Battle of Britain’s ‘Nimbies’: Celebrities Fight Projects

A new word has been introduced this summer into the lexicon of England’s “chattering class”--those who consider themselves opinion makers in media and literary circles.

It is “Nimby,” whose practitioners are Nimbies and live in a broad area across southern England called Nimbyshire. As in the United States, Nimby is an acronym for “Not in My Back Yard.”

It generally refers to celebrity campaigners for liberal causes who have moved to the country and howl in anguish when other people want to share in the rural charm.

And it pits them, under the guise of protecting the environment, against those who would build new roads to relieve the horrendous traffic jams in rustic villages.

The Nimbies’ detractors gleefully charge them with hypocrisy--in Britain, about the worst sin of all.

The issue caught the public eye this summer when protesters objected to a four-lane bypass around Bath that would, they said, destroy scenic countryside. A leading demonstrator was Bel Mooney, a well-known writer, journalist and television personality who is married to Jonathan Dimbleby, a leading anchorman for TV documentaries.

Mooney camped out in a yurt, began fasting, made friends with some transients and reaped acres of space in the newspapers. She climbed a tree and promised not to come down--for a day or two.

But even as she posed for photographers, critics carped that she and her husband are actually based in London and make frequent use of the M-4, the freeway that links the capital with the Bath and Bristol area.

Where, they asked, had she been when that superhighway necessarily cut through swaths of Berkshire, Wiltshire and Avon to speed city dwellers to the countryside on weekends?

Mooney tired of camping out and repaired to her comfortable country estate in Upper Swainswick, near Bath. Some transients, who were evicted from their campsite, asked if they could pitch tents in a corner of her spacious fields. She said no, explaining later that the land was unsuitable for campers.

Next, Jilly Cooper, a well-known author of glitzy novels, organized a protest against a new 83-home development in her beloved Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds.

“Please, please, please consider other measures,” she pleaded with local council members. “I do love it passionately and feel it should not be ruined by developers in this way.”

The bubbly Cooper is supported by other residents, who have protested by erecting an Indian-style totem pole. Cooper said she would get other celebrities to join her in a “dance ‘round the totem pole” to prevent construction from going ahead.

Another plan, in the village of Turville in Buckinghamshire, to turn an empty school into a holiday location for London inner-city children has been opposed by Alistair Horne, an esteemed historian and biographer, and Lord Quinton, former head of Trinity College at Oxford University.

In the Spectator magazine, Jeremy Paxton, the abrasive anchorman for the “Newsnight” TV program, sharply criticized those objecting to the proposed use of the school.

“Inner-city children are the very thing the new residents of the villages of southern England are trying to escape,” he wrote. “For them, the countryside is some sort of Shangri-La, the inner cities some awful Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.”

Paxton complained that houses in the village “increasingly are occupied by the well-heeled, weekenders and the elderly. First, the school closes, then the village shop. The pub remains, but it is serving ersatz Thai chicken to permanently tanned people in immaculate ‘off-road’ vehicles which have never been off the road.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a well-known writer, countered in the Daily Telegraph: “It is not so much easy as inevitable to make fun of the massed ranks of Nimbyshire. Whether it is strictly fair to do so, I am not so sure. Nimby-baiting is itself now a licensed field sport.

“But aren’t we all Nimbies at heart? Surely we are--and can only be--humbugs and hypocrites when it comes to the ‘environment.’ None of us wants to live next to a power station or an airport or a sewage farm. Yet we all use electricity, we all travel by air and we all go to the lavatory. We are all Nimbies now--and quite right, too.”