More than 20 Metropolitan Police officers broke down the front door of a Quaker meeting house to arrest six women who had met to discuss climate change and Gaza.

It is thought to be the first time in the history of the famously ­pacifist Quakers that police have forced their way into one of their places of worship.

The women, aged between 18 and 38, were sitting in a circle eating hummus and bread sticks on Thursday evening as part of a ­“welcome meeting” for Youth Demand, which calls itself a non-violent protest group.

The police, some armed with Tasers, handcuffed the women, confiscated their belongings, took them to the police station and later raided some of their student accommodation.

A Met spokesman said six women had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, amid fears of a sit-down protest in the capital. None have been charged. The spokesman said: “Youth Demand has stated an intention to ‘shut down’ London over the [coming] month. While we absolutely recognise the importance of the right to protest, we have a responsibility to intervene to prevent activity that crosses the line from protest into serious disruption and other criminality.

“On Thursday, officers raided a Youth Demand planning meeting at an address in Westminster where those in attendance were plotting their April action.”

Quakers, including Elizabeth Fry, the prison campaigner who appeared on the £5 note, have historically stood for non-violent activism, including fighting for the abolition of slavery and supporting women’s right to vote.

Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, who is responsible for oversight of the movement, said no one had been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory. “This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a ­society criminalises protest,” Parker said.

He called for an apology from the Met for damaging the building and the “spiritual and emotional” integrity of the place of worship.

“I don’t think the British public wants to see people being dragged out of places of worship when they’re sitting peacefully sharing their concerns about climate breakdown and the situation in the Middle East,” he said.

It is the latest accusation of over-policing of the right to protest and free speech facing the Met, and follows an outcry in 2021 over the vigil for Sarah Everard, who had been murdered by a police officer, Wayne Couzens. Police were also accused of over-reacting to republican protesters at the King’s coronation in May 2023.

• Police arrest parents who complained in school WhatsApp group

The raid on Thursday took place at about 7.15pm after the six women, aged 18, 20, 20, 22, 25 and 38, had been meeting for about 45 minutes.

No worship was taking place at the time but rooms at the meeting house, in St Martin’s Lane in central London, are regularly rented out to other groups and activities, which must be non-violent in nature.
At the time, they were being used for private counselling sessions and a life drawing class, which were also searched by police.

Mal Woolford, 58, an elder of the Westminster Quaker Meeting who was on the site at the time, described the police response as “ridiculously heavy-handed”. He said: “Apparently not all of [the women] were even involved with the organisation, they were just curious, and they ended up in handcuffs.”

He added: “The police flooded the building to make sure no one got away. I had all kinds of conflicting feelings of outrage of why they were here, why there were so many of them, but I wanted to keep the situation calm. The only resistance I could put up was to make tea and drink it in front of them without offering them any.”

Youth Demand holds regular welcome talks, “non-violence training” sessions and “soup night socials” for young people interested in “non-violent resistance against this rigged political system and the people with blood on their hands”, according to its website.

Last year, the group was responsible for spraying the Ministry of Defence with red paint. Three of its activists were found guilty of public order offences in April after a demonstration outside Sir Keir Starmer’s home in north London.

The event on Thursday had been advertised through posters in and around the area and at universities in London attended by activists. Four of the women are university students and one had their dissertation, written in French, in their rucksack, which was taken away by police.

The group has been posting on social media about a plan to “shut down London” over April, using tactics including “swarming”, which involves a non-violent direct action strategy used by protesters to block roads.

One of the women, Ella, 20, who is studying music at a London university, said she had attended the event following a day of lectures. She described the arrest as an “acknowledgment that the government thinks it is worth spending massive state resources on policing a bunch of kids before we’ve even stepped into the road”.

Ella, who asked for her surname to be withheld, said the group had been discussing a 1963 peace march in the US against racial segregation in Alabama when they heard a “massive banging”.

She said: “I think I was the tallest there at 5ft 6in and the best way I can describe the group is baby-faced — we looked young, helpless and scared. Someone in the room saw a police officer through the window and two seconds later dozens of police swarmed. An officer grabbed my arm, turned me around to face the wall and placed me in handcuffs. Some of the others were sitting down, not doing anything, not resisting, and they were also put in cuffs.”

She claims she was held in police custody for more than 12 hours, was not allowed to telephone her parents or a solicitor, and that her student accommodation was raided by police at 2am on Friday.
It is common for the police to hold people who have been arrested incommunicado before they conduct a search of their home address, if they fear evidence may be removed from the premises.

“None of us slept,” she said. “I came home at 6am and my bed was stripped and my neatly organised homework was strewn all over the floor.”

On Friday, police made a further five arrests of four men and one woman in their early twenties across London and Exeter on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.