A garden created by a veteran peace campaigner and fellow protestors at the site of the controversal Greenham Common airbase has been handed back to the public.

Sarah Hipperson, 87, from Wanstead, moved in 1983 to the women’s protest camp, which was set up to oppose US nuclear weapons being based there.

Missiles were eventually removed from the airbase in the early 1990s and Ms Hipperson and fellow protestors created the garden in 2002 to mark the action taken.

Ms Hipperson, who alone raised £78,000 for the project, said handing over of the garden was her “final act, completing the Greenham Common cycle”.

“It was an undeveloped piece of land, when we put tents on it, now it has sculptures, stones and special plants,” she said.

Ms Hipperson was repeatedly arrested during her years at Greenham Common, serving 22 sentences including a 28-day stay at Holloway prison for criminal damage.

She used the court appearances to question the legality of nuclear weapons, the right of the women to protest and her passion for the cause remains undimmed.

“We had every right to be there, the military had no right to be on the common,” she said.

“The work is to achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

“We have all been involved in the crime that presents itself as nuclear deterrent.

“The bottom line is that we will use weapons that are 80 per cent more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, in the case of Trident, as part of the defence policy of this country.

“As a Christian I have never been able to live with that.”

The garden was handed over to the people of nearby Newbury before Christmas.

Part of it has been dedicated to Helen Thomas, who was knocked down by a military vehicle and killed, aged only 22, during the protest.

Ms Hipperson was a native of Glasgow and became a nurse and mid-wife in her late teens, delivering babies in the Govern area.

She then emigrated to Canada, where she lived for 16 years and worked as a nurse, during which time she married and had five children.

On returning to England in the 1970s, Ms Hipperson settled in Wanstead and joined the justice and peace group at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, while also becoming a Justice of the Peace.

During the early 1980s, she said she became increasingly frustrated with trying to raise awareness of nuclear weapons in Wanstead and decided to join the Greenham Common camp.

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