LOOKING BACK NOW, IT IS HARD TO PINPOINT THE MOMENT WHEN THINGS GOT TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL. It might have been when council contractors teamed up with police for an operation that Nick Clegg – then the MP for Sheffield Hallam, now president of global affairs at Facebook – later described as “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia”. It might have been when the council received a letter from the environment minister, Michael Gove, demanding that it halt the scheme – and chose to ignore it. It might have been when South Yorkshire police had to pay out more than £2 4,000 ($29,000) for wrongful arrests that they had made to defend the council’s work. But by the time a public inquiry was commissioned in 2021, chaired by the former undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs at the UN, no one could dispute that something had gone horribly wrong in Sheffield.
It started with a reasonable proposition. Sheffield’s roads were in a bad state, and its pavements were wonky. To some locals, Sheffield had become known as “pothole city”. Residents wrote to their councillors to complain, and in 2012, after years of planning, the council launched a £1.2bn road improvement project called Streets Ahead. Its aim was to upgrade the city’s roads, pavements, street lights and bridges. The plan involved the mass removal of street trees, which were blamed for making pavements bumpy and cracking kerbstones.
The council did not anticipate any major objections. After all, the felled trees would be replaced with saplings. But in 2014, when residents realised the council was felling trees on an industrial scale, protests started to break out, which grew into a city-wide movement.
It was in December 2016 that Paul Brooke and Carole Sutherland learned the council was planning to cut down half of the trees on their road. The couple had moved to Sheffield about a decade earlier. For Brooke and Sutherland, who worked in social care and housing, Sheffield’s trees were one of its great attractions. A third of the city sits in the Peak District national park, and it is estimated to have more trees per person than any other city in Europe. The couple moved into a Victorian terrace house on Meersbrook Park Road in south Sheffield, which was lined with 43 mature limes that stood 4.5 to 6 metres tall. They never tired of walking past the trees, watching the leaves change with the seasons. It was a shock to hear the council was planning to cut down half of them.
Brooke and Sutherland, who are now in their 60s, had always prided themselves on being unconventional. Brooke wears flat caps and waistcoats, and has a dandyish goatee and handlebar moustache, while Sutherland has
