Do you dig it?
Midweek (12 March 1999)

The Grand Old Duke of York used to own St George's Hill, near Weybridge, Surrey. But it's not known whether he ever marched his men to the top of it or marched them down again.

He probably did so at some point, because he was the aristocrat who compulsorily enclosed the common land here by a private Act of Parliament in 1804. In doing so, he extinguished all those ancient commoners' rights to dig turf, collect firewood, graze pigs and so on, which would have upset the local commoners no end and required the Duke to march his men up and down the hill on more than one occasion to make sure that no one was sneaking under the fences of what was now his private domain.

You still have to sneak under the fences to get onto St George's Hill if the security guards manning the gates at the main entrances don't like the look of you. Because the St George's Hill Estate is now one of the most exclusive private estates in the country. The most modest of dwellings here will set you back several millions. And if you're interested in the sort of properties that Cliff Richard and the other celebrity residents call home, you'll be looking at the sort of mortgage loan that not even Peter Mandelson could have put together from his Cabinet minister mates.

Actually, people don't so much buy houses on St George's Hill as the right to build on the land on which they stand. The kind of people who live here have so much money to throw around that they don't just buy new curtains and carpets when they move in; they call in the demolition contractors and rebuild the entire place.

This accounts for the fact that there are more hard hats and builders' vans in the drives of the properties around the hill than there are at the Millenium Dome. It's only when you look closely that you realise that these are not the usual men from the Murphia, and that the decals on the ubiquitous white vans advertise a higher class of building contractor altogether. "Marble Ideas Ltd: Your Ideas Turned To Stone" announces the sign on one white van. "Markham Automatic Gates" declares another. "Great Big Pigging Expensive Statues That You Couldn't Fit In Your Garden, Let Alone Afford To Buy" says a third.

As you slip into the estate via an unmarked gap in the railings just across from the lawn tennis club (never mind the lawn; this place has got its own lake), you pass a building site which promises a "brand new detached family home". This stretches the boundaries of what constitutes a "family home" to the limit. How many children do you need to justify 25 bedrooms? What sort of granny annexe requires its own gym and swimming pool? But with local planning regulations which stipulate that each property must be built in no less than one acre of land, there's a lot of space, as well as money, to play around with.

I'm not sure whether it's comforting or disturbing to discover that neither money nor space is any guarantor of good taste. The "brand new detached family home" is about as architecturally imaginative as an out-of-town Tesco's. A little way up the road, a dwelling named "Atlantis" has two concrete eagles perched on its gateposts -- rather fitting really, since the house itself looks like a terrace of 1960s council flats. Nearby, in quick succession, you can find Georgian thatch, Tuscan pastiche and Tudor parodies standing side by side with properties whose owners think nothing of siting a satellite dish in the middle of the lawn or using car number plate plastic lettering as nameplates for their multi-million pound mansions. Some of the names at least show a sense of humour. ("Wit's End"? Well, I liked it anyway.) Most are as unimaginative as the architecture: "High Trees", "Hilltop", "Hillside", "Hill Cottage". As for "Camelot", would that be the Court of King Arthur or a sign that the owners won the lottery?

There are slightly desperate indications of insecurity here too. As if it's not sufficient to live on a gated, guarded, private estate, some of the residents have felt the need to stick up additional signs to emphasise the point to their neighbours: "Private Drive, No Parking", "Private Road: Residents Only", "Private Post Box: Use Your Own". (Incidentally, even though this is a private estate, there must be more public postboxes -- with four collections a day, no less -- per head of population here than anywhere else in Britain. I counted at least six shared by at most 400 properties.)

At "The Warreners", a vast rambling plot of land, like virtually all the properties here set back so far from the road you might not realise that there's a house there at all, they have even put in one of those curses of suburbia, a fast-growing Leylandii hedge, to keep prying binoculars (the naked eye would not be enough) from homing in on the house beyond. And near the golf club, whose membership roll adds new meaning to the word "exclusive", deep within a rhodedendron thicket where none would dream to venture were it not to see what is written on the sign within, there is a post, a tangle of barbed wire and a red and white plastic notice. "Private" it warns -- for the benefit, presumably, of any wild bird or rabbit rash enough to think of entering.

In April, though, this exclusive, private realm faced its peace being breached by a motley band of modern-day "Diggers", who came here to erect a memorial stone to an earlier band of Diggers who squatted St George's Hill during the English revolution. On 1st April 1649, a couple of months after Charles I had been beheaded, Gerard Winstanley led a group of mainly landless peasants who had fought in Cromwell's army to the slopes of St George's Hill. They came to claim the waste and common land, to plough and sow their beans and barley, and to "lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor".

The Elmbridge Museum in Weybridge, which staged an exhibition to coincide with the 350th anniversary of the Diggers arrival at St George's Hill, described them as "pioneers of communism". They called themselves "True Levellers" (as opposed to the more moderate Levellers who had risen to prominence in certain of Cromwell's regiments) because of their belief that everyone should live in equality.

"Was the Earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land, or was it made to preserve all her children?" asked Winstanley. He and his fellow Diggers liked neither the wealthy landlords, who owned the land but would not allow the landless poor access to it on which to grow their crops, nor the organised church, which they saw as a perversion of God's creation. They made their feelings known towards one of the local parsons at the time when, after being illegally imprisoned at Walton church soon after moving onto St George's Hill, they blocked up his pulpit with thorns and briars.

The Diggers faced ferocious opposition from local landowners and dignitaries. Even so, their colony survived for a year, first on St George's Hill and then on other land nearby. Other Digger communities were also established in different parts of the country. None could overcome the vested interests of the rich and powerful, however, and eventually all that was left of their movement was their writings and the power of their ideas. "Here I end, having put my Arm as far as my strength will go to advance Righteousness," Winstanley wrote after the final eviction of the Digger communities in 1650. "I have Writ, I have Acted, I have Peace: and now I must wait to see the Spirit do his own work in the hearts of others, and whether England shall be the first Land, or some others, wherin Truth shall sit down in triumph."

St George's Hill slipped back into obscurity after that until, in 1912, it was sold to a property developer, W G Tarrant, who decided to turn its 900 acres of open heath, woods and hillside into a luxury estate for the rising professional rich of London, 16 miles away. Tarrant had little regard for either historical or environmental considerations. He dynamited thousands of trees on the hill to make way for his golf course and houses. He eradicated trackways and footpaths that probably dated back to before the Romans. And when he grew tired of local archaeologists expressing concern over his treatment of an iron hillfort on the site, he simply flattened large parts of its ramparts so that they would have nothing left to express concern about.

He would not have had any time for either the original or the modern-day Diggers, who returned to the hill with the intention of commemorating Gerard Winstanley in more than just spirit. "Come along with sleeping bags, tents, spades and things to plant and grow," urged one of the leaflets calling the New Diggers to arms (or should that be spades?). "And make sure there's someone to feed your cat for a few days."

The cat would have needed to be well stocked up with food because the New Diggers stayed for a month on a plot of land they squatted, publicised a public footpath around the ramparts of the ancient hillfort that the residents would rather have remained hidden, and -- horror of horrors -- promised to return every year hereafter until they are finally allowed to erect their memorial stone to the original Diggers and Gerard Winstanley. The Grand Old Duke of York must be turning in his grave, but at least it's not his army that is marching up and down the hill this time.