In a second video, Chris and Graham get in off the roof and talk in more depth about how the scheme came into being, and the obstacles it overcame:

TT-Llandeilo in Wales are fighting to save their historic Market Hall while plans are being considered for a new Sainsbury’s supermarket to the north of the town – read more in This is South Wales.  Picking up a story from last month’s round up, which was explored in more detail in the last Transition podcast, here is an article in Treehugger on TT-Whitehead planting 60,000 trees which includes their fantastic video that we featured here last month.

Transition Heathrow: Credit: Kristian Buus

On the same subject, TT-Horncastle in Lincolnshire have been planting hazelnut trees (see above) as part of their plan to have an orchard spread around the town. Ian Westmoreland from Transition Heathrow (see right) came to give a talk in Totnes to talk about their Grow Heathrow project, which explored the place where Transition and activism meet.

TT-Bridport has joined forces with another local community group and have offered placements to unemployed young people to teach them practical skills.  TT-Dorchester and TT-Taunton in Somerset both held a Wassail at their local community orchards (see left)! Dorchester’s was followed by an orchard work day.   For those not familiar with the term, an orchard-visiting wassail refers to the ancient custom of visiting orchards, reciting incantations and singing to the trees in apple orchards in cider-producing regions of England to promote a good harvest for the coming year.

TT-Bolton have written this rational and forward thinking letter to their local council with 2 specific objections and 2 specific (and they believe achievable) aims for the next 14 year period.  At the end of the letter they refer to two articles which may be of interest, here and here.

So, to London.  Here is a very silly indeed video of Transition Crystal Palace:

Transition Kensal to Kilburn, like quite a few other London Transition groups, have been running Draughtbusting workshops.  These 3 videos take us inside what really happens at a Draughtbusting workshop….

Transition Town Tooting met to make some Transition New Year resolutions.  TT-Brixton have started a Family Group (see right) where everyone is welcome (everyone is part of a family in some way)! Read here for more details of their planned activities.  Transition Brixton’s Brixton Pound initiative also got a mention at the recent Davos Economic Summit!  Have a look a 4.30 into this interview with Stewart Wallis of nef:

While we’re on the subject, the Bristol Pound, the first city-wide complementary currency is coming soon, keenly supported by Bristol City Council.  You can keep up to date with developments at their rather impressive new website.

In a follow up to last month’s story, two very worthy hospices benefitted from TT-Shrewsbury’s post Christmas cardboard collecting initiative (which also featured in our most recent podcast). Read the full story here and see pic, left.

TT-Shrewsbury have also been busy as part of The Shrewsbury Hydro Group who are spearheading the new £100,000 power plan for Shrewsbury Castlefields weir (a story we heard about in a special podcast in December).  A lovely example of skills being shared for a good cause as TT-Worthing took part in a Winter Warmer campaign by knitting woollen hats, gloves and scarves for two local charities (see right).

Here’s a great idea: Transition Cardiff have started ‘Show and Tell’ evenings, where people from different sustainability initiatives in the area are invited to come and present what they are up to.  Here’s a film about it:

The Local Energy Assessment Fund (LEAF), run by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) recently announced 82 winning communities, who between them shared £4 million for community energy projects.  A quick look through the list of finalists shows that about 10 of them were Transition initiatives.  Among those, Transition Town Totnes got funding to retrofit Dartington Parish Hall, Transition Eynsham Area are now able to insulate local homes, Taunton Transition Town can now do some research on the best ways to reduce energy in Taunton, and Transition West Bridgford will be rolling out its ‘EcoHouses’ project, to name just a few.

Speaking of Totnes, Transition Town Totnes’ ‘Transition Homes’ project recently held an Open Day in the same Dartington Parish Hall, to inform local residents of their plans:

Internationally, the Transition initiatives that feature in the new film ‘In Transition 2.0′ are getting ready to preview the film tomorrow (Thursday 2nd February).  Transition Town Lewes are showing it in the town hall, and didn’t like Transition Network’s poster and so made their own (see right), Transition City Lancaster are showing it at Dukes, Transition Marsden & Slaithwaite are putting it on at the Watershed, Transition Monteveglio have had to cancel theirs due to arctic winds and snowstorms, Transition Wayland in the US are using the town building, Love Lyttelton in New Zealand will be showing it in their office, in a fire station in Moss Side, Manchester, in a Hindu Temple in Tooting,  in a school in Finsbury Park, in a hall in Koganei, Japan, in ‘Cinema Paradiso’ in Auroville, India and in Aldeia das Amoreiras Sustentável in Portugal.  Its premiere will be announced soon, and it will be more widely available for screenings from the end of March.

Popping over to British Columbia in Canada, a Shuswap resident (what a great name for a place) is interviewed about why she became involved in Transition in this lovely Salmon Arm Observer article (Salmon Arm, there’s another great name for a place!).  See also this related article on Ten Resolutions for Resilience.

Also in British Columbia, local resident and farmer Matthew Stewart (see below) has taken the first steps in getting a local Transition initiative up and running in the city of Burnaby which sits to the east of Vancouver. Read a Q&A with Matthew in Burnaby Now.

Growing a greener world: Moreno Zanotto, Matthew Stuart and Sarah Milton aim to create communities free from fossil fuel dependence, starting with community gardening and green transportation. Credit: Lisa King, Burnaby Now

TT-Woodstock is one of only two Transition groups in the East Canadian province of New Brunswick.  The group have built a solar-powered cooker that’s used at public events such as Canada Day, compiled a local food directory and established a community garden. They continue to actively encourage more local people to join them.

Heading south to the US, you can check out the US edition of the January roundup here.  From Massachusetts, this simple Resilience Questionnaire put together by The Jamaica Plain (JP) New Economy Transition seeks to find out direct from their residents just how ready their JP community is for change.  Also in Jamaica Plain, for their first Potluck of 2012, local residents Jenny Jones, Alvin Kho and Andree Zaleska shared their respective experiences of the Festival Garden, Egleston Community Orchard and the JP Green House.

A Senior center in Chelsea, Michigan is to host series of free classes on resilience, sustainability and the transition movement and kicks off with a program on “Chelsea’s Resilience 100 Years Ago.”  In North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, the first Transition Congregation sustainability workshop in the US has taken place with Transition Trainer Tina Clarke.

In Wyncote, Transition Cheltenham have started a Sunday Supper series with an excerpt from the film Gasland followed by a speaker and discussion about fracking.  Also in Pennsylvania, the Penn State Center for Sustainability did this review of The Transition Companion and held its second energy forum, ‘Marcellus Shale and Beyond’ which sought to answer questions such as ‘Why do we need our own energy plan?’ and ‘Who is going to fix a growing list of intractable problems?  Government?  Business?  Academia?’

In Utah, Transition Salt Lake City held a meeting at a local church to showcase their website, take part in a mind map exercise and share a potluck meal (see right).  Following a “Training for Transition” in December, Dummerston is the 9^th town in Vermont to start up a Transition initiative and this month held a potluck dinner, a screening of In Transition 1.0 followed by a discussion.

The spread of Transition in Brazil continues apace.  May East sent us the following reports of two particular recent developments there:

Transition Ametista: Town of 150,000 people, the largest Amethyst mines of South America. The town today stands over a Swiss cheese as they have been digging the subsoil for decades.  Recently they have been influenced by brilliant Brazilian permaculture designers friends of ours and decided to diversify economy, close the loops of extraction, created factory of eco-bricks, went back to grow grapes & vinyards, decided to age wines inside of the amethyst caves… a great case study.

We were hosted by the Major and had many reps of LA of the regional towns.  Marcello co-facilitated with me (see photo below).

Transition Rio – Rio has now many initiatives.  This is the third year; third group and I trust one of our trainers who is visiting the UK at the moment will be able to present all that is happening. Transition Brazil is planning a 2 day conference during Rio+20.

That’s it for now.  The next podcast, telling more about some of these stories, will be out in a couple of weeks.  If there are any stories you would especially like to hear more about, please let us know via the comments box below.

Here are some photos to accompany the podcast….

Information about the Tres Hombres

Captain Jorne Langelaan telling the assembled visitors about the ship.

Exeter Brewery's beer stowed safely in the hold.

Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: The Case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK)
By Rob Hopkins
475 pp. University of Plymouth, Devon, UK – Oct. 2010. £15.00; available only in PDF at Transitionculture.org.

For several years groups of innovative, environmentally conscious people worldwide have been part of a social change movement called Transition. It strives to create relocalized communities that are resilient to the looming climate and energy crises, and in which “the future with less oil could be preferable to the present.” It all began humbly enough as a class project six years ago. Since then, it’s spawned thousands of communities, inspired a documentary and several books, been awarded millions in grants and vaulted its figurehead, Rob Hopkins, to something like celebrity status in southwestern England (really not sure about this bit! Rob…). If there’s a movement today that can be welcomed as a fulfillment of David Korten’s 2006 book The Great Turning, this is it.

The bible of Transition is Hopkins’ Transition Handbook (Green Books, 2008). But in hindsight Hopkins has come to view this book with a critical eye, noting fallacies in its reasoning that he attributes to Transition’s organic, ever-changing nature and its still being a young movement. Partly to address these flaws, he’s now come out with a second book, Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: The Case of Transition Town Totnes. It’s the dissertation for a doctoral degree that he pursued for four years along with his activist work. Hopkins is now a newly minted Ph.D. and is marketing Localisation and Resilience through his Web site as a companion volume to Transition Handbook.

The dissertation is a case study of the first official Transition Town, the English market town of Totnes, long a popular tourist destination known for its alternative culture. Using interviews, focus groups, questionnaire surveys and other social science research methods, the study examines the degree to which the Transition ideals of localization and resilience have become a reality in Totnes. (Transitioners endorse a number of upbeat definitions of a resilient community, a popular one being “[a] culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its own limits, and able to thrive for having done so.”*)

When Transition began, Hopkins was an instructor at the Kinsale Further Education College in Kinsale, Ireland. He was teaching permaculture, an environmental design approach that dates back to the ‘70s oil crises. Not yet peak oil-aware, he saw his work primarily as a way of nurturing beneficial relationships within communities, rather than as a ticket to a gentle ride down our energy descent. But when someone did introduce him to peak oil, it dawned on him that permaculture just may be humankind’s best shot at salvation. He and his students embarked on a project to determine what steps their community would need to take in order to successfully weather the decline of oil. The result was a cornerstone Transition text, the very first Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP).**

Kinsale Town Council made the historic decision to adopt their EDAP, with the result that Kinsale is now a proud part of the Transition network.† However, it is in Totnes that Transition took off the fastest, hence Totnes’ status as the first official Transition Town and the home base for the movement. In just a few years, Transition Town Totnes (TTT) went from being the abstract aspiration of zealous volunteers to a limited company offering an array of programs aimed at promoting self-reliant, low-carbon living throughout the South Hams region (a few highlights include Gardenshare, the Nut Tree Planting Project and a local currency called the Totnes Pound).

It is challenging to generalize about results, since Transition is meant as a catalyst for community action rather than as a prescribed program, and different communities come up with different initiatives depending on their particular circumstances. But one general conclusion that Hopkins draws from his research is that the Transition approach has been effective in generating community engagement and initiating new enterprises.

Hopkins admits that Totnes still has a long way to go toward meeting its needs locally. However, he demonstrates that it could supply nearly all of its own food needs, the only exceptions being foods that require soil types not indigenous to the region. As for energy, Hopkins shows that local renewables could meet half of total demand, and that efficiency measures could make up the difference. On the subject of housing, he says that demand could easily be met with local materials (e.g., straw bales, earth, lime, car tires and other recycled objects, hempcrete and cob) but that ramping up current natural building efforts to a commercial scale has proven difficult. Lastly, with regard to transport, Hopkins notes Totnes’ high level of automobile use and suggests that a crucial step in reducing it will be to sway people’s attitudes.

Some of the study’s findings weren’t at all what Hopkins had hypothesized. For example, he originally hypothesized that the main obstacles to resilience and relocalization in Totnes would prove to be an absence of community cohesion and a lack of skills. But as it turns out, the actual stumbling blocks are largely issues of governance. Another major obstacle is the need for increased social enterprise, a still-little-understood quality that Hopkins suggests may be “the key to stepping across from thinking to doing.”

The oral history interviews give the dissertation an ethnographic feel and illustrate how profoundly daily life in Totnes has changed since the advent of cheap oil. The interviews are used to gain insights from the past that may prove useful in acclimating to an oil-scarce future. Hopkins’ team randomly selected townspeople with memories of the period from 1930 to 1955 and had them describe their recollections of the local economy and what practical skills people had then that they don’t have now. In one telling interview, a woman remembers the dreaded chore of doing laundry before electric washers and dryers were widespread. She recalls, “We had a mangle, you had to mangle your clothes! It was terrible. Your feet and legs would get wet, it was hard work.”

Hopkins is mindful of his positionality as a researcher trying to critically examine his own movement. “I am not able to assume an entirely impartial and neutral position in relation to the subject of this PhD,” he concedes. So in designing his methodology, he took steps to at least minimize bias. He had his assistants conduct interviews for him whenever possible, since interviewees who knew him might have been inclined to give him answers that he wanted to hear. And whenever he was conducting interviews, he would tell interviewees to “please answer the following questions as though I have no connection whatsoever with TTT.” He admits that these measures weren’t completely effective, but suggests that the resulting sacrifice of objectivity was made up for by the advantages of his embeddedness in TTT, namely, his trusted access to specialists in a range of fields and an understanding of the community “from the inside.”

Localisation and Resilience represents a solid case study of the first Transition initiative. It goes a long way toward filling some chasms in the resilience literature, which, as Hopkins points out, is still quite sparse. And of course, one of the ultimate tests of its academic rigor has been passed with flying colors, now that Hopkins has successfully defended his research and been granted a doctoral degree.

Hopkins’ Englishness automatically gives him an edge over other peak oil thinkers. England, like Europe at large, is implicitly more appreciative of the gift of abundant oil than is America, since it’s long been much more expensive there. And while the nation shares much of America’s oil vulnerability, it’s easier to get around there without fuel, since the area was settled long before the reign of the automobile. Localisation and Resilience offers no comment on the prospects for Transition on this reviewer’s side of the Atlantic; but it certainly has been heartening to watch the movement build steadily here, from just one official initiative in 2008 to 79 at last count.‡

_{* “Resilience – a few more definitions,” Transition Town Totnes, http://www.transitiontowntotnes.org/content/resilience-few-more-definiti… (accessed Jan. 29, 2011).
** Rob Hopkins, “Powerdown and Permaculture: At the Cusp of Transition,” in Gaian Economics: Living Well within Planetary Limits, eds. Jonathan Dawson, Ross Jackson and Helena Norberg-Hodge (East Meon, Hampshire, UK: Hyden House Ltd., 2010), 212-7.
† Adam Fenderson, “Energy Descent Action Plans – a primer,” Energy Bulletin, Jun. 7, 2006, http://www.energybulletin.net/node/16859 (accessed Jan. 27, 2011).
‡ ”Official Transition Initiatives,” Transition US, http://transitionus.org/initiatives-map (accessed Feb. 1, 2011).}

Maps.  Wonderful things.  From Googlemaps to scribbled-on Ordnance Survey maps: from sophisticated GIS maps to huge maps of the area that people can stick stuff to, maps are a fantastic tool for bringing the area you are working in to life.  One of the Ingredients of Transition is called ‘Meaningful Maps’, and it looks at the importance of using maps in both serious and playful ways.  For example, the picture above is Transition Hereford’s ‘Mappa Sustainability’, modelled on the 1300s Hereford Mappa Mundi, the largest medieval map still in existence, which was exhibited in the town in order to gather peoples’ sustainability projects and stories.  Does your Transition initiative use maps?  How?  Please tell me your stories….

Picture used with permission of Totnes Image Bank and Rural Archive.

Context:

When starting work on your ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN, or any other form of community VISIONING exercise, oral histories can offer a fascinating look at examples of community and PERSONAL RESILIENCE in our recent past. There is also something in oral histories that reinforce the ROLE OF STORYTELLING the power of hearing stories of the practicalities of living with less energy and resources, and more frugally than today. Bringing memories of life before cheap energy and practical skills some people still carry can make a very useful contribution to your GREAT RESKILLING work.

(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).

The challenge:

We have lost access to a significant community resource; our local oral history. This history would have been crucial in part societies, as this was the repository of how to sustainably manage local resources and live closer to the bioregion, its soils and microclimates. The advent of the fossil fuel age greatly diminished the need for those resources. In a world that was fast changing the old ways became quickly seen as being less useful and much knowledge was discarded into the dustbin of history. While not for a moment suggesting the future will be like the past, any process of designing for the future that ignores the past is like building a house with no foundation.

Core Text

Oral histories offer a key tool for understanding how the place we live functioned before cheap oil changed it profoundly, while also dismantling its resilience to a point where very little remains. They take the past and they populate it with characters, anecdotes and stories. They change the way you look at the place you live. They help a more localised economy feel like something tangible. However, they are not about nostalgia, about romanticising some idealised version of the past never actually existed. The future can never be like the past, but it needs to learn from it, hence its importance in a Transition initiative’s planning for the future.

I love doing oral history interviews. Here are a few tips:

• The first few people that you interview may well be people that you already know, neighbours or acquaintances. Chances are though that they will be able to point out other people to talk to, or your local museum might be able to suggest some people too
• Make sure at the start of the interview that the interviewee is happy to be interviewed, happy to be recorded, and happy for you to use excerpts in printed material
• I usually start by asking them to give a potted history of their life so far in 10 minutes, and then go back to the period I want to focus on (usually the 1940s-50s) and explore in more details how food, energy, housing, employment, community and so on were for them at that time
• Record the interview digitally for subsequent transcription
• Avoid doing more than one interview together. I once interviewed two people at the same time, and they kept lapsing into reminiscing, “you remember George?”, “oh yes George! Now didn’t have a daughter, what was her name?”… and so on… best avoided, you spend all your time trying to steer people back to what you want them to talk about
• I usually send interviewees the transcript of our interview afterwards for them to read through and check details.

As well as interviews, you might want to also gather old songs and folklore. What is important though, for me anyway, is a focus on practicalities. Where was food grown? How did people manage with less energy than today? What kind of work did people do? What does a culture of frugality look like in practice? For Transition Town Totnes’s Energy Descent Action Plan, 14 people were interviewed, and the article produced from their interviews opens the plan, setting out the history of the town in which the EDAP has its roots. The tales of urban market gardens, of life with no need for a car, more seasonal diets and a town more connected to its farmland, offer a fascinating glimpse into the past, which can do much to help inform where we might go in the future.

PLAN-it Environmental Education in Cornwall ran a programme called ‘Traditions to Transition’, which brought together older people through Age Concern with pupils from Cape Cornwall School, in such a way that the younger people interviewed the elders about life before cheap energy, in the context of sustainability and peak oil. The result was a fascinating bringing together of the generations.

The solution:

Find ways for elders – and others – to tell their story and start to re weave the local cultural narrative. Bring elders and local story tellers into schools. Create events and meeting places where younger and older people can meet (moots) and tell their stories, formally or informally. Use artists and musicians to create evenings of storytelling and song about the local community. Identify from oral history interviews the elements of how life was resilient, and what from that past might be carried forward into a lower energy, more localised world.

Connections to other patterns:

Weaving oral histories into AWARENESS RAISING work can be a great way of increasing INCLUSION/DIVERSITY, and of connecting up the generations in this work. ARTS AND CREATIVITY can also be a great way of bringing oral histories to life, through a wide range of media. You might even think of making them a central element of your UNLEASHING.

Please leave comments here.

In The Pattern of English Building, his seminal review of vernacular English construction techniques and the wide range of building materials that have defined English architecture – from flint and chalk to clay, oak and straw – Alec Clifton-Taylor wrote:

“all these different materials imposed architectural forms appropriate to their character and, despite the many visual improprieties of the last century and a quarter, the pattern is still remarkably complete. It was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable.”

In a world that lacked the hydrocarbon punch that today bestows the ability, which we take for granted, to move mountains, people in a wide diversity of locations developed forms of construction that reflected local materials, the local climate and other cultural influences particular to that place. From Devon’s curvaceous cob cottages to the limestone roofs of Dorset; from the intricate timber framing of Suffolk to the granite-walled homes of Leicestershire, it was the materials that defined the forms of building – leading also to a wide range of artisans and craftspeople: masons, ironmongers, lime kiln-keepers, thatchers and so on.

Over the past hundred years, during what one might call ‘The Age of Cheap Oil’, the process of building shelter has, like most other aspects of our lives, become increasingly industrialised. A recent study by British Gas found that houses built during the 1960s were built to such shockingly poor standards of energy efficiency that they performed worse than the Tudor homes of the 1500s. In an oral history interview I did in Totnes, Devon, a man who grew up in the town in the 1960s recalled his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press.

“She just wanted modern. She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything. She wanted automatic this, that and everything. So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building to a brand-new house, typical of its time. Wooden-framed, single-glazed windows, open fire for a chimney which she quickly replaced with an electric fire (“I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”). The winters were actually colder than in the previous house. You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold. Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on. Electricity was cheap in those days.”

These days our challenges in terms of shelter are different from those of the 1960s. We no longer live in a world of cheap and abundant energy. Promises of ‘electricity too cheap to meter’ have been and gone, and the climate change caused by our burning of fossil fuels is an increasingly urgent issue. It is clear that the target of avoiding a 2°C rise in greenhouse gas emissions is being overtaken by reality: feedbacks not expected for 50-100 years are already under way – the melting of Arctic ice, the release of methane from the seabed, the melting of permafrost, the disappearance of glaciers; the list goes on . . . This is all happening just because of a 0.8°C rise in the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere since fossil-fuel burning began in earnest. The urgent need is not only to reduce emissions, but to seek to phase them out altogether by 2030.

Over the past four years, the rapidly growing Transition movement has argued that climate change cannot be looked at in isolation from the imminent peaking in world oil production, with the resultant price volatility and interruptions to supply. This realisation has mobilised thousands of communities around the world to start planning for life beyond cheap energy – to see the end of the age of cheap energy and the need for urgent decarbonisation not as a disaster but as an opportunity; a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink basic assumptions. Transition Initiatives can now be found in villages, islands, cities, districts, boroughs, universities and schools around the world. They focus on the practicalities of relocalisation, offering a creative process of engagement and awareness-raising that seeks to involve the community in designing a new, and more appropriate, way forward. The impact of Transition thinking is starting to emerge in the most unexpected places. A report in 2010 from Lloyds Insurance and Chatham House argued, as Transition has for the past four years, that peak oil needs to be looked at alongside climate change, and the following quote from that report could have been taken straight from a Transition publication such as this book:

“Energy security is now inseparable from the transition to a low-carbon economy, and businesses plans should prepare for this new reality. Security of supply and emissions-reduction objectives should be addressed equally, as prioritising one over the other will increase the risk of stranded investments or requirements for expensive retrofitting.”

Just as they have in all other aspects of our lives, cheap fossil fuels have come to underpin the way in which we build our homes. In the same way that it has been argued that our current food system means that we are, in effect, as Dale Allen Pfeiffer put it, ‘eating oil’, such is the embodied energy in new buildings that it could be argued that we now live in buildings made from oil too.

In the same way that, across the world, the Transition movement is arguing for seeing peak oil and climate change as two sides of one coin, Chris Bird’s book represents an important shift in the debates around what the housing of the future will be like. Much of the literature on green building focuses on new build using local and/or natural materials – what is often termed ‘natural building’ – as self-builders discover the possibilities presented by materials such as cob, straw bales, hemp and so on. I have been involved in a number of natural building projects, and have taught straw-bale, cob, cordwood and hemp/lime construction courses. These are all wonderfully democratic materials; anyone can get the hang of them and use them to create individual spaces that feel so different from our everyday idea of what a house should feel like.

The point Chris makes in this book, however, is that the decisions about housing we need to make will bring together the challenges we face today (peak oil, climate change, the need vastly to reduce our energy consumption) with the challenges faced in the past (the need to rediscover local building materials). Much of what is known as ‘green building’ sources its materials from far and wide – sheep’s-wool insulation from Germany; lime from France; shingles from Canada. Like a delicious but distantly sourced organic meal, this represents an approach that is highly vulnerable to volatile energy prices.

The core argument of Local Sustainable Homes is that housing ourselves can be, and needs to be, about far more than simply having a roof over our heads. The model today is one of homes designed for us, built from high-embodied-energy materials, with a high carbon footprint; materials sourced wherever in the world they can be found cheapest; and the property purchased in a way that saddles us with a debt we then spend many years struggling to pay off. How would it be if, instead, we were more involved with our homes’ design, if our choice of materials meant that it became possible for local businesses to emerge to provide them, if the construction process worked in such a way that people could be trained to engage with construction for the first time, and if the homes were built in such a way as to require no space heating at all? We could, by building ‘sustainable homes’, produce buildings that lock up more carbon than they produce, that have a local distinctiveness, and that stimulate the local economy rather than leaching from it.

Of course, it is not all just about new buildings. Of Britain’s approximately 24 million homes, at least 87 per cent are projected to still be in use by 2050. Retrofitting existing homes saves 15 times more CO2 than demolishing and rebuilding them. Over the past 30 years we have also used our housing stock to introduce the ruinous idea that our houses will increase in value for ever, and that we can use them as a cash-dispensing machine. In the UK, and especially in Ireland, this has led to a huge problem of overpriced, energy-inefficient housing that nobody can afford, and historically unprecedented indebtedness. Alongside energy efficiency and local materials, it is clear that we also need to find new models for how we ‘do’ housing – such as cohousing, housing cooperatives and so on. Many such models are explored within these pages. As the implications of the bursting of the debt ‘bubble’ continue to unravel, the owner–occupier model will become increasingly difficult to sustain, and we will need to look at a variety of ways in which we may house ourselves.

Possibly the greatest challenge, however, is tackling the low energy efficiency of our housing. The UK has some of the worst housing stock in Europe in terms of energy efficiency. How to retrofit buildings of such wildly different types? Many innovative schemes are under way, and Chris explores some of these here.

The question this book addresses, ultimately, is: What is a ‘local house’? In ten years’ time, might it be possible that the building standards require that new buildings be constructed using almost entirely local materials, but built to very high energy-efficiency standards, and that the existing housing stock be made vastly more energy-efficient, again using mostly local materials? While little is yet happening in terms of the use of local materials for retrofits, one very exciting development, under construction as I write, is the building of two ‘local Passivhauses’ in Wales. These use largely local materials (over 90 per cent local for one of them), and are built to the Passivhaus standard, requiring no space heating at all. Their construction involves the seeking of local materials, the training of local builders, the recycling of local newspaper (for insulation) and the engagement of local window-makers to manufacture high-performance windows from local timber. It is a project that is beginning to model the future of construction in such a way that the future comes into distinct focus.

The challenge, though, as Gill Seyfang of UAE puts it, is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass-production”. Housing ourselves, and reducing the energy consumption of our existing homes, if done well, could become one of the key drivers of the regeneration of our local economies. These challenging times demand that we think smart, and that is just what Chris Bird does within these pages.

Rob Hopkins, September 2010

The evening was opened by Jacqi Hodgson, and then I gave an opening talk.  You can read my full talk here, but here are a few bits of what I said…

“….in TTT, we do not look at this as a time for gloom and doom, rather as an opportunity for creativity, optimism, entrepreneurship … Rebuilding an economy that can support us here, vibrant local agriculture, renewable energy systems that we own and benefit from, energy efficient housing that utilises local materials, more local and meaningful employment, these are not the things of some Luddite retreat to the caves, but the foundations of a resilient economy more adapted to the times.  Totnes is uniquely placed to achieve this.  We are big enough for it to work, but small enough to be able to do it quickly, and as TTT has shown, what we start here can spread elsewhere incredibly rapidly and virally.  Totnes emerges from the survey as a skilled, optimistic and adaptable community.  Totnes as model that inspires the future direction of humanity?  Why not?”.

Jacqi Hodgson (left) then took the audience on a walk-through of the EDAP, introducing its layout, how it moves from introducing the underlying assumptions, peak oil and climate change, moves into the role stories play, both traditionally, oral histories, and the story of TTT.  The main section of Plan is the different aspects of Transition, food, energy and so on, and also includes two vital pieces of research, the Energy Budget for Totnes, and ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’.  Having given people a sense of the structure of the Plan, she then introduced Paul Wesley (below right), Chair of the Totnes Chamber of Commerce.

He started his talk saying that he was exhausted, so his talk would be rather short.  He said that he had started the evening wanting to watch the election on TV, but gave up and sat down to read the EDAP instead.  While he hadn’t read it all, he had read it into the early hours, and in spite of not having much expertise in the subjects covered in the plan, he does have a lot of expertise in books (he runs Totnes’s largest second-hand bookshop).  With that in mind, he said, he had to say that the Totnes EDAP is the single most important book about Totnes that has ever been published.  He said he was very impressed with it, the language, the accessibility and the layout.

With Jacqi Hodgson and a copy of 'our baby'!

His conclusion, having read it, was that it is much more important than what happens in the election.  Totnes is developing an important lesson for central government.  One of the cultures we are developing in Totnes is that or co-operation, working and communicating together.  The community, he said, is lucky to be working with Totnes Town Council, South Hams District Council and, hopefully, Devon County Council.  This effort, rather than traditional oppositional politics, is paying dividends.  A core theme of the EDAP is about economics, of the importance of the commercial sector of the town.  Paul stated that the least he can do is to make sure that every business in Totnes gets to read the EDAP.  It is full of relevant stuff he told the audience, it is very accessible.  Transition Town Totnes is, he said, already having an economic impact on the town, and an increasing economic impact.  It is now a tangible reality economically, which while not being the sole purpose of TTT, is nonetheless important.  The Chamber of Commerce, he said, will play its part in bringing the EDAP’s vision into being.

Then Totnes Mayor, Cllr Jean Harrop (see right), then formally launched the plan.  You can read her full speech here. It included the following…

“Climate change and the running out of oil and gas are urgent issues that we all need to address.  The EDAP has been written to help us to just that.  It has been written in a very easy-to-follow way, and is full of ideas of how to reduce our dependence on oil in our daily lives: in our homes, workplaces, schools, and so on.  We can all do something and more importantly, we can do these things together…

…I am pleased to be Mayor of Totnes, a town where there are so many interesting things happening.  Transition in this town as attracted many visitors and much attention from the media, and I’d like to thank all those involved in TTT for the work they are doing for the community.  I would now like to officially launch Transition in Action, Totnes and District 2030, and to cut the cake.  May everyone enjoy the journey”.

And cut the cake she did (see left).  Then three members of TTT read out sections from the EDAP that they had chosen.  One looked at the opening of the Transportation section, another took a part from the Heart and Soul section, and the final reading was from the Health and Wellbeing section, and took samples from across the timeline to show how Totnes’s health improved…

Then, to close the evening I read out the poem written by the audience at last year’s Wondermentalist Cabaret evening where, in the interval, the audience were invited to write a couple of lines on the theme ’2030, What are You Like?’, and Matt Harvey then spliced them together to make a poem.  You can read the final poem here.  Then the EDAP cake was cut and that was that.  People then milled around chatting, getting their EDAPs signed and visiting the stalls in the hall.

Ladies and Gentlemen.  It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website.  The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.  It is the creation of the good folks at LumpyLemon, to whom we are greatly indebted.  Highlights include the oral history section, Liv Torc’s poem in the section on stories, the Totnes Energy Budget, the photoshopped visions of the future and, if one might suggest a sample chapter, the food section.  Copies of the printed EDAP are available here, and will be formally launched on Friday (do come).  God Bless Her and All Who Sail in Her (sound of tinkling glass as champagne bottle is smashed against the side of the website)….

We’ve got so many wonderfully diverse and inspiring activities to show you this month…ideas for getting people involved and having fun! And they’re here for the sharing…

In the UK, TT Luton is organising a series of Grow Your Own events to relocalise food production and consumption, with discussions and a quiz to encourage people to grow their own fruit and vegetables, while Southend-on-Sea in Transition organised a day’s introduction to Permaculture with more events lined up that you’re invited to get involved with. TT Leek is getting hold of allotments and orchards so they can plant more trees and increase production of native British apple varieties, while  TT Nailsea is sharing its gardening skills with other local people to increase self-sufficiency in food production, strengthen local resilience and encourage people to think more about their carbon footprints.  TT Totnes held its 4^th annual seed-swap, together with the Heritage Seed Library, to improve availability of a diversity of seeds through saving and swapping of different varieties suited to specific ecologies and climates, a crucial activity for increasing future food security. TT Taunton went on a winter hedgerow hunt, a lovely way to brighten a winter’s day.

TT Horncastle is in the news again: after their recent award of £140,000 from the British Gas Greenstreets scheme, the group is now getting local playgroups to transform old clothes and fabrics into colourful draught excluders that will not only improve energy efficiency in local homes, but also help raise funds for renewable energy projects in Malian villages. Green Energy has teamed up with TT Marlow to help make the town more energy self-sufficient and resilient through the fantastic ‘Marlow 100 Solar Project’. In Leominster, Britain’s first community-owned and operated anaerobic digester for renewable energy production is being developed as part of the town’s Transition activities.

And more congratulations this month for Transitioners who have again been rewarded for their dedication: this time it’s Lucy Neal who made the front pages of the Wandsworth Guardian for her Overall Green Champion 2010 award, and then eco-friendly architect Susan Venner has been awarded the Green Design Honour, both by the Wandsworth Green Champion Awards.

TT Kingston has partnered Artgym for their Our Kingston Our Future project, which will bring together 300 people from two generations (19-25 and over 55) to share their experiences of living in Kingston and create an inspiring vision of how to make Kingston a more liveable place for people and environment that they can share with the world. It’ll all be filmed to make a documentary that celebrates the town. TT Tooting is busily preparing for their colourful Trashcatchers Carnival, and for a glimpse of what’s in store, see the picture at the start of this post.

TT Lewes hit the Independent on Sunday as being an illustration of the ‘slow and steady’ approach to beating climate change as opposed to campaigners’ ‘big and bold’ approach. TT Portobello has raised funds for three new project workers, focusing on food, energy and overall project management.  TT Dorchester is the first town in Dorset to pick up the old tradition of ‘Green Drinks’, an event that started in London in 1989 and is now a regular activity in many towns and cities. Let’s hope they start a trend for wider Dorchester – and for other TT groups? Drinks and a chat about environmental issues sounds like a great way to spend an evening…

There’s support for Transition from the Christian Ecology Link, which has launched a support network for ‘Churches in Transition’, and held a discussion at their bi-annual gathering in Scarborough to discuss climate change and Peak Oil, and the Transition to low-carbon living.

News from Australia and New Zealand tells us that volunteers from T Banyule are busily replacing lawns with food gardens in their regular permablitz events…and they’ll do your garden too if you’re nearby…  TT Pt Chevalier is about to cut their first corn on the cob and celebrate with a traditional Kiwi festival of barbecued corn. Can’t wait to do th same in the UK! And have a look at this! An illustration of the mouth-watering vegan nibbly treats on offer at TT Grey Lynn’s meeting, lovingly prepared by Alice Leonard (recipes supplied…yum)… TT Port Chalmers have been successful in getting agreement for their local train station, which last operated in the 1970s, to open for the Walk2Work day in March, fantastic! Make good use of it and maybe it’ll open again…

In the US, one of the Denver Transition groups is organising regular ‘Conscious Eating’ cafes aimed at raising awareness about links between our food choices and their Impacts on the world and climate change, as well as the crucial issue of our future food security.  TT Albany had a lovely event, where they screened a film called Homegrown about a small off-grid organic farm, followed by discussions with a Ghost Town urban farmer, and then a seed and plant exchange.

TT Nelson in British Columbia, Canada, invited local people to submit video footage and perform live songs on their visions of how Nelson could look in 20 years time, but with a twist: they had to be dressed in the past… What a great idea! This was for their Imagine Nelson music and video showcase with prize awards for the top submissions in various categories.And then there are lots more Transition films for you to enjoy. Here’s some more Transition talk for you to feast on, and here’s the Visions of Transition film with German subtitles, and also for the German audience there’s Arte’s little film of TT Brixton, TT Totnes, and a T Training somewhere… Some of Transition Network and TT Totnes peeps are reflecting on COP15 in a nice little movie by Sara and Emilio at nu-project.  And some keen Transitioners are still not aware that your very own movie ‘In Transition 1.0’ can be watched on-line here…so if you haven’t seen it yet, hurry up and give yourselves a treat!

Once again, my thanks to Helen for collating this….

It was divided into 5 parts, food, shopping, energy, transport and the world of work.  For each, Barrington showed a series of slides from the Image Bank on the subject, and then I invited each of the four interviewees to talk about their memories of each.  Then anyone else in the audience who had memories of the time was invited to contribute, and then anyone in the audience could ask the ‘elders’ questions.

The first part, food, looked at how food was produced, from allotments and back gardens, to urban market gardens and to the farms that surrounded the town.  People talked of the culture around food at that time, how the generation that lived through the war never wasted any food, and that that was the culture they grew up in.  David Heath, son of George Heath who ran the largest urban market garden in Totnes, talked about the garden and what an amazing place it was to go to work, in spite of being very hard work.  Vera Harvey talked about her father who worked on the railways and who had two allotments at some distance from Totnes, and whose work involved regularly walking the railway lines, and who often returned with rabbits he had caught, or with turnips from the fields.

John Watson, who founded Riverford Organic Farm, talked about starting farming just after the war, and how for him, the greatest inventions of the last cenury were hydraulics and the combine harvester. I quoted his friend, Douglas Matthews, who recently passed away aged 102;

“Looking back, practically all our food came from this area. We had a couple of house pigs that ate the rubbish. A local chap would come by, cut their throats and cut them up, and make bacon and hams. We used to preserve it in saltpetre, the wives would make a salt solution and baste it every 2 days, then it was put up on hooks in the dairy to dry. I still have the hooks out there now. I suppose we might have had an orange on very special occasions. Our main meal was lunch, not supper, if the husband worked at home. Evening meals were a professionals’ thing. Lunch was normally roast beef, mutton, hot or cold. Hot or cold chicken, stews, potatoes and veg, peas and beans, potatoes baked or boiled. We ate meat every day, hot or cold, depending on how the husband and wife were getting on! For tea we had bread and butter, jam and cream. For breakfast it was bacon and eggs. Supper was just a snack meal, bits and pieces of what you liked. For fruit we had apples, pears and plums. Apples could be kept all year round. They were kept in a cellar under the house. Certain kinds of pears could be kept. We had greengages and plums; we usually made those into jams”.

Then shopping.  The slides showed a town with lots of shops that no longer exist, when the town was a town that actually sold everything you could want, several hardware shops, tailors, a wealth of food shops, even a shop selling agricultural machinery.  There were slides of the first supermarket to open in the town, and one audience member who worked there as a girl talked about how they had to weigh potatoes out into bags, rather different to the supermarkets of today!  I read a quote from Muriel Langford who I interviewed, about a trip to the shops in the 1940s..

“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely. They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?” You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”. “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?” As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it! Then they’d say “now Mrs. Langford, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish? Yes, yes, and paraffin? Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you. And they did. They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”

For many, the move away from the dynamic, more self sufficient economy of that time to the supermarket-focused economy of today has not been entirely beneficial. This was summed up best by interviewee Ken Gill, who said, in the interview I did with him;

…it has been progress of a sort, or has it?  I’m not sure.  We lost something we will never be able to regain.  The loss of a lot of small shops has been hard, although we have replaced them with what we might call ‘slightly unusual shops’…   We’ve lost the dairies, the independent grocers, although we have retained a good selection of butchers and some good cheese and fish shops.  When you consider what we used to have….”

In his slides about energy, Barrington looked at how the town used to be powered by town gas, coal brought from South Wales by boat was gassified in two gassifiers, producing the gas the town used for cooking and, until the 1950s, for street lighting.  He also showed pictures of the first petrol pumps in the town. Alan Langmaid talked about how freezing cold everywhere was at that time, and how the idea that he could, as he did that evening, walk down Totnes High Street in a tshirt in late November, would have been ridiculous.

He talked about his grandmother, with whom he and his mother lived, keenly moving out of an old house that was a converted cider press. “She just wanted modern. She wanted electric fires, electric cookers, electric everything. She wanted automatic this, that and everything. So we moved, at my grandmother’s insistence, from this wonderful rambling old building…. to a brand new house, typical of its time. Wooden framed, single glazed windows, open fire for a chimney which she quickly replaced with an electric fire, “I’m not having any more of that dirty coal business”. The winters were actually colder than the previous house. You’d wake up in the morning, and your breath would have condensed on the window, frozen on the inside. Inside it was cold, outside it was cold. Eventually my mother paid for an electric fire to be put in so you could reach out of the bed and turn it on. Electricity was cheap in those days”.

Vera Harvey talked about washing clothes, how as a girl she had to help her grandmother do the washing in the wash house in the yard, whatever the weather, often still working by candlelight late into the evening. She remembered, once the first washing machines became available, telling herself ‘I’m not going out in that wash house like Gran!’ In the 1950s, our first washing machine had a wringer on top. I remember when we used the washhouse, being out there with my Gran, and it was snowing, getting deeper and deeper, saying ‘Gran! We can’t stay out here!’. People worked so hard in those days”.

The slides on transport started with a picture of the horsedrawn stagecoach which was how people got to the town before the trains and the internal combustion engine took over. They included some amazing slides from when Totnes High Street was two-way, amazing to imagine now, one in particular showing a bus and a tractor towing a huge oak tree trying to pass each other in the part of the High Street known (see right), appropriately, as The Narrows. There were images of the first cars, the first trains, and the interviewees recalled their first cars.

I quoted Val Price, who I had interviewed but who had been unable to make the evening. She had recalled how her father had bought a car in late 1952, and lovingly built a garage to keep it in. However, she recalls that he rarely used it, never using it to pick her up from school, and never taking it out during the week, given that everything he needed was within walking distance. It was only ever used on weekends, for trips to visit relatives.  Arthur French, a member of the audience, noted how the age at which people first got cars has fallen during his lifetime. He said that he got his first car at 40, his sons at 25, and nowadays people start driving at 17.

The final section looked at work and livelihoods. Barrington’s images introduced an economy very different to the Totnes of today. The Totnes of 2009 has very little in terms of manufacturing, and has lost most of its main employers over the past few years. In the 40s and 50s, things were very different. We were introduced to Reeves Timber Yard, Harris’ Bacon factory, the markets, potters, shoemakers, the milk processing plant, and various other local employers. Alan Langmaid talked about working for the Totnes Times when he left school, and about the work ethic of the older generation, who worked from dawn to dusk, and also how incredibly strong they were.

One of the last images was of the town carter, a man with a sort of souper-up go cart, who served as the DHL of his time, running errands and deliveries around town in a handpulled cart. The photo showed him as a young man in the 1920s, but several of the older members of the audience remembered him still being active with his cart in the 1960s. David Heath remembered a particularly horrible grating noise the cart made as it flew down the High Street, and Alan Langmaid, who now runs Totnes Museum, noted that his cart is still in Totnes Museum, and is set to be part of an exhibition next year.

One of the images that most stuck with me was of the last working flour mill in Totnes (see right), which shut some time ago. What is important about these oral histories isn’t that it allows us to romanticise some former halcyon time where everything was rosy and jolly policemen smiled at everybody from the street corners, but it reconnects us with the infrastructure that a more localised economy needs. It is a reminder of how easy it is to get rid of things, but how hard it is then to put them back.

Shutting down an uneconomic flour mill is easy enough, the person who ran it was probably close to retirement anyway, and it was no doubt not economically viable. However, putting a new one in from scratch today would be a far, far greater task. Finding people with the skills to make good flour, to run a mill. Finding the machinery, a suitable space, good sites with sufficient water power to run the mill. Not easy.

This event was a fascinating look at the history of the town, still near enough for us to be able to draw on first hand memories of it, but far enough away to feel like another world. Thus far, TTT has focused just on looking forward, to visioning what a post-oil Totnes might be like…. this was the first attempt to look back, to try and capture how the place functioned before liberal lashings of cheap oil fundamentally altered how the place functions. For those I spoke to after the event, all had found it a fascinating immersion in what a pre-globalisation Totnes looked, smelt, sounded and felt like. While one can read history books, and look at the facts and figures around that time, it is hearing the stories, the first hand accounts, and the anecdotes of those who were there, that truly brings it alive.

“I used to go to the grocers and I could sit down, lovely. They’d go through your list and say, “yes, yes, we’ve some new whatever it is, would you like to taste some?” You’d have a little snippet of cheese or something, “great, yes, we’ll have that”. “Now we’ve got a tin of broken biscuits, but they’re not too bad (half price you see), would you like them?” As soon as you put a biscuit in your mouth it’s broken isn’t it! Then they’d say “now Mrs. L, you’re going to the butchers, yes, yes, and going to get some fish? Yes, yes, and paraffin? Yes, yes… and they used to say to me now bring any parcels in, we’ll put it in the box with your groceries and bring the lot up for you. And they did. They’d come and deliver and you’d go through it and say that’s fine and would you like a cup of tea….”

As well as the home deliveries offered by the shops, other traders, such as butchers, the creameries and local farmers, also offered home delivery services (not an idea new to Tescos!). MA recalls one of the traders who supplied her family’s bed and breakfast business. “I can remember when a lady used to come and sit at the table and say “and what would you like this week Mrs. Taylor? She would write down the order, Mum would check her cupboards and it would be delivered and paid for”. VH recalls deliveries of bread from Tarrings Bakery, and that Mrs Sollar’s grocery and Nott’s Dairy (run from the same shop) also did deliveries in the town.

For those living in settlements outside the town, such as MV who was living in South Brent, the home deliveries were vital. Her milk was delivered by a local farmer, cream was collected on Sundays on the way to church, and the local shop provided whatever else she couldn’t produce herself.

Reflecting on the changes seen in the local economy, KG is unsure change has necessarily been for the better. He told me;

“it has been progress of a sort, or has it? I’m not sure. We lost something we will never be able to regain. The loss of a lot of small shops has been hard, although we have replaced them with what we might call ‘slightly unusual shops’… We’ve lost the dairies, the independent grocers, although we have retained a good selection of butchers and some good cheese and fish shops. When you consider what we used to have….”

The supermarket age began at the end of the period we have been exploring here, on May 28th 1968, with the opening of Gateway, in what is now the chemist besides the Market Square. Nowadays the opening of a new supermarket in the town would be front page news, but AL, then a reporter for the Totnes Times, says that it “didn’t even register” for him, and was only reported in the Totnes Times on page 5.

Prior to the Gateway supermarket, the town had proto-supermarkets like Liptons and ‘Dickie’s Discount Store’, and at 58a. High Street there was International Stores, which had begun in the mid-30s as a standard grocers, but as the opening of Gateway approached, tried to make itself more supermarket-like. AL recalls it as “a shambles with one supermarket-type till near the door. I would not call this a dedicated supermarket though. More of a shop that was trying to move with the times”. There was also a very popular Co-operative Store, which VP remembers her mother loyally sticking with, in spite of the opening of the Gateway supermarket.

MV is dismissive of the idea that the arrival of the supermarket era was to the benefit of the town. When I asked her why she thought the supermarkets caught on, her reply identified another important social trend that was well underway by the early 1960s. “There were more women working by then, gradually almost every woman was working, except perhaps for some of the older ones. So it was more convenient. I hate the word ‘convenient’, but it was more convenient, to buy everything all wrapped up in plastic from one place”.

MA remembers the shops until the mid-60s as being very different from today. “Everyone seemed to buy everything in the town, they didn’t go anywhere to buy it”. The idea, which began to emerge in the late 1960s, that shopping meant driving to another town, would have been baffling in the 40s and 50s. It is interesting also to get a sense of the extent to which the town’s shops reflected its position at the heart of a rural community, much more than it does at the moment, and how it was more of a working rural town than at present. AV recalls the High Street of his childhood.

“All of the little back streets had some kinds of artisans or builders yards or something going on in them. You didn’t have to go very far out of the High Street before you were in light industrial premises. All of the top of town, like Harris’s ironmongers, they had their big ironmongery shop, but on the other side they had, where Greenfibres is now, an agricultural machinery shop. Can you believe it?! There was agricultural machinery sitting there which was for sale! They sold harrows and seed drills and things to go on the back of tractors! They had a little showroom of all that sort of stuff. Then they had the blacksmiths forge just round the back there”.

In the 30s and 40s, Totnes was an important outlet for the farm’s produce. D’s wife’s grandmother and mother used to make butter by hand, which they made under contract, either to shops in Totnes or in Brixham. The trips to Totnes, initially in a horse and trap, to deliver the butter, were also an opportunity to shop.

He recalls the post-war push to increase productivity, driven, at least in part, by the Agricultural Committees of which he was a member. One of the other key drivers in agricultural innovation was Dartington, which started the first artificial insemination centre in 1944, one of the first in the country, and also hosted the Agricultural Discussion Society, which brought many leading agriculturalists to the area to give talks on new developments and innovations.

This led to many new developments, the move away from South Devon cattle towards Holstein Fresians, and from hand milking to milking parlours, among other things. His neighbour and friend, John Watson of Riverford Farm, recalls the enthusiasm with which he embraced mechanisation and chemical farming. He remembers the steady stream of agricultural chemical salesmen beating their way to the farm.

The town’s Cattle Market meant the driving of animals into the town from the surrounding countryside. MF, who in August 1950 moved into the house her husband built on Barracks Hill, recalls needing to put a gate across their driveway in order to keep out the cattle who were driven into town by what was, at that time (before the town’s bypass was built) the main way to bring them to Totnes from Dartington.

Her son, AF, recalls picking up lots of casual work on local farms from the age of 13 onwards. He told me that in the late 1960s there were “lots of small family farms all over the place. The average farm size would have been 30-40 acres, 120 acres would have been considered quite upper class sort of farming”. Many of the farms were short of labour during the summer, especially during hay making and straw baling times. His favourite was one at East Allington. “We were out there a lot. We used to go out there and the farm was pretty much run by the young people.

Andy Strutt was a classmate of mine. He had 6 sisters, which was part of the attraction. Suddenly I found myself in charge of a little tractor moving around the farm picking up haybales with all these young women about and these big lunches and suppers where you could eat as many roast potatoes as you could get in yourself, that was very lovely. We basically ran the place. The children from Andy, 16, down to the rest of us, would man the potato harvester. That’s what we did. We’d go out there for the weekend and harvest however many tons of potatoes needed picking, take them, riddle them, sort them into this size and that size, then get in the Land Rover and deliver them to the chip shop in Kingsbridge. It was great”.

A Market Town

For most farmers, the two markets in the town were absolutely essential to their economic survival. Totnes had two markets, the Cattle Market, held initially at the Lamb every other Tuesday, before later transferring for a short period to Totnes Racecourse (now the Industrial Estate), and the Friday Pannier Market, held in what is now the Civic Square but which was, until it was destroyed by fire in the 1950s, a traditional covered market with stalls, the front of which came right out to the High Street (see left). DM recalls the Pannier Market as being “all covered, with old stalls with top and bottom doors, and a separate bit in the middle. Anyone could sell anything, rabbits (this was pre- days) and so on”. For VP, the weekly Pannier Market was as much about meeting friends as it was about shopping. “You’d meet your friends from out of town there”, she told me, “main things I remember buying there were sweets and butter”.

The Cattle Market was a key element of the local economy. Not everyone recalls it favourably. AL told me “on Tuesday, the town became what you would imagine the Somme to be. It was muddy, dirty, dungy, smelly, drunken, bloody and crowded”. On market days the pubs closest to the market, the Kingsbridge, the Bayhorse, the Plymouth and the Bull Inn were open all day. For AF, a young teenager at the time, market day was the day when, as an underage drinker, one could get served in the pubs.

KG recalls how the Cattle Market was what brought farmers and their wives into the town, while the husbands traded, haggled and drank, the wives would go shopping, providing a vital boost for the town’s economy. Although it created a certain degree of nuisance and put a huge strain on the town’s traffic infrastructure, the Cattle Market’s passing was, for some, a loss. KG told me “once you took away the Market it wasn’t the same”.

The expense of imported food, until the EU Common Agricultural Policy began to lead to cheap subsidised imports, meant that diets were much more seasonal and the lower population meant that these market gardens generated a high proportion of the town’s food. AL’s memory of Heath and Gills’ shops were that the produce was mainly seasonal, “brussel sprouts at one time of year, runner beans at another, and cabbages seemed to be all year round”.

Heath’s Nursery was in two sections, there was the open area, which grew mainly vegetables and had one small propagating house, now “Heath’s Nursery car park”, and the lower area, now also a car park known, just as “The Nursery”, which was covered in greenhouses. He grew a wide range of vegetables and salad crops in season. To support the florist side of the business he also specialised in chrysanthemums, dahlias and pot plants. Dahlias were more fashionable at the time and were lavished on the decorated van which was a big feature of Totnes Carnival in the summer. The greenhouses were heated and allowed the production of large quantities of tomatoes (a speciality), lettuces and chrysanthemums out of season. A large sack of congealed pigs blood suspended in the central water tank for watering the tomatoes gave a pink hue to the water and gave the tomatoes the edge in flavour over the competition.

For more exotic flowers on special occasions such as weddings, these were ordered over the phone direct from Covent Garden. These came down overnight on the train from Paddington and David Heath remembers regularly going in their van to pick up the boxes from the station and at the time seeing all the boxes of day-old chicks also awaiting collection. The garden’s fertility came mainly from manure brought up from Harris’ Bacon factory. The outlet for Heath’s produce was his shop on the Butterwalk (now Harlequin Bookshop), which was frequently beautifully decorated for special occasions, such as the 1977 Silver Jubilee.

Although Heath’s nursery was a large area situated almost in the middle of the town, there were those who lived in close proximity to it but who never ventured in. Given the town’s Elizabethan layout and narrow roads, which survived the war mostly intact, access to the gardens was very poor. VH, whose father grew a lot of the family’s food himself, recalls that she had little to do with the nurseries, “firstly because we rarely had any need of their produce, and secondly because it was all walled in and locked”. There were those who visited the gardens behind the walls though, MV remembers that when her own vegetable plot was no longer able to provide a particular vegetable, she’d go down to Heaths. “You could tell him what you wanted and he would go and pick a few of them for you”. IS remembers rarely seeing George Heath, as he was usually working in the gardens, apart from Friday afternoons and Saturdays, when he would come out and spend time in his shop.

AL recalls going to Heath’s shop on Saturday mornings with his father, Eric, who was a teacher at the Redworths Secondary Modern School. “My dad and he were both in the amateur operatic society and would be singing in the same Gilbert and Sullivan show, so they would sing little bits to each other, and then him saying “oh no, tomatoes, we got no tomatoes, but let’s go get some then”… and then we all went over. That’s what we did. We all went over to the greenhouses at the nursery and picked tomatoes, and they sang songs to each other wandering up and down and talked about this and that”.

DM, farming out at Staverton, remembers recalls George Heath’s business style. “He had a miserable manner. If you took anything to him to see (I used to take Bramley apples), he would plead poverty. “I can’t pay you what I paid you last week Mr. M, business is very bad”. I used to say “George, you’re talking rubbish!” He was a very good businessman and he did nobody any harm. He was very go-ahead and he worked hard”.

As has been mentioned above, access to Heath’s Nursery was difficult due to it being completely walled in. One could either access the garden by a small door in the wall in South Street or through a passageway in from Leechwell Street at the top end of the garden. A small van could get in through a small double door in Leechwell Lane after going round the tight right angled bend and making a very skilled manoeuver (even today it is quite a feat!).

A small road in from South Street was opened up in the early fifties and is now used for pedestrian access to the Heath’s Nursery car park. This allowed access for lorries to get in to deliver manure and general supplies, as well as bringing more customers in. Heath toyed with taking advantage of the new access. His son David told me “once the site was opened up, more people came in to get plants and so on. It could have been a garden centre, but by the time it was opened up he was nearing retirement, and didn’t want to”.

When it came time for George Heath to retire he did consider selling the site for building development but there was a sewage embargo on the town at the time and the access from South Street was not acceptable in any planning application. The land was sold to the South Hams Council and it was only after this that the Southern bypass road was opened up and the car parks put in as they are today. The closure of the nurseries took place in 1981 ending with the dismantling of the greenhouses. George Heath passed away in 1985.

Gills Nursery adjoined Heath’s, and was similar but smaller. Their shop (now Sacks Wholefoods) backed onto the nursery site which, when taken over by his grandmother in 1932, featured just one greenhouse. The shop was run by ‘Granny Gill’ and her daughter in law, selling produce grown by the family topped up with produce from local farmers. Ken Gill recalls “there was a farmer on the Paignton road who was a big sprout grower, he supplied us in the winter, and our cauliflowers came from a grower near Kingsbridge. We couldn’t grow sufficient variety to be self-sufficient”.

The nursery was run by Jack Gill until 1973, when his son Ken took over, who managed it until the nursery closed in 1981. Running a series of glasshouses which were kept warm all year round required a lot of energy. Initially they were heated using coke, which required 10 tons a year, but they later moved to the less labour intensive oil, necessitating the burning of 2000 gallons of oil a year in order to generate sufficient warmth.

The site behind the shop was not the only site Gills managed. They also had a site on Harpers’ Hill, where they grew potatoes and sprouts, and one on North Street, where, Ken recalls, “we grew raspberries, in spite of it being north-facing, somehow it was warm enough for raspberries”. Later they also acquired a 3½ acre site beside the bypass, which was used for field scale vegetable production. The main nursery was kept fertilised with manure from their own pigs topped up with manure from a local farmer. “We had no complaints with our fertility”, he told me, “one year we grew 20,000 lettuces”, an extraordinary output from a small piece of ground.

Although running a business like Gills was hard work, it was a good living. Unlike Heath’s, the closure of which was forced by retirement, Gill’s was driven to close by a less predictable challenge. “A Highways engineer from Devon County Council came into one of the greenhouses one day, and told me and my father “you won’t be picking many more tomatoes here, we’re going to build a road through the place”.

Although the proposed road linking South Street and the newly built Heath’s Way was never built (part of the road building phase which saw Heath’s Nursery opened up), it created enough uncertainty, hanging in the air as a possibility for at least 10 years, that when Jack Gill died, it fell to his son, Ken, to decide whether or not to invest in modernising and expanding the Nursery. Given the degree of uncertainty, he decided it would be unwise, and the nursery was slowly wound down.

Running a market garden and a shop was hard work. Ken Gill recalls working 12-14 hour days, seven days a week during the summer months, and David Heath describes his father’s choice of career as ‘bloody hard work’.

The third garden, Victoria Nursery, run by the Philips family and about which less is known, supplied a shop at the bottom of Fore Street which is now Michelmore Hughes Estate Agents, and closed before the other two, and has since been developed for housing, as St. Catherine’s Mews. I have as yet been unable to find anyone who remembers much about this garden.