The bunting says “Go vegan”, the clothes are Fairtrade, and the politics are earnest. There is even the occasional hairy female armpit on display. It is as though a Thai beach bar of gap-year students has woken up the next morning, vastly outnumbered by journalists, confused to find themselves in the City of London.

12pm on Threadneedle Street, and Climate Camp is awaiting its instructions. At the Bank of England, the BP headquarters and five other locations, a thousand climate change protesters check their phones for the text that will tell them where to take their tents. For the next week they intend to live together sustainably in a anti-carbon festival, without a carbon footprint. But there is a problem — and, to many people’s surprise it isn’t the police. By 1pm there is no text message. The rumour is, their system is broken.

By 1.30pm things are getting desperate. Climate Camp’s (studiously non-hierarchical) hierarchy are entertaining their crowd with “Outreach Bingo” and speeches about carbon trading. Demonstrating surprisingly efficient organisation, the Whitechapel Anarchists have taken a collective decision to sit out the bingo and go to the pub.

A banker crosses the road to buy his lunch. “Are you going to cause trouble lads?” he asks a pair of gangly teenagers kicking a beanbag in the air. They look like they would be unlikely to cause trouble for the beanbag, let alone the capitalist cause.

Meeting near the site of the death of Ian Tomlinson, Climate Camp claims that they are worried about trouble caused by the police, rather than by their own activists. Their camp at April’s G20 protests, which was away from the main troubles, was trampled by police in the early hours of the morning, and many who were there allege that they were attacked by riot police.

Yesterday Climate Camp was taking no chances. It photographed each police officer, and teams of legal observers in orange T-shirts handed out leaflets to protesters — explaining what they should do if arrested. Frances Wright, who helped to collate many of the complaints to the Independent Police Complaints Commission after the G20 protests, offers wine gums to a police community support officer. “The police liaison has been far better this time,” she says of their negotiations. “There is less posturing, and they are more conciliatory. We are hopeful.”

2pm and the instructions finally come. “We’re going to Cutty Sark DLR station,” a young lady shouts into a megaphone. And so our climate change crocodile weaves through the Underground system meeting its counterparts from the six other swoop sites, to its final destination: Blackheath, overlooking Canary Wharf — that great crucible of capitalism.

Yesterday morning Blackheath was a bleak hilltop common. At midday perhaps a dozen people knew it would be the location of this week’s eco-camp. By the time we arrive, just before 3pm, it has fencing, food and the beginnings of a composting toilet.

Climate Camp’s philosophy is to demonstrate that it is possible to live a sustainable life, without a carbon footprint. And for a week, in London, they intend to do that.

As his colleagues erect their tents, Dave, a thirtysomething who spent last night in a Hackney squat, explains how he believes their work will eventually change the world. “The problem is, at the moment what’s sexy is a fast car and a great wodge of cash,” he says. “But that’s changing. One day, planting trees will be sexy — and doing what we do in Climate Camp will get you laid. Then the world will improve overnight. It’s all in the hands of women.”

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