Last week three people from the Nottingham Greenpeace group went to BP's headquarters in St James Street near Piccadilly in London to hand over one of the 'No tar sands' petitions we had been making in the past two months.
Kirsty, Dave and I got to St Pancras early enough but then due to a major navigational error on my part we ended up on the wrong tube going towards the city of London. We had to quickly decamp and take a taxi to our meeting place at St Martins in the Field where we met the folks from West London Greenpeace group and Tim and Paul from Greenpeace HQ.
Paul, the campaigner, updated us on the campaign and what we had to do then Tim went through the logisitics with us. We then walked the short distance to BP HQ and set up outside with our posters - us on one side of the main door and West London on the other side. It was strange, Kirsty noted, that the building did not shout out BP in fact only a small nameplate by the front door said BP. This might have something to do with the fact they had had a previous visit from us. Tee hee.
The massive front doors were quickly slammed shut - not surprising really - and Tony the security man stood outside looking imposing and fearsome. We had expected this so while West London stayed at the front entrance we went round the side to the staff entrance where we met another security guard who was very nice and chatted to us a lot (and probably got into trouble for it later).
Security shifts changed frequently and soon Tony was round the side. We didn't know his name then but Kirsty was brilliant and managed to get the names of all the security guards just by chatting to them. Pushy friendly she called it and it was very successful. The chief of security came down to meet us and I chatted to him - and got his name - all this name taking was necessary but I won't say why. He asked how long we were going to stay and I said just until 2pm which was sort of the truth but BP must have worked out by now that really it is till the end of the month!
We arranged with him the way we were going to hand our petitions over and then just stood there trying to work out which of the many people in suits was working for BP so we could give them a leaflet about what BP is up to and what the solution is.
There was a Chinese delegation there that day and Tim said they were taking pictures of us - really great publicity for BP then with a Greenpeace delegation outside. Strangely that day there was an article in the news about China buying some of BP's assets. Wonder if these two facts were related. We did manage to hand some leaflets to them as well for extra effect. It was interesting to see that most people who took a leaflet actually read it rather than throwing them away.
Just before 2pm we told Slav (now on security) that we would like someone from Communications to come down and take our posters as we had arranged earlier so at 2pm Robert Wine came down from Communications and accepted our posters. Each group had been told to take some sort of memento of the area we came from to give to BP and we took a small Robin Hood teddy bear which I stuffed in Roberts shirt pocket, much to the amusement of Paul (and the rest of the campaign team later on so he says). Robert graciously took our posters and listened to our message thanked us and took the posters indoors. They probably went straight in the bin but the message will have been received loud and clear and repeatedly by now.
So we packed up after that and Tim took us to Picadilly tube station so we didn't get lost again and we went home tired but happy. And it didn't rain!
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