I thought my journalism days were behind me. But sometimes life has a habit of turning things around in ways you least expect. In December 2005 I was in Rome researching what was to become the sixth Nic Costa novel, which will appear in 2008. Out of the blue I took a phone call from his wife which revealed that the large London university Imperial College had very big designs on the area where I was lucky enough to live.

The next ten months saw an extraordinary battle by ordinary people pitched against an army of well-paid professional developers trying to turn some of the most beautiful - and protected - countryside in England over to the bulldozer. They were just ordinary citizens appalled by what was being planned, in secret and with the covert support of our own public representatives. The most extraordinary part of all is… we won. After concerted local opposition and a string of revelations on save-wye.org , the web-site I set up as a public forum to discuss Imperial’s plans, the project collapsed.

You can read this amazing saga in full on the save-wye web-site, with all the original articles there as they appeared. But this story deserves more, not least because there are many other people out there who are desperate to know how Wye won where so many others failed. The answer is through luck, determination and some very single-minded people. So in some ways this isn’t a story that far from fiction at all… though every last word is true, even though I occasionally had to pinch himself when reminded of that fact.

SAVED is a full length account of the true story of this campaign from its opening to close. It’s not hagiography or triumphalist, because this may be a short-lived victory. Nor does it seek to hide the mistakes that were made along the way, because one important thing we learned during this fight was that honest and openness were often the most powerful weapons the Wye campaigners had - and sometimes the only ones.

I’m grateful to everyone who helped with the Wye campaign, in particular my colleague in the site, Justin Williams, without whom this story would not have had such a satisfactory ending.