“Always pull up survey stakes.”

The Monkey Wrench Gang is a fun novel for entertainment purposes only.

Obviously people have already suggested direct action and varying degrees of monkey wrenching etc, but the two things that most frequently kill large construction / infrastructure projects are delays and having to change of adapt project plans.

Both are extremely costly and having to change plans once a project has begun in particular has massive potential knock-on effects, not just in terms of budget, but losing suppliers, finding new ones, not completing work within schedules which means new assessments and administration needs to be done etc.

The budget and complexity of something like HS2 spiralled to the point of likely never being completed mostly because the project had to keep going back to the drawing board again and again due to opposition of residents in it’s path and shifting government positions forcing frequent changes.

If you ever listen to people in the construction industry talk about the challenges facing big projects (that aren’t supply chain or cost related) it’s always resident concerns / movements to local councils and environmental / sustainability requirements or legal hurdles.

Sustainability and environmental concerns and requirements are harder to hit cheaply, the legislation around them is still more complex than other aspects of planning, the surveys take considerable time, and most hated by construction projects is that new concerns can appear during the project rather than simply in advance, which is considerably more costly.

On local resident concerns they can be powerful, especially when organised and sustained, but you’re going to have to do a lot of playing into the reactionary concerns of NIMBY homeowners. Effect on house prices and ‘quality of life’ are always the top listed concerns for residents. Construction companies like to claim that proximity to (especially leisure) facilities increase home value, but this is rarely borne out by the data when those facilities are in fact leisure destinations. Those areas tend to see more traffic, more noise, more litter, illegal and nuisance parking, less local policing and enforcement, and less other services as these large tourist traps act like a black hole on stretched council budgets. All of these things have a much bigger negative effect on local property prices and resident quality of life than living slightly closer to a theme park they might go to once or twice a year. Furthermore, with theme parks especially, they’re designed to be walled economic gardens that offer everything (food, drink, hotels, souvenirs etc) to customers and ruthlessly police and monopolise guests spending and time, meaning they bring basically zero customers or money into businesses in the local economy.

I’m not going to claim to be an expert just because I’ve protested military / industrial expansion projects a couple of times in the past, but I have also consulted on big architectural/construction projects before (usually after the fact, I’m not in the construction or engineering industry) including for train stations and smaller leisure + tourism businesses. But I’d suggest that the most important aspect of opposition is that it’s sustained and had multiple tactics ready for different stages of a project. Again, if you want it to be prohibitively expensive, then it’s about creating new problems at different junctures that force changes to plans, the redoing of work, going back to the drawing board as many times as possible etc.

Weaponized NIMBYism.

Anglosphere countries famously have a lot of NIMBYs. They may agree with building affordable housing……somewhere else for example and the UK is no different.

Correct me if I’m just being a dumb burgerlander, but Milton-Keynes is smack dab in between Cambridge and London, two powerhouses. It would make perfect sense to expand that town but they don’t and will list any excuse to not do so…in the middle of a housing shortage.

Same goes for HS2. High speed rail from Edinburgh to London (and then connect to Paris) would make perfect sense, but everyone had their own excuse from “we can’t afford it” to gammons whining that it’s different and different is bad. Time to let NIMBYism come home to roost.

any trees on the site can be easily defended with nails. They’ll hit chains in saws and destroy them (and potentially injuring the user, so leave warnings if you do this)

sugar in fuel tanks can spoil the fuel and make replacements expensive.

Gluing shut portaloos and site offices.

Use GenAI to create fake pictures of local endangered species on the proposed project site and submit anonymously to department of conservation

Go on 4chan pretending to work in the UK government and say the theme park is part of a plot to trans the kids.

I heard they were planning to do a Lord of the Rings theme with the UK park instead of Harry Potter. That fell through?

but i like rollercoasters :(