Middle-class climate camp is prim but still rather inspiring

Our normal mid-afternoon traffic is a few cars. Yesterday we had pickup trucks with sheets of plywood; vans all the way from Salford; a couple of police Transits; and then the giveaway, a car loaded roof-high with toilet rolls. Suddenly, the groups of young rucksacks I'd vaguely clocked walking past fell into place.

Pop up there before the kettling starts, said the editor. So I took my bike and went out, unshaven, in the T-shirt and shorts I'd been wearing round the house. This was of course, the perfect ensemble.

Up on the Heath, inside their self-erected fence, half the Climate Campers were wheeling bicycles too - often rather nice ones, with BlackBerry attachments. It was my first clue that the new residents would fit in fine with our little neighbourhood. Just like Blackheath itself, this was all going to be unbelievably middle-class.

A diagram on a blackboard allocated sections of the camp to regions of Britain. Leaflets were distributed, headed: "Some notes on our location." The organisers bustled about. In later life, you knew, they would all become NHS community engagement managers, ordering people on estates to eat more brown bread.

One of the organising group, Amelia Gregory, was giving a pep-talk. "We are part of the most damn beautiful movement probably on the planet today," she said. "Are you up for some action? Say hoorah for some action!"

"Hoorah!" they all said back. It was pure Famous Five. Except for the police helicopter, of course. So far, the Met have been playing it cool. The chopper kept a polite distance. As more people arrived, the only other police presence was a solitary van about 200 yards away.

Perhaps the police are finally learning the lesson about protests like this: that they rely on a kind of jiu-jitsu, where protesters turn the state's own power against it.

The G20 protests, and the previous climate camp at Kingsnorth, would have been quite minor stories without the violence and overreaction of police. And so far, although it's very early days, this camp has been quite a minor story. Numbers are relatively small, perhaps the high hundreds. Attendance may not have been helped by some, well, climate change - by mid-evening, light rain had set in.

The atmosphere was good-natured and peaceful, apart from some heckling when the local police commander came to call. TV reporters sat around, not getting on air much.

What happens today may be interesting. "It looks like Canary Wharf, I'm pretty sure it's Canary Wharf," said one boy. It is a very obvious target, looming over the trees behind us. City Airport, which is just about to get a big rise in flights, is another.

Much has been made of Blackheath's Wat Tyler links. At the nearby gates of Greenwich Park, there is a memorial describing exactly what happened to him (death) and to most of his followers (execution). I preferred the other Blackheath connection the protesters were making.

This place is a common: open to all, the property of all. And as the campers' leaflet put it, "the land and the air and the sunshine and the rain" are also commons. The atmosphere is a commons, a public property put at risk by the actions of a few.

Though there are some things to mock at the Climate Camp, others are rather inspiring.