim of cancelling the expressway and promoting East West Rail (EWR) as the alternative, more effective and less polluting form of public transport. The group was officially launched late in 2018, and included many different single-interest groups from Oxford city concerned about global warming, re-cycling, water shortages, transport policy etc. etc. Extracting a common expressway theme, and aims to which all NEA members could subscribe, was initially tricky.
Friends of the Earth have an excellent record in campaigning against environmentally damaging projects such as the expressway. We have to thank FoE for its success, more than 40 years ago, at preventing the M40 from running right through Otmoor. As a result, the M40 was diverted to run around the outside of what we now call ‘greater Otmoor’, an area that includes the RSPB Reserve, several SSSIs and Ancient Woodlands including Bernwood Forest. Many of these areas were declared SSSIs, or made into Reserves, after this M40 decision, emphasising that even today we cannot assume that all precious wildlife areas are sufficiently recognised and protected.
After the cancellation of the expressway in 2021 NEA merged with the No Expressway Group and together they became the Stop the Arc Group.
North Otmoor No Expressway, NONE
This was started by Terry Pollard of Charlton-on-Otmoor Parish Council. Terry also ran the NEA Campaigns sub-committee. NONE was the first Oxon group to make an effort to contact villages over the Oxon border into Bucks and invited several to very well-attended meetings in Charlton in 2018 and 2019. NONE as part of the NEA merged with the No Expressway Group in 2021.
Buckinghamshire Expressway Action Group, BEAG
BEAG was originally a member of the NEA but set up a separate organisation to cover all the issues from a Buckinghamshire perspective. After the cancellation of the Expressway, BEAG became the Buckinghamshire Environment Action Group.
Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust, BBOWT, and The Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, BCNWT
Wildlife Trusts are very concerned about the loss of habitats the Ox-Cam Arc plans involve. They highlight these disadvantages but seem reluctant to come out against Ox-Cam Arc plans altogether, preferring to be ‘inside the tent’ trying to influence decisions, rather than outside it.
The No Expressway Group (at that time known as HcSEG) first realised that Highways England was in contravention of the Strategic Environment Assessment (SEA) regulations (and the Aarhus Convention) to which the UK Govt is a signatory and obtained some pro bono advice from FTB Chambers via Emma Mortlake of the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF). Their solicitor, Merrow Golden, agreed with our initial assessment and wrote to Highways England challenging this lack of an SEA. Highways England brushed this aside but ELF/FTB persevered. We passed on all of this information and legal contacts to BBOWT (because it began to look to us that pursuing this on our own would be very expensive) and they took up launching a (crowd-funded) Judicial Review challenge of Highways England's handling of expressway plans. A February 2019 High Court decision agreed with the Judicial Review challenge but, in July 2019, the High Court ruled against BBOWT, on the grounds that no definite decison had yet been taken on either the corridor or route. This meant that the Government could press ahead with the expressway scheme without carrying out any Strategic Environmental Assessment of the likely environmental damage the expressway would cause. BBOWT stated….
“BBOWT challenged the government for its failure to conduct a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and Habitats Regulation Assessment (HRA) – requirements under European law – before it chose a preferred corridor for the Expressway. This failure excluded key stakeholders, including expert ecologists, from the decision-making process, and the government chose the corridor that evidence shows to be the worst option for wildlife.”
A press article about the High Court judgement can be found here, and the judgement itself here