A crime is in progress in a field that has, in recent weeks, captured the UK’s sense of powerlessness and frustration. For several months a group of organised criminals used the field as an illegal rubbish tip, building a hulking glacier of crap 500 feet long in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside. But the gang has scarpered, the gates have been padlocked and a rain-soaked piece of paper taped to the barrier informs the public they will be committing an offence, punishable by up to two years in prison, if they try to observe evidence of all the other crime the authorities failed to stop while it was being committed here.
However, it is trivially easy to access the site and lots of people are doing so, including a news crew from a national broadcaster, a local journalist, two men with drones and a pair of landscape gardeners who found it on Facebook and wanted to see the mighty trash-olith for themselves. The anchorman from the news crew puffs out his chest and declares that it would be ridiculous for the Environment Agency to start arresting journalists acting in the public interest, and if they want to come after anyone then they can start with him. I agree with this sentiment, especially the last part. He was the ringleader, actually.
It is not only the dump we’re here to see, but the reaction it will provoke in our nation’s disappointed uncle. Ed Davey is on his way. Will he venture illegally into the zone of disaster? Will he toboggan down its festering slopes to Raise Awareness?
The site itself is not just a random tip. There have been earthworks, with large trenches dug to contain waste. A mound of soil 30 feet high would have helped to obscure the view of the site from the road. There’s a heap of empty oil drums from the tipper lorries that delivered the rubbish here. There’s a dog kennel, its roof broken, which I’m guessing housed the security system. This was an unremarkable field in which sheep occasionally grazed until someone spotted that it came with a useful appendix: a strip of land that runs between the A43 dual carriageway and a branch of the River Cherwell, shielded from view on either side by trees.
This spring, an as-yet unidentified group of complete and utter bastards began filling the appendix with rubbish. Load after load of trash was piled up, filling the little strip of land to a depth of 30 feet. At the northern end the rubbish emerges in a towering slope that spreads out from the end of the strip like ice from the mouth of a fjord. The air has an acrid quality that catches in the back of the throat, but it doesn’t reek like a landfill site. There are no crowds of seagulls or rats. In one corner the branches of a struggling hawthorn are raised like the arms of a drowning swimmer above the slimy grey waste, offering a few berries in exchange for rescue.
The trash, on closer inspection – and at this point, I’d like to thank my editor for the opportunity to conduct that inspection – has been shredded. This means it’s the leftovers from publicly funded waste processing. It was supposed to go to a landfill site, but dumping this kind of “active waste” into landfill incurs “gate fees” of about £26 a tonne and Landfill Tax at £126.15 a tonne. So, promising to dump rubbish in a landfill and actually dumping it in a field can yield more than £3,000 in savings for every 20-tonne tipper. What we’re looking at here is a huge pile of tax evasion.
How did this happen without anyone noticing? Michael, who is 80, has lived in the house nearest the dump for 68 years. He’s noticed more lorries lately – sitting at the bus stop the other day, he counted 20 – but the site was obscured by trees; it’s more visible now that the leaves have fallen. Michael, and others I spoke to on the streets nearest the dump, have had no contact from the authorities. They do not expect it will be cleared up soon.
A local councillor tells me the Environment Agency was alerted in May and tried to enter the site in July, but was rebuffed; the dumping continued until September. When the agency eventually secured the site it was after “YouTubers began showing up en masse”, they say, along with “disaster tourists”, whose safety on the dump could not be guaranteed. But the rubbish itself is contemptuous of that idea. At the bottom of a steep bank at its northern end, the wooden fence has given way and a great wave of gubbins has broken loose. This spilled mass of scraps of metal, plastic, glass, electrical cable, fabric, foam insulation and chunks of rotting plasterboard is oozing towards a metal grate, beyond which is a drain that leads into the River Cherwell. This area floods regularly and as the waters rise, the heavy metals, industrial pollutants and asbestos lurking in the trash heap will be washed into the Cherwell. And because the Cherwell is a tributary of the Thames, this pollution will eventually make its way to Westminster in what the councillor described as “the world’s most depressing metaphor”.
The Environment Agency is planning to monitor the Cherwell for pollutants. Alas, as an expert on river pollution tells me, the Environment Agency hasn’t bothered doing this for six years, so it has no baseline data, and it will be impossible to say which pollutants came from the dump and which came from the sewage outflows upriver, which last year spilled sewage into the Cherwell for nearly 10,000 hours. That, too, is a mammoth crime, but it’s less noticeable because it doesn’t form into a skyscraper-sized shitheap in a field.
For a while the rain stops, the sun comes out and the peaks of the trash heap begin to steam. The rubbish is producing its own heat as it decomposes; it is becoming alive. Perhaps it could stand as a paper candidate for Reform in the next election. Meanwhile the local Lib Dem MP has arrived, and he has a potential solution to the access problem: they can use a painter’s ladder to raise Ed Davey above the barrier, so he can be pictured with the trash without having to enter the site and go to prison. The waiting journalists collectively imagine the opportunity for a pratfall this represents; the photographers silently cross their fingers.
As it turns out, the ladder isn’t tall enough to provide much of a vista anyway, so the Lib Dem leader has to make do with expressing vigorous concern from a distance, but he’s good at this. No one furrows brow like Davey. He’s “pretty angry” about the dump, which is “pretty horrendous”. When the local MP, Calum Miller, showed it to him he “had never seen anything like it… It’s made me, actually, determined that we’re going to sort this… we’re not going to let this go.”
That’s a relief, because the environment tends to take a back seat these days. The Greens might once have been vocal about this, before they got hooked on identity politics and modern monetary theory. The Tories would have screamed at the desecration of England’s green and pleasant land, were it not glaringly obvious that it is, to a great extent, their fault. Labour increasingly considers the environment to be an inconvenience in the path to economic growth. Meanwhile, the Cherwell Trash Heap must take its place among the landmarks being raised in modern Britain – PPE Mountain, Rotting Salmon Beach, Wet-Wipe Island, the Great Fatberg – that stand as national monuments to criminality, incompetence and greed.
[Further reading: In Sanna Marin too hot for politics?]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand