In mid-April 1996, I was finishing a degree in Human Geography at Middlesex University. I was asked by a friend to attend an “action” planning meeting for TLIO (The Land Is Ours) at the Battlebridge Ecology Center in King’s Cross, London. The Battlebridge Ecology Center in King’s Cross was a pioneering environmental hub built in 1992, but it no longer exists. Constructed on Battlebridge Road by the Community Creation Trust, it was the largest ecology center in Europe at the time. It featured eco-housing for homeless youth, gardens, ponds, and the Last Platform Café, but was later demolished to make way for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link redevelopment. When I arrived, the warehouse was a hive of activity. Yurts were being constructed, and wood construction materials collected from London’s skips were being denailed. I was ushered into a small room where Simon Fairlie, Bill Knight, George Monbiot and a few others were gathered to talk logistics for the upcoming action on the 5th of May 1996. This was going to be my 2nd foray into NVDA and land-based actions, which highlighted the importance of the dispossessed in the environmental movement.
My background prior to university was hospitality. I am a trained chef with 10 years’ experience in high-end establishments serving gourmet cuisine. They needed a quartermaster to organize the pallet of donated food and vegetables and to organize vegetarian meals for the 1st week. There was approximately £1000 worth of food donated by a whole-foods wholesaler moving to Bristol, and it was end-of-line, discontinued wastage. There was also about 30 kg of donated vegetables. I was ushered into the kitchen store and shown the food. My guide said I was the only person who had looked at the pile of food and seemed undaunted by it; everyone else had changed their mind at the last minute, backing out of volunteering. The 1st thing I said we needed was a lockable metal trunk which would be rat-proof, and I knew exactly where one was, but it required a trip to my parents’ house in Kent. A lockable trunk meant I could ensure the high-value foods like chocolate, halva, and almond butter would last the week as well.
I also had plans to attend a secret tribal gathering for Beltane at Thieves’ Copse in Sherwood Forest. With the scantest information as to the location of the copse on National Trust land, I was let off the lorry I had hitched a ride on from London at the edge of the forest. I used my tracking skills to search for the telltale signs of a camp. Looking for high ground to let me see over the trees, I looked for smoke. It was a windless day, which meant that a column of smoke would rise straight up and not be blown into the dense pines and dissipate among the trees. I had been trained in advanced wilderness search and rescue; now the skills I used to help lost people became my navigation tools to a Beltane gathering like no other I would ever attend again. I set a compass bearing and headed toward the smoke, pretty much “as the crow flies”. After the Beltane celebrations, we cleared the camp, including hiding the firepit so it was indistinguishable from the surrounding grass; I was bundled into a hippie van and off to London.
May 4th, 1996: Day zero, the kitchens of the Battle Bridge Center in Kings Cross were a hive of activity. The organization of the food pallet into 2 galvanized metal trunks fitted with locks, and the cooking of 100 portions of vegetable stew for delivery to the Pure Genius, Wandsworth Eco-Village. By day 2, the vegetables were used up, and we started going skip diving. Within a kilometer of the Eco-Village were several large supermarkets.
At one point, someone asked me why the boxes were locked — because it’s everyone’s food. I agreed; it was everyone’s food, but to make it last and distribute it fairly, locking the boxes was necessary. I also said I was happy to open the boxes at any time as long as people didn’t just take all the nice things. I left after the 1st week of the occupation. The site was invaded by London’s drug users, and they raided all the easy food from the boxes, like biscuits, chocolate and halva, and left a mess. Those still living on the site eventually threw them out: The term Camp-Fascist became synonymous with those of us who didn’t tolerate the alcoholics and heroin users and spongers who turned up at these protest camps, ate the food, and did nothing to contribute.
Skip Diving (Dumpster Diving)
Food waste is nothing new; large Supermarkets throw vast quantities of good food away simply to make room for new stock, and they don’t want anyone to know this, let alone go freebie shopping in their skips. Some supermarkets have compactor skips which compact the food into an area inaccessible to people. Compactor skips can crush people who climb into them and should be avoided, even if they contain rich pickings. The compactor is not predictable.
Skipped food was a staple of the 1990s environmental campaigner; occasionally we would arrive to see the manager pouring bleach or other noxious substances all over the food. This, on the odd occasion, could lead to a disruptive action leading to negotiated access. At the Wandsworth Eco-village, we were sometimes feeding families from the estate across the road.
On the Newbury Bypass Protest, many of the town’s shop skips were left unlocked, and we never left a mess. My favorite was Thorntons’ skip! Chocolate with that tell-tale white blush of leaching fats, perfectly edible and delicious. I suspect many of those shops feared the hippies in the trees might turn up and ruin their business for a day. I never imagined that skip diving would become a literary genre.
It’s now September 2026. My 24-year-old civil engineer son turns aluminum foil food containers into beautiful embossed pictures, which he stitches onto card and presents to us for birthdays. The cameras I use to make the films on my ~ YouTube channel, including the video below, are retrieved from a charity shop skip and repaired by me. I built a greenhouse in my garden to grow strawberries, and all the wood and polycarbonate multiwall sheets came from a skip, which I carried home on my bike trolley (I don’t even own a car). The Trolley is also made from reclaimed waste. Most of my bicycles are 2nd hand.
The wood for the greenhouse came from a building site up the road, and the builder was intrigued to see me load it onto my bicycle with some home-made modifications.
I still get food from skips, but I am a discerning skip-diver. I never get into the skip. There is a high risk of injury, especially from unseen broken glass and nails. I avoid bread because even if it looks ok and isn’t visibly moldy, it’s already growing the mold mycelium. Soft fruits like strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries are also avoided because they are often near-rotten. My favorite local spot is the hipster shop; they sell organic fruit and vegetables and seem to throw vast amounts in their compost bin. I occasionally empty their entire bin into one of my trolley boxes to add to my own compost heap!
Skipped Electronics
Most of this blog is written on a computer retrieved from a skip, with the hard drive reformatted and the operating system set to Debian Linux. The same is true of my Laptop.
Skip Diving as a Cli Fi
The writing of this blog was inspired by a blog post by Author Joanne O’Connell on the Climate Fiction Writers League Blog about her debut novel, Beauty and the Bin. It was this excerpt from the novel that caught my eye:
‘Can I get into the actual bin?’ asked Fern, jumping up and down on the spot. Her bracelets, home-made from bottle tops, jangled loudly. ‘Like properly inside it? And throw things over to you?’
Handling waste, building materials, and polycarbonate sheets comes with risks. I have cut-resistant Kevlar gloves for exactly this. I have already mentioned the dangers of getting into skips, especially compactors. Aside from this, I largely agree with the author about supermarkets.
“I have ethical qualms about shopping in a supermarket, and it’s not even cheap – so for a year I’m buying in bulk and going local” https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2012/may/21/giving-up-supermarket-shop
But for most working-class people, including myself, there is little choice, and today shops like Home Bargains offer a variety of cut-price basics which tie people to the out-of-town supermarket. Today, very few people forage nettles, have access to land, and have the time to grow vegetables. In a cost-of-living crisis, many families not only live paycheck to paycheck but also work 2 jobs just to cover the cost of living and are using food banks.
Where I live, allotments are in high demand and waiting lists are long, and it can take years before you get anywhere near the land.
I Don’t Own a Car
By not owning a car, I save between £3,500 and £8,000 per year and don’t have to account for the car’s emissions from manufacturing and use. As a family, we have never owned a car. How do we do it? The bike and trolley are our main mode of moving stuff, whether it is pilfered veg waste for compost or the monthly shop. Larger things? We are part of a community of friends who really do help each other and do favors, including moving large items by car or van. Even being carless is a challenge for many people; cars are ubiquitous, and not having one is weird, and people have said this to me. I don’t care.
The reality of living well without a car, while eating locally produced food, some of which I produce myself, like Shii Take (Japanese Forest) Mushrooms, takes some logistical juggling. All 12 1-m-long logs were transported by trolley out of the woods to my home, where they were inoculated with spawn.
Repurposing Rubbish and Obsolete Technology
The author butchers an old boiler to provide hot water to a camp kitchen at an arts camp.
The shower’s boiler system at that same arts camp: Built from a combination of reused and new parts. These types of backwoods engineering skills are part of DIY culture, which emerged in the 1990s protest movement. This boiler system operates entirely without electric pumping. Next year, it will be a radical off-grid solar thermal setup.
Skip Diving is About Way More than Just Food.
Skip diving and waste repurposing are important climate-friendly skills. It’s not just food, as this blog post and my lifestyle attest. I live this every day. I don’t pass a skip without glancing over to see what is in it. Here is a list of things I have retrieved from skips:
- Photovoltaic Panels: 1 Solar Century 40Wp 6V roof tile. 2 Thin-film trickle chargers. A 70Wp Shell Solar unframed experimental sprayed-on thin-film photovoltaic (Shell Mothballed the Factory).
- Multiple computer cooling fans
- 3 computers, screens, and other computing peripherals
- Sony Camcorder
- Digital SLR
- Enough Wood to build a house
- Antique bathroom sinks
- Belfast sinks
- Radio-controlled car (working)
- Organic fruit and vegetables, especially garlic
- Push-fit plumbing pipe and connectors
- copper pipe
- Assorted tools and tool bags
- Metal shelving
- DAB Radio
- CB Radio
- Walkie-talkies (working)
- Telescope
- Binoculars
- Bronze Desk Light
- Brass Gladiator figurine on a brass base — in my garden by the pond
- See-saw (that came floating down the canal)
- Assorted unwanted decorative plants
- Gas Boiler (see above)
- Hot water cylinder (see the showers)
- Meters and meters of wire
- Garden Compost bin
- Garden Water Butt
- Bricks
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