Showing posts with label development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label development. Show all posts

Thursday, 8 December 2011

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. 

Friday, 13 June 2008

Getting oil out of our food

In Transition Town Lewes we’ve been asking for a while how we will feed ourselves in a world after oil. Now it’s a relief to hear this question go mainstream. The answers that arise are varied and often exciting. The Food Programme last week featured communities growing their own food and ended with an interview with the eloquent Kath Dalmeny from Sustain. ‘We’ve got to have a vision of what we want to world to be like when the oil prices become too high,’ she said. ‘There are some examples of this already: there are park deparments who are allowing land to be used as community gardens, Crown Estates, training up small producers. There are community supported farms such as Tablehurst and Plawhatch in East Sussex issuing shares. We’ve got to get serious about this stuff if we’re going to grow enough food to make a difference.’

She pointed out that we cannot wait for government to take the lead and suspects a lot of initiatives will come from local people demanding them. ‘If you look at the carbon footprint of the food we eat, it makes most sense to grow our horticultural produce - perishable salad leaves and so on - very close to where they are consumed. That way you can take away the need for refrigeration. We need a growing policy for the UK, a kind of vision that would genuinely take oil out of the equation.’

Monbiot, too, writes about how small farms and smallholdings across the world are far more productive than broadscale agriculture. Almost all commentators, other than the Monsanto gang, are pointing in the same direction: in a world with less oil we will feed ourselves locally. It’s common sense. Last weekend a group of us planted a small urban edible garden in public view just opposite St John’s Sub-Castro. A quick covering of foraged cardboard, compost and straw excludes the weeds in this no-dig garden and provides a mulch for the pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, sweetcorn and marrows (by request of the owner).

Lewes must be at least 20% garden. And we’re blessed with a number of excellent local farmers and growers. We can feed ourselves, sooner by choice or later by necessity. I know what option I prefer.