Hyde Park is the setting of a protest against a Criminal Justice bill and of a defining episode in August Epp’s account of his years in Wandsworth. Amid a crowd of more than fifty thousand people, August takes a riderless, panicked police horse away from the confrontation, gives it water, and eventually brings it back to the Eco Village as a friend. The place joins public dissent to a private act of care, revealing how August responds when a living creature is caught in the force of a crowd.

Protest and political setting

August describes the protest to Ona Friesen while recalling life in Wandsworth, where he and others lived collectively in an Eco Village. The community had built several structures from materials salvaged from old houses demolished by the city to make a freeway; it also held concerts and tended gardens. Its way of life came under pressure from a Criminal Justice bill that, as August explains, allowed greater penalties for conduct classified as antisocial and outlawed raves, gatherings, and certain music characterized by repetitive beats. The protest at Hyde Park placed the community’s way of life in a mass public demonstration: more than fifty thousand people were there, August says, though the number became known to the participants later.

The horse at Hyde Park

During the protest, a police officer forced his horse to charge the demonstrators. Other protesters pulled the officer from the horse, leaving it riderless and panicked; it stamped and reared against the crowd. August mounted it and rode away, moving around the demonstrators and other police officers to a pond with a fountain. There he let the horse drink and cool off, speaking to it in what he hoped was a soothing voice. The crowd paid no attention to either of them.

From protest site to lasting connection

August rode the horse all the way back to Wandsworth and kept it there as a friend to the community. He named it Frint, meaning friend in Plautdietsch. The horse also contributed practical labor, carrying wood and other materials in a community where every being was expected to help. Hyde Park thus enters the account not only as the site of political protest but as the point where August’s relationship with the horse begins: amid a confrontation organized around human causes, his attention shifts to the frightened animal and its immediate need for safety.