Growing up near one of Europe’s longest-running women-led peace movements left an imprint on my childhood, inspiring a fascination with counterculture, activism, and the possibility of peace, all of which continue to influence my jewellery designs today.
As a designer, I often wonder why I’m drawn to certain colours, motifs, and symbols. Why does the idea of peace, love, and protection resonate so deeply with me? Looking back, the answer lies in my childhood and a movement that unfolded just beyond my doorstep.
I grew up in Newbury in the 1980s, when the Greenham Common Peace Women became a defining presence in British activism. Their camp was a protest against the U.S. Air Force storing nuclear-armed cruise missiles at Greenham, each bomb was one many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Even as a child, I understood instinctively that the world would be better without them.
But life was full of contradictions. Some of my closest friends were American, living inside the base because their parents were posted there to guard those same missiles. I can still remember eating Pop-Tarts and Lucky Charms in their kitchens, running around in a fenced and heavily guarded world, while outside, the peace women sang songs, banged drums, and chained themselves to railings to demand change. We were playing in the shadow of the very weapons those women were leaving their homes to resist.
The women had first marched from Cardiff in 1981, and over time their small protest grew into a sprawling, colourful peace camp that lasted 19 years. Their persistence made them impossible to ignore, and by 1991, the missiles were removed from Greenham. The camp continued until 2000, a quiet but powerful end to one of Europe’s longest running women-led peace movements.
Having that movement on my doorstep shaped me and I can see why I was later drawn to the spirit of Haight-Ashbury, the Summer of Love, and other counterculture moments when people dared to imagine freer, kinder, more creative ways of living. For me, these aren’t just design motifs; they’re fragments of a worldview I absorbed as a child: the belief that ordinary people, especially women, can stand up to extraordinary power and make their voices heard.
