this land is your land

I heard on the grapevine that the North Street area of Lewes has been sold to a foreign buyer (subject to contract). Its previous owner, Anglo-Irish Bank, who had loaned a ridiculous sum to Charles Style of Angel Properties to develop it, had repossessed it when Angel Properties went into admin. The Anglo-Irish Bank, which was heavily over-extended, in turn, went bust and was nationalised a couple of years ago so the land was until recently being held by the Irish government.

News of its new ownership must come as a blow to the Lewes Community Land Trust, which had created a consortium of social developers including Guinness Trust, to bid for the land. Their bid, however, was conditional and was probably underbid by an unconditional offer, which the Irish Government had been requiring.

What upsets me is that someone can simply buy a piece of land that’s essential to a town’s infrastructure, and then attempt to make money out of it, with little reference to the people who live and work there, this history, the culture, such as we saw with Charles Style’s bizarre Phoenix Quarter – brilliantly subdued by Lewes Matters five years ago.

At the moment, North Street is experiencing a small renaissance, with individuals and small groups of people renting the warehouses to make goods and run services. It’s probably quite a significant source of self-employment and employment in the town, precisely because there are no corporate logos to be seen, but under-valued as a result. The myth still prevails in town planning that large employers are the biggest source of revenue for a town, when the opposite is often true.  

Is the 22-acre land being landbanked as part of a wealthy foreigner’s property portfolio with the tenants in long-term uncertainty and unable to invest in infrastructure? Or will Lewes residents once again be faced with staving off someone else’s self-wealth-creating ‘vision for North St’? We shall see. I look forward to a future where once again Lewes is run by and for local people, looking after each other in the complex web of interconnectedness that creates real abundance and resilience. 

the real 'big society'

One of the great things about Lewes is that the Big Society has already arrived in another guise; perhaps it has never gone away. Wherever you slice the cake, you see layers of people doing things for other people for nothing. Take public transport, for example. The uber site for this in Lewes is Travel Log Lewes, an up to date website full of ideas and advice of how to travel around without a car, and which also offers a free monthly newsletter. According to Chris Smith, the (unpaid) editor, there are no less than four different walking groups around Lewes, some, including  Lewes Footpaths Group, offering free walks.

On the cycling front, Cycle Lewes has a great website, full of local information and routes and has created a wonderful hard-copy cycling map, with help from District Council funds, available free at the Tourist Information Centre. They also campaign for more cycle routes, including the Lewes-Newhaven route and completion of the route from Ringmer.

Bus-wise, our hands seem to be tied by the bus companies and East Sussex county Council who seem not to realise what a lifeline buses are to the vulnerable and isolated. I didn’t realise, though, we do have a community bus, according to Travel Log Lewes, whose existence is owed to Ruth O’Keeffe and other dedicated local councillors (who by the way are also unpaid).

Trains, obviously, are operated by commercial outfits, but I didn’t realise that, according to Travel Log Lewes, you can get Daysave tickets from the Tourist Information Office that allows you to travel anywhere on Southern Trains for £10 for one and £20 for four if you avoid the rush hours.

In terms of car clubs, Lewes has two informal, volunteer-run car clubs, one, the Silver Bean Car Club is an informal car club I helped start and which reduces the money and hassle that comes with owning a car. If you want to start your own group you can read about how we did it here. And the District Council has also started a car club, run by CommonWheels CIC, with European money, open to everyone in Lewes.

Most Lewes schools now have volunteer-run walking buses that take children to and from school on foot. The District Council’s Think Air campaign still continues to try to relieve the congestion and resulting illegal levels of NO2 emissions on School Hill and Fisher Street.  And Lewes Living Streets is, I believe, still campaigning for a 20mph speed limit throughout Lewes.

Everything I’ve listed above is run by Lewes people for Lewes people, all for free. In a world where the corporations suck money out of the land and out of communities, and try to seduce us so loudly, it’s easy to forget this huge layer of community expertise and goodwill, our local immune system, underlying our wellbeing and ready to spring in to action when necessary. Let’s remember that this huge, often invisible, source of people power is where our resilience lies.

the wasteland

A little pleasure garden is rising out of the rubbish and brambles on the North Street industrial estate. In the marginal land between a building that used to house the fire brigade and the walled-in river, a patch is being tended, tenderly, by a few people thrown together through the love of it. It’s a community garden in the making, so everyone’s welcome. On the first day we picked up the litter and cut back the brambles. The stronger among us hoisted logs to make a hexagonal raised keyhole bed. At the next session we planted strawberries, raspberries and an artichoke in it and made some paths using an old pile of woodchip. A little boy pitched in with his bucket and spade. An artist made a path around a welcoming mound by the entrance, on which we’ll plant crocuses, primroses and forget-me-nots. Soon we’ll make a swing, a fire pit and somewhere to sit, and a willow dome for the children, all out of scraps and unwanted things. A friend is running a biodynamic compost making workshop there soon, which will help revitalise the polluted soil. It’s becoming a place of beauty and intention.

Last week’s Costing the Earth spent 30 minutes covering the New Diggers, a new wave of people reclaiming unused land all over Britain in order to feed themselves. It’s a visceral collective response to climate change and peak oil, a move to empower ourselves in the face of uncertainty.

We all garden for different reasons, and this patch is special to me because of the people I am working with and because I love marginal places, derelict land where nature shows up through the cracks. That’s the reason why I never pay to visit National Trust gardens and the like; to me they’re sterile, forced arrangements in comparison. No, the wild places, the edges, are where it’s all happening. Last night’s totally gorgeous Natural World focused on the Wild Places of Essex. And there are plenty all around Lewes, when you start to look. From the moss on a wall to the tall grasses on the mounts and the wild patches near the castle, nature is constantly reasserting herself; you can never keep her down, never tame her. So we’re helping her along, a bit of Earth repair in our little Pop-Up garden, a place where people can be together and do what comes naturally.

Knowing our onions

Despite the background chatter, news of the world crisis/opportunity is deepening daily. The future scenarios vary from apolcalyptic to idealised, so I stick to comment by deep thinkers and visionaries. Richard Heinberg, who visited Lewes recently, describes this time as the calm before the storm and encourages us to appreciate what’s around us. When he was in Lewes he spoke of the need for the world to develop resilient, localised communities, which are flexible and able to respond intelligently to shaky economies, resource shortages and climate impacts such as flooding.

In this recent video, he notes that we’ve already missed several opportunities to do so but that we still have the luxury of time and relative wealth to prepare ourselves and our communities. In terms of a risk assessment, it seems sensible, however surreal, to respond even to a small risk with a big potential impact.

These days I’m developing my food growing skills, since I’ve always had a latent smallholder in me. I’m already outgrowing my tiny garden and am planning next year’s experiment: a medium plot of potatoes, onions, beans and pumpkins. I’ll grow leafy greens and herbs at home and am looking for a plot near enough to commute to for those staples. Robin has offered me a corner of his field, or perhaps I’ll look for someone who wants to share their garden in Transition Town Lewes’s Garden Buddies scheme. One of the most radical positive acts we can do in these times is grow our own organic vegetables or buy them from a local grower.

Bag banning

I practically fell over in the aisle at Waitrose last Friday when I was asked whether I would like a bag. A glance to my left confirmed a strange absence of plastic bags. The checkout girl gleefully told me that management that day had issued instructions to hide the bags, and assume customers would bring their own. Suddenly plastic bags are uncool. How did this happen, I wondered? Was this the result of competitor M&S’s announcement the previous day that it was to charge for bags? Was it Gordon Brown’s plan to get tough on plastic bags? Was it Lewes Town Council’s decision last week to step up efforts to help Lewes go plastic bag free? Or was it a compelling (or rather shaming) growing presence on the streets of Lewes of cotton and hessian alternatives?

You could say that plastic bags are a paltry distraction from the devilish things Gordon Brown and co are pushing through: What matter the odd bag in the face of a new Heathrow runway or coal powered station? Complacency is the new denial, and we could be sleepwalking towards our own demise by believing that plastic bags, composting and eating organically are together enough to get us through the survival bottleneck ahead. But perhaps the plastic bag phenomenon illustrates the power of the 100th monkey. This year plastic bags are the new drink driving; next year flying might be. Can we save the world one bag at a time?

Insider information: some of the places generating their own beautiful bags are Lansdown Foods, Harvey’s shop, Bill’s, Wickle, Lewes New School, Gossypium and the Farmer’s Market

Money as powertool

I've got money on the brain these days. Money is like thought: what you invest it in creates reality. So when I do spend money these days, I like to think of it as a creative act: by buying from local food producers I am reconnecting the broken links between myself and the land. When I buy from people who make clothes and useful things I am supporting that person’s life. When I buy from local shops, even if the goods are not local I am helping rebuild our community’s economy or lifeblood.

Not that I do buy much these days: apart from food, one can live extremely well off the fat of our society’s excesses by harvesting skips, swapping with friends, buying second hand or using Freecycle. But the other day I did, after some thought, buy something new: a pressure cooker. It was, at £106 from Steamer Trading on School Hill, the most expensive thing I’ve bought in ages. A month on, this tribute to Swiss engineering is practically a member of our family. We can now cook rich meat stews or chickpeas for houmous in 20 minutes, brown rice in 10 and steam root veg in seconds. It’s a great investment that, the makers say, can pay for itself in six months through energy savings. Plus, unlike most bought stuff, it’s helping us do our bit for the planet.

The power of Lewes

I was talking to Colin Brent, economic historian, this morning and he told me that in Victorian times almost all Lewes businesses were owned by people who lived in Lewes or near Lewes.

Local people owned the gasworks and the waterworks. Local people owned the farms and the shops. Local people owned the barges that went up the river and the breweries. Local people owned the three newspapers and the print-works. Local people owned the foundries, including a big one called Phoenix. Local people owned the banks, including Lewes New Bank, on the site of Barclays Bank, and which joined with other banks to create the first Barclays Bank, a direct line from local to global. The only business that Lewes people did not own was the London to Brighton South Coast Railway, but local people initiated and were shareholders in the Lewes to Uckfield line.

In the age of capitalism, we Lewesians have given away our power; leaving ourselves vulnerable to the hunger of corporate and supermarket agendas and out of town developers. However, the tide might be turning. The picketers at Lewes Arms pulled off a great coup last week; another group is forming a community land trust to investigate community ownership of the land of Lewes, and Lewes Community Partnership is seeking funding to buy the Pinwell Road site for an array of local businesses. With troubles ahead, we might just be waking up to the need to rebuild our resilience and abundance. Colin Brent will be talking at Pelham House alongside Bill Collison and Topsy Jewell at the next Transition Town meeting, ‘Feeding Lewes - Past, present and Future’ Wed 2nd May, Pelham House 8pm, £3

The hundredth monkey

I’ve never written about the title of this column before. It’s based on a story about monkeys on a Pacific island who started to wash their fruit in the river before eating it. Once a critical mass of monkeys (say 100) had cottoned on to this improvement in their standard of living, monkeys on neighbouring islands started to do the same, even though they were not communicating in any obvious way.

This story - the Hundredth Monkey - is one of the great Urban Myths, made up by a sixties philosopher, Lyall Watson, to illustrate a phenomenon called morphic resonance, a term coined by the scientist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake himself carried out experiments to prove morphic resonance, which explains why, for example, dogs know when their owners are about to return, and why the more rats complete a maze, the easier it becomes for succeeding and different rats to complete the maze, and so on. Humans also communicate through morphic resonance, or as Karl Jung called it, the collective unconscious. Viva Lewes might call it the zeitgeist. Malcomlm Gladwell writes about it as the Tipping Point. I see myself as one of the first hundred monkeys (or rats) creating new pathways, new stories, to help us live more humanly and within our collective means. Our society desperately needs a new story - or maybe we should revisit some of the great fairy tales and native traditions. Transition Town Lewes is a process of designing a story, or pathway - together - towards a more viable reality. I hope at least 100 monkeys will be at the Official Unleashing of Transition Town Lewes next Tuesday.

We belong to the earth

I’ve just had an Emperor's New Clothes moment. In deep despair this weekend over the UN report, I was thinking and dreaming about how we humans were going to turn this beast around in time to avert unimaginable cross-species suffering by 2100. With our leaders not only in denial but in the case of Bush and his neocons, appearing to be deliberately ‘bringing on’ Armageddon, things look bleak.

It’s not a great stretch to understand that cutting CO2 emissions means a planned descent from fossil fuel use. And unless we move en masse to nuclear or renewables (both of which are problematic large-scale) this means the economy - so closely linked to oil and gas production - has to turn the peak towards terminal decline. But that very solution for the biosphere is also the greatest fear of governments and corporations, whose lifeblood is economic growth. I spoke to Chris Skrebowski, Editor of the Petroleum Review, on Sunday inviting him to speak about peak oil in the Transition Town Lewes programme later this spring. He confirmed this and more: our leaders will not make the first move. Many people have been saying, and it was reiterated at the Soil Association conference: change will start from the individuals, communities and organisations who don't have as vested an interest in endless growth.Which is what gives me the greatest hope: we are moving towards a paradigm shift or turning point, into a new era, when we stop believing that the earth belongs to us and start realising that we belong to the earth.

Vision or business as usual?

According to Einstein, intuition is the most important thing. Sometimes you just know. Like Virgin airline boss Richard Branson offering a $25 million prize for the first scientist to come up with a technology that removes carbon from the air. That’s just wrong. Intuitively, morally - are they the same? Like our District Council’s planning department last Friday putting Angel Properties together with 19 stakeholders who without exception are people the developer has consulted, and calling it a Visioning for the North Street area. That’s just wrong, isn’t it?

Apart from anything else I’m disappointed with our elected officers for hijacking the precious V word. I could lobby, protest and write things like this, but I don’t want to. Having paddled in the waters of spin, greed and denial the last few weeks, I’ve decided that this is not my bag. It’s there; it runs the show. For now. But what I’m most interested in is the twin sister. Hope, truth, honesty. Intuition. Vision.

Real vision is what I experienced at the first event of Transition Town Lewes last Sunday. End of Suburbia was documentary film about a post-peak oil future that was both shocking and strangely encouraging. Afterwards, the 81 people who attended stuck up post-it notes: ‘One step I can take’, ‘One step Lewes can take’, ‘One step government can take’. The intentions, collated and emailed back to the filmgoers and now on the Transition Town Wiki page, are beautiful, juicy with personal vision and hope. That’s the reality I choose.

The Baked Bean Car Club

Luckily my growing allergy to cars and the stuff around cars has neatly dovetailed with an imperative to reduce our ecological footprint in order to save the planet. So last week we gave away our car: a Ford transit minibus, in fact, on Freeserve. It was claimed by a local charity. 

This idea has been brewing for a year. At first I felt deprived and curtailed at the thought of it. But we started using trains more, walking around town more (it helps not shopping in supermarkets and getting most of our food delivered free) and planning things differently, so we ended up not using the wheels much anyway. But I do like to go to the woods once a week. So we’ve started a car share between five people, using a friend’s car. The cost is £100 refundable deposit to pay for the initial service and insurance, and then £1 an hour or £10 per day, plus petrol. We’re reviewing and refining it as we go along. 

Car share schemes are springing up all over the country. Imagine them springing up here: a shared car/bike/minibus/van on every street in Lewes, with free parking. Imagine the council paying someone a salary to manage this. Apparently it costs £2,200 a year to keep a car on the road and it’s getting more expensive. So we’re saving loads of money. Plus we get to be smug about something we were going to do anyway!