A Photographic Journey Through the Ban the Bomb Movement’s Historic Walks from Aldermaston to London (1952-1963)

By the mid-1950s, Britain was a nuclear-armed nation in the middle of a Cold War that terrified millions of ordinary people. The government had tested its first atomic bomb in 1952 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1957. For many citizens, that was too much. The fear that nuclear weapons could end human civilisation drove people into the streets — not in riots, but in organised, determined marches that would define a generation of protest.

Before the marches began, the mood in Britain was already shifting. In 1957, the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapon Tests called a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square. Thousands turned up, many of them women, braving the rain under a sea of umbrellas. It was a sign of what was coming.

That same year, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — known as CND — was formally founded. It became the engine of the Ban the Bomb movement. One of its first and boldest decisions was to organise a march from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire to Trafalgar Square in London, a journey of roughly 50 miles. The first march took place over Easter 1958 and drew tens of thousands of participants: families, students, clergymen, and public figures, all united by a single demand. The CND adopted a logo designed by Gerald Holtom, who combined elements of semaphore signals into a circle. That symbol spread rapidly across the world.

By 1959, the marches had already developed an international character. Protesters from Australia, Sweden, and other countries joined the column heading out of Aldermaston. The cause was not seen as a purely British concern — it was a global one.

The marches were physically demanding. Participants covered around 54 miles over four days, often in cold and wet Easter weather. Blisters, sore feet, and exhaustion were common. Marchers rested wherever they could — fields, roadsides, church halls.

The 1960 march drew even larger crowds. An estimated 20,000 protesters made their way out of Aldermaston, carrying banners and, in some cases, guitars. The atmosphere combined grim seriousness with a youthful, almost festive energy.

That year, demonstrators set off from Aldermaston on the 54-mile route that had become a fixture of the Easter calendar.

When the 1960 column finally reached Trafalgar Square, nearly 70,000 people packed the space around Nelson’s Column. It was the largest anti-nuclear demonstration Britain had ever seen.

The 1961 marches brought both inspiration and confrontation. The Committee of 100 — a splinter group led by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who held the title Earl Russell — pushed for more direct, disruptive action beyond the annual marches. Russell addressed crowds from the plinth of Nelson’s Column at a Committee of 100 meeting in Trafalgar Square, with Lady Russell at his side.

Police maintained a visible but initially restrained presence as Russell spoke. The crowd listened closely, aware that the Committee of 100 was calling for sit-down protests and civil disobedience that the CND itself did not officially endorse.

The 1961 Aldermaston marchers arrived in London exhausted but determined. Some had walked through west London in pouring rain, barefooted, with their trousers rolled up against the wet roads.

Some marchers passed through Liverpool Street Station on their way through the city.

The Committee of 100’s sit-down protests in 1961 led to mass arrests. Police carried demonstrators — many of whom went deliberately limp — to waiting trucks and vans. The tactic of going limp forced officers to physically drag or carry each individual, making arrests slow and highly visible.

The arrests cut across class and background. One of the more notable people taken in during the eight-hour sit-down in Trafalgar Square was playwright John Osborne, famous for writing Look Back in Anger. He was fined £1 at court. After paying, he walked out of the building still dressed in his everyday clothes, entirely unbowed.

The protests extended beyond Trafalgar Square. Demonstrators staged a sit-down on Bayswater Road near the Soviet Embassy, making clear that their objections were not directed at the West alone but at nuclear weapons wherever they existed. Police lined the road alongside rows of squatting protesters, and those who refused to move were physically carried to vans.

Some of those convicted received jail sentences. A police van leaving Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1961 had “Ban-the-Bomb” written in the dust on its back doors — a quiet, defiant gesture from someone on the street.

The 1962 march was shaped heavily by the shadow of Hiroshima. Two survivors of the atomic bombing — nurse Miyoko Matsubara, 29, and law student Hirosama Hanabusa, 18 — joined the march column as it entered Hyde Park for the final rally. Their presence made the abstract danger of nuclear weapons immediate and human.

That same year, four members of Women Against the Bomb stood in silence at the Cenotaph on Whitehall for a 12-hour vigil marking the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. No banners, no chanting — just four women standing still in one of London’s most solemn public spaces.

The 1963 march took on extra symbolic weight. The route passed Windsor Castle, and marchers — including a Japanese contingent from Hiroshima — walked past the royal residence in a deliberate statement to the establishment. At Runnymede, the site where the original Magna Carta was signed 750 years earlier, marchers stopped to sign a document they called the “Magna Carta 1963,” demanding nuclear disarmament.

When the 1963 column reached London, tensions with police escalated. Scuffles broke out in Whitehall as officers struggled to control the flow of marchers heading toward the final rally in Hyde Park. One man was gripped by three officers at once. In other sections, police physically strained against the mass of people pressing forward.