Description
In recent years, climate activists in the UK have deliberately targeted iconic sites of national memory, including Stonehenge, the Magna Carta at the British Library, and the Royal Courts of Justice, to provoke public attention and demand urgent climate action. These interventions have triggered sharp institutional responses and widespread condemnation, often framed as acts of vandalism or criminal damage. This article examines how both activists and institutional actors construct the significance of these protest actions through competing moral, visual, political, and criminogenic narratives.
Bringing together insights from visual politics and visual criminology, we analyse how these actions generate conflicting discourses about visibility, legitimacy, harm, and historical authority. Through discourse analysis of activist materials and institutional statements, we trace how each group produces a distinct narrative of disruption: activists seek to resignify heritage sites as sites of complicity and urgency, while institutions invoke legal protection, moral outrage, and civilisational values to reassert control. By focusing on this contestation, the article reveals how climate protest at national monuments is not merely a tactic of disruption, but a struggle over the aesthetic, political, and juridical boundaries of dissent in the face of planetary crisis.
