The trash incinerator and the guerrilla bee

When the security guard found him, Jay Jochnowicz was knee-deep in mud and leaning over a concealed outflow pipe with a chemical testing kit. This was unexpected; there hadn’t been any guards here when Jochnowicz had come at 3am the previous day. “I said, ‘[I’m] looking at frogs’,” he recalls. The guard insisted he couldn’t be there. “I just asked ‘Are you gonna come in and get me?’. He watched as the cogs in the guard’s head turned, weighing the idea of marching through the bog after him, before he eventually decided it wasn’t worth it. 

Those late night flirtations with trespass are just one part of the bizarre tale of how plans for a gargantuan trash incinerator in south London spiralled into an all-out war. But why did this dispute, of the countless that play out in the capital every month, make so many people so angry? Why did it drive one man to spend hours sitting through government meetings all while dressed as a bee? And how did it bring together an unlikely coalition of militant bird watchers, the capital’s last Romani horse grazers and the unknown man who accidentally became London’s most viewed photographer?

The guerrilla bee

“Where are you?” Jochnowicz calls to ask, “I’m wondering if I should get into the costume.”

I’ve made the hour and half long trek to Thamesmead on an icy Saturday morning to meet the documentary filmmaker after he emailed The Londoner several weeks prior. A nature reserve in south east London was about to be built on by the owners of the trash incinerator next door that “releases more CO2 than the entire nation of Eritrea”, he informed us, though it was one line near the end that promised something unusual: “I also might have been making representations at the national planning meetings dressed as a bee”.