ANTI-WestConnex campaigners have set up a 24-hours-a-day tent blockade to halt work on a construction site at Alexandria.

Protesters have vowed to camp out for up to eight weeks to stop the Sydney Motorway Corporation from removing dozens of mature trees as part of road widening on the eastern side of Sydney Park.

Contractors are set to begin geotechnical drilling and searching for underground electrical cables and water pipes along Euston Rd this week in preparation for a construction compound to be built on land owned by Roads and Maritime Services.

The site, linked to work on the nearby WestConnex interchange at St Peters, will also accommodate heavy vehicles.

Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, who offered her support to the protesters yesterday, said the interchange will make the city’s traffic congestion problems far worse.

media_camera Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore at a WestConnex rally at Sydney Park, St Peters where protesters have erected a tent city for the next few weeks. Picture: Jim O’Rourke

“We’re opposing the cutting down of these trees, which is the beginning of the building of the interchange adjacent to Sydney Park,” Ms Moore said.

“The interchange proposed will cover an areas the size as Sydney Park.

“Euston Rd currently carries 7,000 vehicles a day. It will be 60,000 when the interchange opens.

“It will be devastating, We don’t want six-lane roads ploughing through our beautiful city.

“We don’t want this and we will campaign hard to stop this,” Ms Moore said.

Earlier this year the The City of Sydney gave the WestConnex Action Group (WAG), which is organising the blockade, a $15,000 grant “to help them raise community awareness”. It also gave $10,000 to the No WestConnex Public Transport group to help pay for a community organiser.

WAG spokeswoman Anne Picot said it can call on close to 1,000 volunteers to help keep the 24-hour protest roster full.

Organisers are urging people to sign up for minimum two-hour stints at the blockade site, on the edge of Alan Davidson Oval.

“We have an eight-week window to stop the work here,” Ms Picot said.

“They are going to be putting down a giant concrete slab down. It will be a turning bay for trucks working on the interchange.

“Before that they’ll have to rip up a high voltage Ausgrid electrical cable.”

Ms Picot said the blockade has already attracted support from people affected by the WestConnex M4 East project at Haberfield, Concord and Ashfield.

The St Peters interchange, which will eventually link the New M5 with the future underground link between the M5 and M4, is being built at the southwestern end of Sydney Park, between Canal and Campbell roads on the site of the former Alexandria waste dump.

As part of the works Campbell St, as well as Campbell, Euston and Gardeners roads will be widened. A new cycling and pedestrian bridge will be built over Alexandra Canal linking Mascot town centre with St Peters and Sydney Park.