They've been trying to get it back since it was 'stolen' in the 1940s."Greenham Common became an airbase in 1941 and was occupied by the US Air Force until the early Nineties. The base, covering 364 hectares, was sold by the MoD to the Greenham Common Trust, which consists of Newbury District Council and a group of local businesses, for pounds 7m. The trust then sold all but the commercial area of the site for pounds 1 to Newbury council, which aims to return it to use as an open area. Concrete and tarmac from the the runways are being recycled for use on the Newbury bypass.The trust is now managing and developing the commercial area and since 1994 the existing buildings have been let out Occupiers include a childcare centre and a ballroom.

One building, earmarked to become a museum/visitor centre, was purpose-built as a command and control centre with walls one metre thick, steel doors and a chemical-warfare decontamination suite.Because of its former use, there have been repeated concerns about radiation hazards. But the latest report, prepared by Southampton University and the Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Centre, concluded that there was no more radiation around Greenham Common than anywhere else.. It is a startling transformation. One minute Thami Tsama, 10, is a little girl in sneakers and T-shirt. A smudge of lipstick later and she becomes a smouldering, trophy-winning, Latin American dance queen. A few years ago such a metamorphosis would have been impossible.

Thami is black, and black girls seldom ventured in those days into the white world of ballroom dancing. But in the new South Africa the old segregated white, coloured (mixed race) and black dance federations have been outlawed, and ballroom has caught the imagination of township kids. With girls like Thami clinching national titles only months after taking to the floor, the whites, who still call the tune, are uncomfortable."You should see where the black kids live," says Patricia Paleman, the only dance school teacher from the coloured township of Ennerdale, south of Johannesburg, to recruit kids from the neighbouring black squatter camp of Orange Farm.Coloured boys are shy of dancing, so there may be a degree of self- interest in her black recruitment drive But her motivation runs deeper. "The black kids cannot even afford the bus fare to get here," she says "But they have such a talent to dance. At first they had no experience of the dance syllabus but now they are taking first, first, first."As small girls in green mini-dresses and boys in dinner suits waltz by, she says the man responsible for the new championship standards at the Ennerdale Academy of Dance is Paul Kgole, one of a handful of blacks to beat the old apartheid restrictions to qualify as a ballroom teacher.