Will Hammersmith eco-village inspire new generation of Diggers?

From The Guardian:

The spirit of the Diggers has been invoked once more with plans to seize land in Hammersmith next week in order to create an eco-village.

The Diggers were a group of 17th-century English radicals led by Gerard Winstanley, who has been referred to as the father of both communism and anarchism. Winstanley realised that one-third of England's land was barren waste, which the landowners would not permit the poor to cultivate. He declared:

... if the waste land of England were manured by her children it would become in a few years the best, the strongest and flourishing land in the world.

So on 1 April, 1649, Winstanley and his followers began to dig over a patch of common land in St George's Hill in Walton-upon-Thames. They were soon chucked off, and then chucked off the next spot they tried out. Winstanley gave up in the end, and became a Quaker instead. But the idea had taken root, and has never been killed off since.

The action on Saturday is the latest incarnation of this long-running movement. After the second world war we had ex-servicemen taking over land because of a housing shortage. In the 1970s, the squatter movement used empty houses for the homeless and poor. In the 90s, gardening protest camps flowered at Twyford Downs, the M11 extension, Newbury.

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