The construction of ever larger and costlier accelerator facilities has its limits, and new technologies will be needed to push the energy frontier. Plasma Wakefield acceleration is a rapidly developing field which appears to be a promising candidate technology for future high-energy accelerators. The AWAKE project has been proposed as an approach to accelerate an electron beam to the TeV energy regime in a single plasma section. To verify this novel technique, a proof-of-principle demonstration experiment is proposed by a proto-collaboration, using 400 GeV proton beams from the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN.