My Prison Story for the New Yorker The London Orbital Motorway, or the M25, is a vast ring road that runs in a shaggy circle around the outer edges of the capital 🧵 - ThreadSky

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rogerhallam.com • 19 days ago

My Prison Story for the New Yorker

The London Orbital Motorway, or the M25, is a vast ring road that runs in a shaggy circle around the outer edges of the capital 🧵

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rogerhallam.com•19 days ago

If you live in the city, it’s the road you might take to the airport, or the suburbs, or the countryside, and it provides a kind of unofficial border to the Greater London Area.

rogerhallam.com•19 days ago

Also provided: lots of traffic. Every day, the road plays host to some two hundred thousand vehicles. It is sometimes jokingly referred to as “the nation’s largest car park.” Had you been cruising along the M25 in mid-November, 2022, you might have encountered a particularly stubborn delay.

rogerhallam.com•19 days ago

For four consecutive days, dozens of activists from the British environmental group Just Stop Oil climbed onto and occupied the gantries, or bridges, overlooking the highway, forcing the police to halt traffic. Drat!

rogerhallam.com•19 days ago

Perhaps understandably, people were upset. In the Mail Online, and elsewhere, they raged. “Just Stop Oil eco-mob face jail as 35 are arrested for holding motorists up for FIVE HOURS and ‘blocking an ambulance’ on the M25,” one headline read.

rogerhallam.com•19 days ago

The government issued a statement denouncing the action as “criminal activity.” In an emotional video filmed from one of the gantries, a young activist said that they were demanding that the U.K. stop issuing new oil and gas licenses.

rogerhallam.com•19 days ago

“I’m here because I don’t have a future,” she said. “And you might hate me for doing this, and you’re entitled to hate me, but I wish you would direct all that anger and hatred at our government.

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