The Brighton Women's Peace Camp is on the Level

The Brighton Women's Peace Camp is on the Level is a grassroots vintage pin badge from the two-month women's peace camp pitched in the heart of Brighton during early 1983.

Levelling the land

The camp was established on February 15, 1983. It was formed as a direct response to the arrest and trial of 44 women at the main Greenham Common peace camp in Berkshire.

The slogan printed on the badge relies on a clever double meaning. To be 'on the level' is a traditional idiom. It means a person is acting fairly, and that their cause is honest and legitimate.

The Level was also the name of a recreational green grass space in the centre of the city. Flat, central, and historically associated with public dissent, it suited the purpose perfectly, giving the camp maximum visibility in the middle of the city.

The Brighton women wanted to ensure the arrests at Greenham did not silence the broader movement. Women gathered daily in consensus circles to organise transport to national protests, run non-violent direct action workshops, and prepare communal meals.

Cold nights at the camp

The camp was intended as a brief demonstration. It stayed for over two months. The bright yellow sun hand-drawn on the badge's teepee was likely a hopeful wish for warmth during a bitterly cold winter.

Local residents brought food down to the tents. Oral histories record well-meaning neighbours arriving with large pots of meat-based soup for a community that had quietly committed itself to vegetarianism.

The friction the women did face came not from the state but from hostile members of the public. Right-wing counter-protesters and late-night hecklers found the camp harder to tolerate than the council did.

The police have been very good

At Greenham Common in the same period, bailiffs and police conducted aggressive, repeated evictions. They dragged women from fences, destroyed their belongings, and pulled down their tents in the mud. Brighton was a different story entirely.

Sussex Police adopted a hands-off approach, monitoring the camp without intervening. Brighton Council, sympathetic to the broader peace movement and already aligned with the national trend of declaring Nuclear Free Zones, chose not to serve trespass notices.

A forced eviction in a highly visible public park would have generated exactly the kind of publicity the authorities wished to avoid. By treating the camp as a legitimate peaceful demonstration, they allowed it to run its natural course.

The women noted the contrast directly. Their recorded statement was plain:

“The Brighton Corporation have been very good. And the police have been very good.”

Who stands in the circle

The camp was not without its own internal friction. Brighton's women's peace movement was a meeting point for two distinct strands of 1980s feminism.

Socialist feminists argued that anti-nuclear work had to be rooted in class politics and connected to working-class communities. Radical and eco-feminists held that militarism was an expression of patriarchy itself, requiring women-only spaces to counter it.

The sharpest expression of that division was practical. It came down to who could enter the camp's core living spaces. Some women welcomed male CND allies for logistical support. Others insisted on a strict women-only boundary within the tents.

The daily consensus circles that governed the camp had to hold both positions at once.

Camp dispersal

The camp dispersed peacefully in April 1983, but not because it had run out of energy. The Level was a public park, not a military installation. It had no perimeter fence to block, no convoy to stop.

Once the trials of the 44 Greenham women had taken place, the core organisers made a deliberate calculation. A peaceful, purposeful withdrawal was preferable to a long, grinding occupation that would eventually collapse under its own weight.

The Level lives on

Many of the women who rotated through the tents were students, mothers, and local residents running a shift-work camp between their daily lives. They took their training in non-violent direct action and went directly to Greenham Common.

The Level had been a rehearsal. Greenham was the frontline. The pressure of Greenham and its satellite camps contributed directly to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which mandated the destruction of the American cruise missiles.

The activist networks forged at The Level laid the groundwork for Brighton becoming the heartland of the UK Green Party, electing Caroline Lucas as the country's first Green MP in 2010.

The 1983 peace camp may be gone, but The Brighton Women's Peace Camp is on the Level, still stands pitched with its tent on a patch of bright green grass.