What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century?  While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site.  However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it).  The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself.  As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building’, “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”.  

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake.  Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing’ and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn’t depend on it.  What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing.  In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally was the building’s ‘icing’ that caused the difficulties.  With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I’d like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition.  As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape’ “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”.  Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution.  Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”.  As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materials demonstrates (source).  Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there’s also the aesthetics.  The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town.  It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old.  I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years.  Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction.  Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”.  She argues for the natural/local building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime”.  Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling.  The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating.  When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn’t veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials.  Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn’t yet exist.  I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project.   For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign.  Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here).  The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s experimental ‘atmospheric railway’, has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site’s owners’ unwillingness to engage seriously with the community.  So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site’s owners.  We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy’, and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy.  It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction.  One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand?  In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I’m going to cook a meal, what’s in the garden”, rather than “what’s in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project’s architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes.  We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced.  My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make ‘reedboards’, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in ‘straw bale building’, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials:  newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons’ quarter, a timber framers’ quarter and so on.  On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding.  If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it’s metaphorical cake locally.  As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames...

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion?  I think so.  I think the time is right for that, and that’s what we want to do with Atmos.  Watch this space.

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.

Transition Toronto recently held a film competition for people to use film as a way of communicating Transition.  The winner was Mariko Uda with her film ‘The People in my Neighbourhood’.  Rather lovely it is too.  Here it is:

The judge, Gregory Greene, producer of ‘The End of Suburbia’, said of why he chose this film as the winner:

“I really enjoyed Mariko’s film. Her vision of a possible urban future based on local skills and innovation, progressive resource-and-energy taxation, future compost “consultants”(loved that one) and Ministry of Transportation folks on bikes – embraces so many Transition principles. I found myself learning quite a bit and developing new ideas about what the future might feel like. I also loved the friendly, up-beat tone and diversity of faces, so reflective of our city! This video is the winner by a long-shot. I’ll say it again I LOVED IT!”

Mariko makes the point that the various stories in the film are already a reality… she writes:

“Yes, that rooftop garden really exists! It’s one of a number of urban agriculture projects at UofT.

The composters are at the Stop’s Green Barn.  Check out the Farmers’ Market there every Sat. morning!

When I thought of buildings for the future, I thought of Rohan Walters. Get to know him here.

Need something fixed? Go to a repair shop like Fix-It-Again Sam! Want to make a skateboard?

For the composting toilet I had to go all the way to Vaughn to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s Restoration Services Building.

I kid you not – they did not smell at all!

The lovely singing at the end were UofT students in Hot Yam! who prepare yummy vegan lunches every Wed. at noon. http://hotyam.ca/

If you’ve watched this film, and want to know what to do, start by discovering and enjoying the treasures in your neighbourhood. Go to a Farmers’ Market. Walk, ride your bike! Smile & talk to your neighbours Nourish yourself, envision a positive future & work together with others towards it.

Here is the third film in the ‘Story of Transition in 10 objects’ series, this time looking at a part from an old Victorian gas lamp from Malvern. You will be able to read more about this, and many other Transition stories, in the forthcoming ‘The Transition Companion’.

Let’s start with Transition Town Kingston in Surrey who ventured out  on bikes and skateboards to celebrate a Zero Carbon day which included a fossil- fuel free time trial. Here is their report of the event, here’s a report from the local paper, and here’s a video about what they got up to:

http://youtu.be/2Lmy9wVkDiw

CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture schemes) seem to be all the rage these days.  Hebden Bridge TT in West Yorkshire have a HebVeg box scheme which plans to become a fully fledged CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. Discussions took place at the local Riverside School about the project’s future direction and how to build on its success. Click here to read the related article in the Hebden Bridge Times.

Transition Norwich are excited about their local Farmshare CSA, which grew out of the Transition Norwich food group, and East Anglia Food Link, and is now producing veg, in spite of the “the near Saharan conditions endured early in the growing season”. Transition Town Worthing are moving closer to setting up a CSA scheme for the area, and recently held a public meeting about it.  Here is a film they made about their progress so far:

Also taking place in Hebden Bridge this month is a project to become The Greenest Town in the Land. And to round off this lively Transition Town here is a great article entitled The Wombles go Skipping in Hebden Bridge. For those not familiar with The Wombles, click here to read about these much loved national treasures whose motto was “make good use of bad rubbish”. Also, on the waste theme,Stamford TT (Lincolnshire) is gathering support for their Bottling Out campaign which aims to rid the town of plastic bottles.

Transition Kensal to Kilburn in London are in running for the ‘London in Bloom’ award thanks to the allotment they have created on the platform of Kensal Underground station.  The beds, which were rather sad and neglected, are now a riot of edible produce, and commuters are invited to help themselves. Michael Stuart, from the group, said: “We want people travelling on the tube to see the plants, and help themselves to the fruit.  “We hope to show people that if we can grow fruit, vegetables and flowers on a busy tube platform, then they can easily grow the in their gardens, on their windowsills or in their front drives.”  You can read a piece from one local paper here, and another here.  Our picture (above) shows the great sign which now adorns the station platform.

The Transition Belsize Premier Inn Food Growing A-Team!

Also in London, here’s an update from Jo Homan of Transition Finsbury Park on ‘Edible Landscapes’, the social enterprise they are establishing setting up productive gardens in the area. Transition Belsize, on July 22nd held the ‘Grand Opening’ of their food growing project in the car park of the Premier Inn Hotel on Haverstock Hill (see left).  The launch, among other things, featured a local magician.

Anne Rickard of Transition Bridport with Young Transitioner of the Year Ellie Holt.

In Dorset, a local school impressed the Transition Town Bridport group at their inter-house gardening competition (see right). The Transition Town Louth Food Garden Group in Lincolnshire has been busy making a community garden to inspire local people.   In Craigmillar, Edinburgh,  PEDAL – Portobello Transition Town, reported the opening of the new Green House advice shop. This fantastic local resource helps people save money while help­ing the envir­on­ment.

In case you missed it, Transition Town Totnes last week premiered a new short film it had made about oral history in the area and what it can do to inform Transition.  ‘Totnes: the past can teach us about the future’, went down very well at the premiere, and you can now see it below:

An artist's impression of what the inside of Sustaining Dunbar's community bakery will look like when it's finished...

Sustaining Dunbar’s efforts to create a community bakery are moving along nicely.  They have already raised £38,000 from 270 people, who are now the collective proud owners of a community bakery.  They are still seeking another £12,000 and are inviting investment, with a minimum shareholding of just £20.  They’ve currently got the plasterers in, and they are recruiting for bakers.  Sustaining Dunbar have also been setting up a community energy company, and have been working on their version of an Energy Descent Action Plan, called ‘The Dunbar 2025 Project’.

Transition Town Whitehead in Northern Ireland is one of 6 community organisations that has been shortlisted in NIE’s BIG Energy Saving Challenge in which 20 Whitehead families are competing in this yearlong competition. Read more about this fantastic project here in the local Carrick Times and here is a great picture of the group from the local paper:

Neil Coleman and Caitriona Butcher from NIE Energy present members of the Transition Town Whitehead group with their energy saving starter pack also present is Councillor Isobel Day. Picture courtesy of Carrick Times.

UK viewers might be interested in Nicholas Crane’s new 4-part BBC2 series called ‘Town’ (see below) which starts tomorrow (Thursday) at 9pm.  One of the town Nicholas visited was Totnes, and we expect Transition to be a strong theme of that programme.  If you miss it you’ll be able to see it on iPlayer, but for non-UK viewers that might be a bit trickier…

In Portugal, Transição em Telheiras held a great workshop called ‘A garden in the house’ which  showed urban apartment dwellers how to grow food on their window ledges.  Everyone went home with a “homegarden” with some garlic, lettuce, tomatoes and parsley (see left).  You can see a great selection of photos of the workshop here.  They also ran a ‘Make your own bag’ workshop and seem to be busy with all kinds of things.

Now over to Canada where there is an update to the community garden set up by TT Meaford (ON) in partnership with Georgian Bay Secondary School which featured in last month’s roundup (see pic right). Read more about the ongoing project in the local Meadford Independent.

Food preservation display at last year's Dunbar Harvest Festival.

Also from Canada, Shelby Tay kindly sent some sets of photos from Flickr of various Transition happenings there.  There was “Village Vancouver’s ‘Neighbourhood Transition Village’ collaborative demonstration of projects and initiatives that build community resilience and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels”, Dunbar (the other Dunbar) Transition Village’s canning workshop, and some lovely ones from their Harvest Festival (see left:  check out the fantastic Transition aprons).

In the US, Richard Heinberg hosted a conversation with Rob Hopkins via a web event which had several hundred people listening in! To read more about it and listen to the recording click here.  KRCL Radio in Utah did an interview with Carolyne Stayton, Director of Transition US and local residents of Salt Lake City Jake Hanson, Jim French and Jen Hamilton who are working towards making SLC a Transition Town. Listen to the full RadioActive! interview by Ashley Anderson.

Transition Ambler/Upper Dublin (PA) showed the film In Transition 1.0, the first of a planned monthly screening and pot luck event.  The DVD of this film is no longer available via the Transition Network website but you can view it on Vimeo. The next film In Transition 2.0 is due out later this year.

Transition Durham in North Carolina put on the first of a five-part film-event series they have called “Feeding the Bull City” which will be followed by discussion on what is happening in the local, sustainable food scene.  Speaking of films, you might have missed this great little short film about Transition Houston.  As one comment on Transition Culture put it, “It’s fantastic to see a city built on the oil industry taking up the Transition challenge. If they can do it, anyone can!

The Windham County Transition Towns of Putney, Dummerston and Brattleboro (VT) hosted a forum event on Coming Together in a Time of Challenge & Change; Transitioning to a Positive Future facilitated by Tina Clarke, the East Coast Transition Trainer.   Tour de Fresh 2011 is the result of a partnership between Bike Ypsi and Transition Ypsilanti in Michigan and is the 5th annual garden and healthy food system tour featuring the work done by community groups and individuals to make the Ypsilanti-area greener, healthier, and more sustainable. Read more about Tour de Fresh and watch a video in which it appears that Health and Safety in Ypsilanti extends to the need to wear protective headgear in the kitchen!

Transition Milwaukee was recently unveiled as the 93rd official initiative in the US, allowing them to tick off the next thing on the list of tasks they have set for themselves…(see left).  They  celebrated by holding ‘Powerdown Week’ which had 2 simple objective,firstly”make your carbon foot print as small as you can” and secondly,”do it with others”, not so easy to do during one of the hottest summer months on record!

Transition Pittsburgh recently held a ‘Sustainability Jam’.  I’ll let them explain why it was called that…

If you would like to read the full and rather wonderful Transition US July monthly roundup, a kind of sister publication to this one, you can do so here.  I finish the US section with the Final Frontier of Alaska and an article in the local Anchorage press which encourages people to join Transition Anchorage and asks some important questions such as ‘would you share food with your neighbors in a crisis’ and ‘can we feed ourselves’?

In New Zealand there is currently a lively debate flowing on the Transition Towns New Zealand blog section.   There was also a National Day of Action – Rail Against the RONS (Roads of National Significance) for sensible, sustainable transport solutions.

In India, Heal the Soil CSA in Auroville in the state of Tamil Nadu, is adopting the Transition model. With the help of organic farming experts, community leaders and volunteers, they help start-up small vegetable gardens in village homes; provide seeds and permaculture training to local people which enables them to grow their own organic veg and fruits in their own premises. Snehal Trivedi has uploaded more information on Heal the Soil as a muller initiative on the Transition Network website.

From Japan, in case you missed it, here is beautiful piece about the world’s 100th Transition initiative, told by Hide Enomoto of Transition Fujino:

There was also a great piece on Japanese national television about Transition in Japan, which also featured Fujino.  The bit about Transition starts at 14.20, but the whole clip is worth watching because in Japan, on summer solstice, the tradition is to turn off the electricity and to just use candlelight.  In accordance with that, the whole studio where the presenters are sitting and talking is lit only by candles!  Although not understanding Japanese is a distinct disadvantage with this clip, it is well worth a look nonetheless.  Thanks to Paul Shepherd in Tokyo for sending us that.

Before I go, there’s the Transition Network Diversity Newsletter put together by Catrina Pickering, and the trailer for Just Do It, a tale of modern day outlaws.  Thanks for letting me share yet more great stories on this constantly growing and evolving Transition Movement. If you have any events that you would like me to feature in the August roundup please do not hesitate to e-mail them to me at amberponton@transitionnetwork.org.

Now, ‘and finally’, as they say.  You will hopefully have seen this round up of this year’s Transition Network annual conference which took place in Liverpool, which draws together the many resources available from videos, photos, workshop write ups and blog posts.  What you may not have seen (a fact for which you may soon be immensely grateful) is the contribution to the Sunday evening’s Open Mike session which featured various Transitioners doing a Transition-themed homage to the Rocky Horror Picture show.  As the blurb that accompanies the film on YouTube says:

“The North London Transitionistas supporting Frankly Ridiculous, AKA Jo Homan from Finsbury Park in a lively rendition of Sweet Transitioner, a mostly original creation. They were: Ros from Leytonstone, Alexis from Belsize, Sarah and Andy from Crouch End, Debbie from Finsbury Park and Peter from Narnia”.

Brace yourselves.

The 'Larch House' in Ebbw Vale, Wales.

The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’.  Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.  As part of an EU-funded project, the Welsh government wanted Wales to take a lead in Passivhaus design, to show what is possible as well as bringing low energy design into the mainstream construction industry.  They ran a competition, and Justin Bere Architects won.  Their proposal was for more than just a house, they saw it as the possibility of kick-starting a radically new approach to housing in Wales.  As Justin Bere told me:

“Instead of a narrow vision to design a house, we want to get people fired up in to doing something much bigger.  I’d just love to see a successful example in Wales that would encourage other people and give them ideas of how they could do their own locally made, affordable, truly low energy buildings, and maybe we could get this sort of thing happening all over the country”.

The chosen site pushed the Passivhaus idea to its limits.  1,000ft up at the head of the valleys, very cold in the winter and misty for much of the year, a climate twice as hard to design for as Innsbruck in Austria.  The project also aimed to build to social housing budgets and to the Passivhaus standard, the first time this has been attempted.  As well as the attention paid to the design, a lot of thought was also paid to the materials used, with a focus on using Welsh materials where possible.  I asked Justin why:

“Local materials matter because they do two things.  They reduce carbon emissions from transportation, and they increase local employment.  Local employment, if it really is local, also requires less carbon emissions and travel from the factory or workshop to the site”.

The final buildings used Welsh timber (used in an innovative way to make up for its poor quality compared to, say, Scandinavian timber), Welsh-made Rockwool insulation, Welsh-made slates, local stone, and UK-made paint and sprinklers.  Things that were harder to source included lime render (a Welsh company but a French lime), and woodfibre insulation, which was imported from Germany but could easily be made in Wales.  The last challenge was the windows, which need to be of very high quality.

For the first house they were made in Germany, for the second house, a Welsh joiner produced them to a passivhaus certified design provided by the Scottish window designer Bill Robertson.  I asked Justin if he had a sense of the local/imported proportions in the materials used.  He said he thought the first house was probably around 80% Welsh, and the second house was closer to 90%.  Did he think, I asked, that, as has been discussed with food, an 80/20% local/imported ratio could work for construction in a powered-down UK?  “I think”, he told me, “that in time people will be forced to do better than 80%!”

I also asked him about what role he saw in the future for more genuinely local materials, such as hemp, straw, cob and so on.  He said that in the two houses built in Ebbw Vale, the original idea had been to use hemp/lime, but the data on its insulation properties wasn’t sufficiently well done to allow them to meet their efficiency targets, and that more research is needed, but in time, they would have a vital, and increasing, role to play.

One of the things that will be central to this shift to the local Passivhaus, he told me, will be a huge reskilling of young people and the creation of a new infrastructure of manufacturing across the UK.  He told me:

“I think we need to start right back at school.  Let me give you an example of Austria.  We employed an assistant here from the Vorarlberg region.  At the age of 14 he moved to a school that did the traditional subjects but alongside timber technology.  By the age of 19 he had a diploma in timber construction and was skilled in using timber with his hands, skilled in using timber with machinery, skilled in drafting, skilled in structural calculations and building low energy technologies.  In the UK by contrast, at the moment we’ve spent years dismissing technical skills as being for those who can’t do anything else, and if a young person is half able to do anything, they’re encouraged to go to university and not waste their life using their hands”.

The Ebbw Vale houses offer us a taste of what might be possible with some vision and some applied effort, and the potential benefits that such an approach would bring in terms of jobs, skills, local economic activity and a return to a more vernacular approach to building, where buildings are rooted in place and the local materials.

And now here, in full, is the interview I did with Justin a couple of months ago…

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

I’m Justin Bere, I’m an architect, director of Bere Architects.  One of my main interests and specialisms in the practice is low energy building and in particular we’ve found that the Passivhaus methodology and standard gives us the best way of controlling the quality of what we are providing our clients with.

The two houses in Ebbw Vale, how did they come about and what were you trying to achieve?

They came about as a competition, which was the brainchild of Nick Tune of the Building Research Establishment to use European funding as I understand it.  I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it’s European funding to ensure that Wales gets the very latest Passivhaus, low energy thinking into their buildings and encourages developers to follow suit, having shown the way.  There’s a number of houses round there, so Ebbw Vale, or the local authority of Blaenau Gwent worked with BRE and set up a competition and found a partner in United Welsh Housing Association who would use their normal procurement route of contractor and so on to build the buildings – they were basically just given the money to do that.

Part of the exercise was to train an existing supply team and get their feedback on the viability of this.  The hope, before the funding cuts, was that housing associations would have a lot more money to be able to contribute to the 700 new homes in Ebbw Vale.  From our point of view, we entered that competition, and we were told that we had the best grasp of Passivhaus and technically they were confident in us succeeding.  They initially also employed another architectural firm to do the other passivhaus but lost confidence in them at the same time as they got interested in our ideas of making further savings in the future on our first house, nearing completion. So we were asked to produce the second passivhaus which was a great opportunity for us to put into practice our ideas of further cost savings that came out of building the first house.

What were you trying to achieve with those buildings, what was your intent?

To show how we can get the very lowest energy consumption and the greatest comfort in building by concentrating on the fabric of the building, and also showing how we use the techniques to invigorate the Welsh construction industry locally at least.   I described a vision that they all seemed to like, of starting something in Ebbw Vale and the means to that.  They had funding for a skills and training centre in Ebbw Vale which was going to be run by a big commercial outfit with all sorts of funny angles and things, their pictures were about students drinking caffe lattes in foyer areas and I said, “look, this isn’t about skills.  What you really want is a supershed with rectangular classrooms on one side overlooking the shed.”  In the classrooms you have new technologies, timber technologies that are to do with the fundamentals of building timber frame buildings and one production line.

There’s another one which is to do with laminating timber for window frames, there’s a number of technologies there which are tiny production facilities, which the students learn to use – because there aren’t many other opportunities to use these techniques in the UK and these are generally used in Germany and Austria and so on, and get them to learn and perhaps sell those products so it’s a resource to sell to local industry.  Then if production goes up and demand goes up then you perhaps spawn a little kind of science park for timber technology.  Someone comes along and says, “Look you’ve created a business case.  I’m going to take students, I’m going to build a shed, I’m going to buy this equipment and we’ll build a production line.

So there is now, resulting from that, and quite excitingly, Nick Tune at BRE has got so far £6 million of funding committed to building a low carbon technology training centre.  Maybe we will end up getting to be involved in the design of it, but my purpose is really just that it’s exciting.  Instead of a narrow vision to design a house, we want to get people fired up in to doing something much bigger.  I’d just love to see a successful example in Wales that would encourage other people and give them ideas of how they could do their own locally made, affordable, truly low energy buildings, and maybe we could get this sort of thing happening all over the country”.

The houses that were built – why were they significant and how do they move the idea of the passive house forward?

They’re significant because they are designed to be passive even in this extremely inhospitable environment at the head of the valleys.  People tend to think of a building regulations house being a building regulations house – same design – whether it’s in Swansea, Manchester or London.  What we found, or what BRE found for us, was that the weather conditions – because of the real misty conditions of Ebbw Vale, a thousand feet up and cold in the winter, are twice as difficult as Manchester and twice as difficult as Innsbruk in Austria.  That is using what they call the ‘extreme worst case’, they were being quite cautious because they want to make sure that they do work.  We have to make the building passive in that location.

In addition, we were designing for social housing, so they’re the first social housing, passive house prototype in the UK.  One of the primary requirements of the brief was to build them as closely as possible to the housing association average house price for a one off detached house for £1200 per square metre.  We came pretty close to that.  The first one, because it was a very rushed project, before we could really fully understand the cost we had to get on and build the first one, because of the opening date for the Eisteddfod.

The first house was coming out at something like £1700 per square metre.  At that point we realised there were ways of saving money.  We came up with the idea of doing an alternative technical approach, both Passivhaus: one is working on total annual energy consumption and the other is looking at total peak monthly energy consumption.  Normally those end up looking like quite similar buildings but in extreme conditions we end up with one house, the more expensive house, more traditionally passive house design with relatively big windows – because of the low amount of sun they get very big in order to grab every bit of sun that’s available and hold on to it.

The co-heating tests at the moment show that they get a little bit of sun and they hold on to that heat for 5 hours.  That means that in the summer, in order to avoid overheating, you need retractable blinds, another cost.  Our alternative design can be rationalised by saying well, there’s not very much sun so we’ve got super insulated walls, 400mm of insulation, there’s 600mm of insulation in the roof.  These super insulated buildings can make a lot of use of the internal heat gains so we’re not getting much from outside, so let’s not bother much about the outside.  The windows are a bit smaller – they’re still bright interiors with plenty of daylight, but make them smaller than the traditional passive house and because a 400mm thick wall is going to lose less heat than a triple glazed window even.  So we concentrate on holding on to the internal gains from people, their pets, their oven, their TV and so on, to supply a great deal of the warmth in the house.

The significance of the project is that we’ve got one down to about £1300 per square metre on the second option, and I think we can do better still.  We’ve achieved low costs.  Basically it would be about £8000 more for a two bedroom house than a standard building regulations house built over the last ten years.  It’s not bad considering the reduction in energy and the pay back period of about 14 years.

What about the role of local materials in the building – what have you done that’s innovative in that regard?  Why do local materials matter?

Local materials matter because they do two things.  They reduce carbon emissions from transportation, and they increase local employment.  Local employment, if it really is local, also requires less carbon emissions and travel from the factory or workshop to the site.  The factory, the timber workshop that we were employing to build the timber frame, have built the factory on supplying Premier Inns around the country with horrible, cheap 140 mm thick stud walls so because Wales has plenty of these 140 mm sized timber sections.  I should explain that mountain timber in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia can come in larger sections than our fast growing timbers in the UK, because our moist and relatively warm climate means that we end up with less good quality, less dense timber and it tends to twist a bit more and be a bit more sappy and is generally not regarded as being suitable over about 140 mm, that’s the ideal.

At 140mm we have thin, poorly insulated walls zooming off all over the country to Premier Inns.  What we needed was about 400mm of insulation and we wanted to use local materials.  Now the biggest, most reasonably accessible timber grown in Wales is about 215mm as a sawn timber stud.  So 215mm, as your central core of insulation, still requires another 200mm of insulation so we’ve found a reasonably economical way of achieving this.  215mm is in the centre – that gets built up on site – then we put 100 mm stud on the inside of that, the services zone, build that with fibre insulation, get our extra 100 and then 100 mm wood fibre insulation on the outside.

The heart of what we were trying to do was also stimulate and show markets for local timber so we weren’t absolutely having to use local all the time, we didn’t think that was always the best thing to do.  We could, on the inner and outer surfaces, have had that 100mm zone of insulation on the inside and 100mm of insulation on the outside as Welsh Rockwool, or we could have used some horrible oil based foam insulation, or we could have used Warmcell recycled paper but the problem with that is that it’s not energy efficient and we couldn’t get that in 100mm studs so the logical thing to us is to use wood fibre insulation.  It’s really healthy, it’s truly a renewable material and it’s more efficient than Warmcell, so it worked in 100mm zones.

There is no wood fibre insulation made in the UK so we bought it from a UK distributor and it’s made, some in Switzerland, some in Germany.  As part of the exhibition, to say this is what we think a Welsh manufacturer could and perhaps should be making, does anyone have an interest out there?  We were looking for opportunities of growth of Welsh industry.  With the first house, the most reliable Passivhaus windows produced come from Germany and they’ve being doing this for 15, 20 years.  They make windows that last generations that don’t twist that have insulation in the frames so they remains warm, as warm as the triple glazing almost, and they’re well sealed to avoid cold draught leakages.  German houses are quite famous for not having draughts, just as English houses are famous in Europe for having draughts!

We thought we’d play it easy on the first one, we must get a draught free construction – we will be air tested so we don’t want to risk it on the first one, get a British one and find our house is not certified.  So we got the German windows.  But then on the second one we said, “Look, now let’s try and push things.  We know we’ve made it work – we’ve got certification on the first one, it’s not so important on the second one so let’s get a designer I knew who designs passive house windows, learn his trade.”  We designed Passivhaus windows and the front door – got them certified in Germany (which was quite a rushed process) and got a partnership of five or six Welsh joiners together to buy in to this process.

One of the joiners went great guns for it and said, “I’m going to build these”, and imported the insulation from Germany.  Part of our message was that we could be making these in the UK – maybe someone like Kingspan or whoever would be able to do that with relatively small changes to their production lines.  But at the moment anyway it needed to be imported from Germany and then laminated to the wood, made up and installed.  So in the second house we had Welsh windows – the first UK, passive house certified windows; UK designed and made.

Are you able to put a percentage to the amount of local materials in both houses?  Presumably by local, in that context, you mean Welsh?

Yes.  Well I can’t at the moment…do you mean in quantity, volume, cost?  It’s a very difficult, if not impossible question to answer.  I’ve got a list on the two houses of the Welsh sources, which I could quickly read through, scan and send to you.  Some of it’s a bit confusing…

• The timber frame: I’ve listed the company and it’s local
• Roofing:  it’s a local company and they were using Welsh made tiles
• Local plumber, local electrician, local scaffolder, local carpenters
• External blinds:  well it’s a British company that distributes them but they import them from Germany.  We don’t have anyone that does it in the UK – that’s on the larch house.  We don’t have anyone who makes retracting solar blinds in the UK, it’s just incredible really.
• Sprinklers:  a UK company, parts probably from overseas.
• Plaster: a UK plastering company.  The plasterer may be from the UK but half the plaster in the country comes from France
• Flooring:  a UK, local company but who knows where the….well linoleum is British, yes.  Normally they put horrible vinyl down which makes you sick when you walk in and breathe the fumes, and that’s what goes into most social housing Passivhauses.  Well I insisted, for a small amount of extra money that we used linoleums which is made from plant resins and smells lovely – except they put the disgusting vinyl in the kitchen and the bathrooms for some unknown reason
• Stonework – a local company and local stone
• Painting: a local company.  The paint was an Earthborn, British, organic paint
• Wall tiling: a local company though not sure where the tiles came from because the design build company, United Welsh Housing said, “Normally we get rid of the architects at this point.  We don’t want to be told where to get our tiles from, we have our own normal suppliers.”  It was the same with the kitchen which is why they put the vinyl flooring down, “We always use vinyl flooring – we’ll use our local people and do that.”

I remember when I talked to Rob McLeod, he said that he thought the first house was about 80% and the second was about 90%.  But as you say, it’s of what – weight?  Volume?  Price?  Was he getting a bit over excited?

Yeah, I wouldn’t be being completely honest if I said I thought he was absolutely right, put it that way!  Maybe it is 80 and 90, but if you look down the list of names here, they’re all Welsh or British, but hidden behind that, for example there’s a lovely Welsh company doing the render for the Lime House.  Where does the lime come from?  Germany.  In Wales they’re really proud of Tir Mawr lime, but little do they know that a lot of the products come from Germany.  It’s just so frustrating.

The reason, to be completely fair to Tir Mawr, they use Welsh lime on very traditional lime rendering where there’s no external insulation, straight over stonework and it’s quite chunky material, thickly daubed-on stuff.  However, when you’re going to do a low energy building you need wood fibre insulation, or you need an insulation on the outside – it’s much better than inside for all sorts of technical reasons.  Then if you put a lime on, you need a very thin coat of lime.  You can’t use the traditional lime, so we have to develop that technology.

It’s interesting, because I was talking to a guy called Mike Small who works for the Fife Diet up in Scotland where they’re promoting the idea of local food.  They started out saying, “You should eat all local food, all seasonal food,” but then people come and say, “I like the idea of eating local and seasonal but I couldn’t live without chocolate and wine and coffee.”  If people say, “OK, list the things you really couldn’t live without”, they don’t make up more than 10, 15% of the diet so they now say, “90% local food, 20% imported feels like an achievable context.”  It sounds like with construction, you might be able to say that 80 – 20 is a rough target in terms of the target between local and imported materials, if and when we get to a stage where we have all the infrastructure in place to make that possible. Would that be reasonable?

Yes, I think that is reasonable.  I think that in time people will be forced to do better than 80%.  In the food thing, I’m sure you know Professor Tim Lang, and I completely subscribe to his thinking.  My parents ran a small organic farm in their retirement and personally I haven’t been to a supermarket for 10 years or more.  I would only go to the local shop round the corner, the farmers’ market or Mother Earth health food shop.  Mother Earth produce our lunches here and I was a bit concerned because as they winter was coming on they were producing salads with tomatoes.  I went round and had a chat to say, “I’d far rather go to the market – there are some much nicer greens than you’re providing.  Let’s forget about tomatoes.”  They’re nice but they’re importing them all from Italy.

She said she goes to the farmers’ market and she’s been telling her boss she would happily get the greens that come from Cambridge rather than him importing this stuff from the wholesaler.  That’s what she’s now doing and our salads have got much better, they’re much more tasty, they’re fresh…and I think everyone here feels better about that and partly it’s a matter of people understanding what the alternatives are and having some pleasure in doing it without chocolate…..on the other hand one doesn’t want to get the message over that to be green one has to live a dull and sad existence!

If the aspiration, similarly, is that we want the buildings of the future being local, seasonal, organic, far more nutritious houses in that kind of a way – what role do you see in the idea of a local Passivhaus for some of the materials that would be more prevalent in the natural building scene in terms of hemp, straw bale, clay plasters and these kind of things….they would ultimately be much more rooted in the local vernacular of the place, so what role do we have in a rediscovery and a re-embracing of those materials in the context of a Passivhaus?

I think there’s tremendous scope and opportunity.  I know Rob looked at hemp insulation because we were keen to use that instead of the wood fibre, but the U-values claimed by the hemp insulation people Rob discovered were extremely dubious and he was quite shocked at how poor the testing methodology.  He said, “No, we cannot achieve anything better than Warmcell – it may be not as good as that; we can’t rely on it.  We need to be sure our first building are going to work.”  We don’t want to be experimenting so much that all the opportunities to experiment in the future are lost because we blew the first one.

The approach has got to be that we build really successful, true to performance, passive houses, get that recognised as being a really good methodology.  Then I’d love to work with rammed earth technologies, cob and so on and work out how we can use those really local materials, get them well insulated and draught free.  I know that probably sounds controversial to some people.  They’ll say people have lived in cob buildings for generations and they didn’t worry about the odd draught, but unfortunately we were talking about a different mindset – people that didn’t mind putting pullovers on, who got up and went outside and did a lot of manual work.  Even if they were Wordsworth writing poetry, he was also walking the hills, getting exercise and coming home to write poetry.

Now we expect to do no manual work, sit in jeans and Tshirt in front of a computer for 8 hours and feel warm.  Because most people don’t see the energy going into their houses, they’re not carrying logs and buckets of coal, they’re completely obvious to what’s going on.  If they were carrying logs in they’d be shocked at how much needs to be carried in just to keep that lifestyle going.  In an ideal world, yes people would behave like our grandparents did and we wouldn’t need so much insulation, but what we’re trying to do with the Passivhaus is to bring people into a low energy way of living without having to compromise anything.  In fact, they’ll actually have better comfort in the building because they’ll get fresh air through the heat recovery ventilation.

In terms of the hemp, you were saying that the testing wasn’t good enough.  In terms of hemp and straw bale having sufficient data behind them for you to feel confident in using them….where’s that testing going to come from?  Who should be doing it?  Who’s going to move it forward?

I think that could be done by us as architects and inventive clients.  So a client comes to us and says, “We’d like to use cob because it’s a local material and we’re passionate about doing that”, then we would think through the design in order to come up with a solution that dealt with the really positive attributes of cob and part of that would be thermal mass and it does add to insulation.  I don’t know how much insulation it provides, I doubt there’s any data around so we would do some research and see if there’s something in Germany, someone may have done some cob prototypes.

Then we’d look at how to externally insulate the wall appropriately because we’d need more insulation than the cob alone I think, but we’d need to maintain the breathability of it.  That’s one route, I’m not trying to shirk that responsibility but I think the best place for this work is for universities to have some good tutors – some of them do – inspiring them to think in this way and saying, “Let’s build this prototype.”  This is perhaps the one opportunity in their lives when they’re going to be able to dedicate this amount of time to experimenting and research and actually producing something that’s useful at the end of it.  I’m trying to encourage that.

We’ve started the UK Passivhaus conference and the same time we’ve started the UK Passivhaus student conference and that’s been largely run…we did the first two years’ conferences but it’s now been taken over by the Passivhaus Trust, and I’m on the steering committee and we’re trying to positively engage the universities, both in presenting papers and encouraging to do the research in the first place; and hopefully giving them feedback of these sorts of ideas.  At the moment, no-one has said from our group to the universities, “What about research into cob passive houses?”  It’s a great idea but they need guidance and help from the cob experts, from people like myself doing Passivhauses and so on.  The universities being aware of this as an opportunity as well and asking us and getting involved.

The idea of buildings being built to Passivhaus standard but the design starting with what materials are available, so that they’re designed specific to that place, that you could almost have a way of designing Passivhauses rooted in place in terms of the materials and the whole idea scaling up – what do we need to put in place?  What infrastructure do we need?  You talked about the need for the windows to be made here and that kind of training, but presumably you also need woodland being planted and managed properly, you need retraining, young people – what infrastructure do we need to scale this up meaningfully?

I think we need to start right back at school.  Let me give you an example of Austria.  We employed an assistant here from the Vorarlberg region.  At the age of 14 he moved to a school that did the traditional subjects but alongside timber technology.  By the age of 19 he had a diploma in timber construction and was skilled in using timber with his hands, skilled in using timber with machinery, skilled in drafting, skilled in structural calculations and building low energy technologies.  In the UK by contrast, at the moment we’ve spent years dismissing technical skills as being for those who can’t do anything else, and if a young person is half able to do anything, they’re encouraged to go to university and not waste their life using their hands.

If someone is utterly useless and persuaded by other people that they’re utterly useless they’ll think, “Oh, there’s nothing for it, I’ll end up in construction” and it becomes a very negative choice.  We need to start by making practical things: if someone enjoys playing with water and things like that then maybe plumbing’s for them.  If someone enjoys fiddling around with electrics, then maybe an electrician.  We should try and get a more positive approach.  There seems to be from the intake here, and the applications we get, my impression is – and it may just be that they’re finding us more – but my impression is there’s a growing appreciation of what humanity and the planet faces, and what local communities and the UK faces.  People want to do more and I’m sure that a lot of these young people feeling they’d like to do something…..although they realise construction is part of the problem, very few of them think that going off and being a builder with a load of layabouts isn’t really going to get anywhere.

If we can give them a more positive view of the opportunities of working within construction, it could achieve much more.  I think also that this can attract those people that don’t like wearing pullovers and want to sit in an office, to show them that they can also do the Austrian thing, going off and by the age of 19 having a diploma in timber technology.  I’d start right back there and get the really good people coming into the industry.

There are really good people coming in to architecture now but it’s a bit more difficult in other fields.  As architects, I see the role we’re playing as Passivhaus architects, a lot about rebuilding by one, showing appreciation of people’s interests and two, encouraging those interests.  On the Welsh Passivhauses we ended up having a site manager who is now quite knowledgeable, he succeeded in achieving one of the best, or probably the best air tests in the country, having never done that before because we gave him sympathetic designs and training and so on, which we’d learnt in Germany, and he’s really enthusiastic.

Likewise a contractor, a site manager locally here at the Passivhaus community centre, he’s had training in air tight construction, avoiding leaks and draughts and so on.  He’s spent a career in construction, knocking things up any old how and he’s really rising to the challenge of doing this and making comments and alerting us to concerns he has and asking our advice and so on.  You often hear architects saying, “We don’t have the skills, it’s hopeless,” and so on.  We can’t take that attitude – we have to learn those skills ourselves and teach those skills.

It’ll be a slow process but we can do that.  That’s why, as I say with the cob building, I relish that challenge and I regard it as an opportunity to do more research and try and pass this learning on and collaborate with people and get them set on a trajectory that they master themselves and we just help to get it going.  The other really strong thing about local materials is that we start to build local specialist industries and everything from the Japanese electronics industry that thrived because of the density of companies in a locality, in a relatively small nation, around Tokyo or somewhere, that were supporting each other, where anything you needed you could get – to timber where in Germany, they say, “Look, we’ve been around since 16^th 17^th century and we’ve got everyone from the growers to the mills, with their production line geared specifically for us.  They know what we want and they supply us exactly the right materials.  It means that we have faultless products that we can supply to the joinery workshops”.

It’s about building those connections.  If you’ve got an area rich in timber like Wales, relative to the rest of the UK they’ve got 3 times as much wood per hectare as England and twice as much as Scotland – that’s a place to set up that would do well by saying, “Let’s use these resources, let’s go to furniture shows, let’s send people out to find the best furniture designers, bring them back to Wales, to offer them space, to enhance the value of the raw materials that we have, to build an industry to work locally with house builders in timber frame, and gradually you find all the machinery, suppliers, makers, maintenance people move in to the area and you get a whole buzz and the whole thing takes off”.

Vorarlberg region in Austria decided that low energy building was central to its success in achieving its ambition of self-sufficiency.  If someone is building a house using local timber, and burning local timber to keep warm, if they’ve got a very insulated house they won’t use much timber to keep it warm and that means there will be more land available for growing food.  As a result, Vorarlberg has, through this combined vision of wanting to do really high quality, low energy buildings, have got everything – not just timber but they’ve got a really good low energy heating company, really good low energy heat recovery manufacturers, really good insulation people.  All these organisations support each other.

I just think whatever the focus, it’s really good to get a focus in a region and get a vision.  That’s what you’re doing with Transition Towns – you’re getting this shared vision, bringing communities together and saying, “Let’s go in a direction and make a success of this” and then everyone starts supporting this.  And I think local materials can fit into that because around a Devon cob industry that used to be dominant in construction in Devon and is now a niche thing, one could potentially rebuild this and we’ve got all the raw materials, it’s really cheap, we could get young people off the streets, somehow…….people with the enthusiasm and vision that this is an exciting force.

Some people may think that’s a funny thing for the future, that it’s going backwards.  But that’s where I think potentially allying something like cob with passivhaus could actually make people think this is the future – it’s not backward at all.  This is a fantastic new technology, or a new way of working with cob.

If you imagine in 20 years time this has been successful and any new house built in the UK is built using 80% local materials and the structure that has sprung up to support that – can you describe that to us?  How would that be different from now?  What would be our experience of the building industry?  Could you paint a picture of what that would be like?

One would be choosing a house from local companies and there’d be perhaps in one’s locality 5 or 10 smallish companies, each with a proven track record of building wonderful, low energy houses, using local people one knows in the pub or knew at school who are running or working in these organisations and you choose between the pros and cons of the various techniques.  There probably isn’t a great deal between them, and some of one’s choices may be made as a result of who one knows or who is nearest to one’s building plot.

Those organisations or companies are buying raw materials locally that are also employing people in the area, and there’s a tremendous pride in the kind of results that are being produced in that area.  Traditionally, Herefordshire and East Anglia, on opposite sides of the country, have similar technologies in terms of timber frame buildings.  Somewhere else you’d have stone buildings.  We’d be going forward to a new regional interest, attention to detail, producing buildings, results and products for local people.

You’d have a pride in doing something well.  You don’t want it to fall apart and you want to do your best for the people you know and care for.  We get a completely good culture, as I see it, and the same with food.  It’ one of the nice things about going to farmer’s markets – you’re buying from people who are producing and they know who they are selling to each week and they’re going to make sure – they want to produce the best for regular friends that come to the market.  One will want to do that for the local community, whether it’s food, building, whatever and as a result we’ll all have a much more enjoyable, fulfilling lives.  Yes there probably will be some things that are transported around, but hopefully we’ll need so little power going into our buildings that we’ll be able to use some nice big wind generators to generate electricity for vehicles so that when we do have to move things around, it’s done by electrically run vehicles.  It’ll all be low carbon, healthy and rewarding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8&feature=related

There is a huge boom in natural gas production going on in the US at the moment.  Gas which is locked up in shale and has proven very hard to extract in the past is now being made available through a process called hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’.  Here, wells are drilled deep into the shale, initially vertically, then horizontally, explosive charges then fracture the rocks, and then a highly toxic mixture of over 500 chemicals, many of them known carcinogens, is pumped under pressure into the rocks, followed by huge volumes of water into which the natural gas then dissolves, rather like the bubbles in lemonade.  Think of it as a huge Sodastream.  About half of this water is then pumped out again, the gas removed, and the highly toxic water is then, in theory at least, safely disposed of.

Gasland, in part, tells the story of Josh Fox, who lives in a forest, near a river, in the house his parents built in Pennsylvania, and who one day received a letter from a gas company offering to buy the rights to extract gas from his land.  Intrigued, he set off to find other places where this was taking place.  The film is really the story of that trip.  What he found was that fracking is happening across the US, on a huge scale, and that in many cases, is having a disastrous effect on groundwater and on the communities that depend on that water.  He found communities suffering from all kinds of illnesses, and with water that comes out of the tap dark brown, smelling of benzine and other hydrocarbons, and, in many cases, in some of the film’s most spectacular moments, that can actually be set on fire by holding a lighter next to the water.  Being able to set your kitchen water on fire is as sure an indication as you could want that something is wrong somewhere.

‘Gasland’ reveals how the organisations supposed to be protecting many thousands of people aren’t, and how one of Dick Cheney’s final acts when in government was to change the legislation so that the companies carrying out fracking are exempt from the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and a raft of other environmental legislation.  The industrial system’s model of find a resource, trash the place trying to get it out and to maximise the economic return, then get out doing the least possible to remedy the impacts of what you have done, is thrown into stark relief in this film.  The polluted water, once stripped of its gas content, is left to sit in ‘holding ponds’ where it often leaks out.  In theory it should be sent to landfill, but in one of the scenes that stayed with me the longest, some places now have machines that ‘evaporate’ the water, turning it into mist which blows away, taking its poisonous contents away to wherever the wind carries it.

Watching this film in the UK, you might find yourself thinking that this is another film about the US and some of the more outlandish things that happen there, but it isn’t an issue here.  However, fracking is now underway in the UK.  The first hydraulic fracturing wells are being sunk, as we speak, on a farm 4 miles from Blackpool, and many more sites are in the process of being identified.  The terms of their license mean that Cuadrilla, the company undertaking the drilling, doesn’t have to reveal the results of the explorations until 2015.  Many more are planned, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change has made it clear that it has no plans to call for a moratorium on the practice.

So, given the potential of the environmental impacts being so clearly experienced in the US, it might be worth asking what are the benefits of turning to fracking?  The UK imports much of its gas, currently from Qatar and Russia, among other places.  How might this affect our national energy security?  According to a recent report from the Tyndall Centre, displacing 10% of the UK’s current gas consumption would necessitates about 2,500-3,000 horizontal wells spread over some 140-400 square kilometres, requiring 27 to 113m tonnes of water.  ‘Gasland’ sets out clearly how the authorities who are meant to protect people from things like fracking are failing them horribly.  One woman reports confronting a public representative and saying “if you aren’t going to protect us, what should we do?”, and being told “get an attorney”.  However, with gas fracking starting here in the UK, we can naturally be assured, one would hope, that the powers-that-be are all over it, and intent on keeping a close eye on things.

However, when asked about the Blackpool drilling, the Department of Energy and Climate Change wrote that:

“Cuadrilla, currently operating near Blackpool, has made it clear that there is no likelihood of environmental damage resulting from its shale gas project, and that it is applying technical expertise and exercising the utmost care as it takes drilling and testing forward.”

Oh that’s alright then.

I would highly recommend this film as a powerful and graphic immersion in what ‘scraping the barrel’ looks like in practice.  In ‘The Transition Handbook’ I referred to the Alberta tar sands as the equivalent of an alcoholic going to the pub, finding the beer is off, and being so desperate for a drink that he thinks “over the years there must have been thousands of pints spilt on this carpet, I’ll boil it up and drink that”…  Gas fracking is like starting to blow bits of the house’s foundations up in order to find any spilt beer that made it through to the brickwork.  It may be marginally better than coal mining and all the horrors associated with that, and we can debate, as George Monbiot has been increasingly in recent weeks, the role of nuclear in all this and whether it is better or worse than coal or gas fracking, but really surely the message of this film, with its closing shots of huge windfarms, is that we can do better.

With the publication last week of a report showing that a rapid transition to a completely renewable infrastructure is possible by 2030, and Germany setting a record last year for the amount of renewable energy installed, the sooner we can leave the second half of the oil age behind the better.  The sooner we can shift our expectations, use less, and get a sense of the increasingly abusive process that filling our cars makes necessary, the better.  I found ‘Gasland’ a very sad film to watch.  Here is something that makes nobody happy, and represents corporations completely out of control.  It also takes you on Fox’s journey through learning more and more about gas fracking, to the point where it all gets too much for him and he stands and weeps by the side of the river.  I think it is vital viewing, and absolutely deserves the Oscar it came so close to winning.

You can order the DVD of Gasland here.

Of course one of the dangers of writing history is the people that you leave out, so I apologise in advance, by its very nature I am scrabbling about in my memory here and this is by no means an attempt to be exhaustive, but from my memories of the period 1996-2005, here are some of the people I think should such a history should record (apologies also for the fact that this is inevitably a pretty Munster-based selection…).  There are the permaculture pioneers, the people who were teaching permaculture up and down the country, often using their own evolving sites as their classroom: Marcus McCabe in Clones, Richard Webb, Graham Strouts in West Cork, Philip Allen in Belfast, Dominic Waldron, the straw mulch man, Klaus Hauschild, and John Dolan, the pond wizard.

In the media there were people who pushed this whole thing forward too, getting stories about what was going on into the mainstream media.  There were the various publications, Don Coughlan’s The Source, which didn’t make it beyond a few editions but was great while it lasted, Sustainability Magazine which also recently stopped publishing, Construct Ireland which has done a huge amount to spread green building ideas in Ireland.  There were the broadcasters, Duncan Stewart who has made very influential environmental programmes for years, George Lee who made ‘Future Shock’ for RTE about peak oil, and writers such as Iva Pocock and Adrienne Murphy who got stories into the press about these things from early on.

There were the ‘Monsanto 6′ who pulled up the first Monsanto trial crops in Ireland, John Seymour, Gavin Harte, Pauric Cannon, Davie Philip, Adrienne Murphy and Richard Roche, who ended up not being prosecuted. Also, in terms of food, and pushing for looking at food in a different way, organisations such as the Dublin Food Co-op were years ahead of their time, and writer and cook Darina Allen has done a huge amount to push the idea of local food in the Irish mainstream.  The Irish Seed Savers have done amazing work protecting the country’s genetic heritage and making it available again to growers.  Madeline McKeever in West Cork is now doing similar things, selling local heirloom seed varieties. Dominick Cullnane ran the Mallow Garden Festival for some years and created a very high profile space for many innovative ‘green’ businesses and craftspeople to read a wider audience.

Then there are the building and construction pioneers.  Architects like Brian O’Brien and Mike Haslam of Solearth Architects, designers of The Village in Cloughjordan and green building pioneers at a time when nobody knew what they were on about.  Other architects, such as Paul Leech, Sally Starbuck, Tony Cohu, Rachel Bevan, who were bringing ideas about sustainability into their work at a time when the national push was for as much construction built as cheaply as possible, usually using concrete blocks.  There are the pioneers of different natural building approaches, Marcus and Kate McCabe who built Ireland’s first strawbale house and are now great hemp advocates, the many timber framers up and down the country who tried to break concrete’s stranglehold, the people who learnt cob building, often at The Hollies, and went on to do it in other places.  There’s The Village project, many of whose members have been involved since 1997, and only now, 13 years later, are actually building their houses.  It is a project that is the embodiment of tenacity and patience.

Brian Rogers, Sligo’s last master thatcher, who has done so much to keep that art alive, and Dan McPolin of Narrow Water Lime Services, who first got me fired about about lime. Christy Collard and Saul Mosbacher introduced the chainsaw into construction, bringing the concept of the reciprocal frame roof forward with each new construction. There was the then Mary O’Donnell (since divorced and I forget her new surname) who did an amazing job in the mid-90s trying to build a methane biodigestor near Skibbereen that would have used local slurry to power a swimming pool and ice rink, many years ahead of her time, and came very close to realising it.  Quentin Gargan and Clare Watson who, among other great work promoting renewable energy and running for political office among other things, built a very well researched and gorgeous strawbale house.

There were those who pushed for a new way of looking at Ireland’s woodlands, for a move away from monocultural forestry to  a more diverse and productive approach.  Jacinta French and Paul McCormick started experimenting with growing nut trees in West Cork, and Mike Collard, whose Future Forests nursery has been a huge catalyst for the planting of broadleaf trees and more unusual productive trees (as well as for the idea that chainsaws can do a lot more than just cut down trees).  Joe Gowran and Mark Wilson’s ‘Coppice Association of Ireland’ did great work promoting the idea of coppicing, and Ted Cooke reconnected people to their cultural connection to the forest through story and through experience.  Ian Wright and the Irish National Forestry Foundation created, at Manch, a series of demonstration trials to show the potential of broadleaves in Irish forestry.  Then there was the woodland survey work that An Tasice did, pushed forward in West Cork by Jacqi Hodgson, Tony Cohu, Joyce Russell and others.

There were the educators too.  Sonairte in Meath was one of the first environmental education centres in the country, as was The Ark Permaculture Centre in Clones, Co. Monaghan.  There are the organic colleges, An T-Ionad Glas Centre for Organic Education and the Organic Centre in Rossinver, as well as the pioneers within the universities, such as Tipperary Institute, one of the first off the block in terms of weaving sustainability into their courses through the work of people such as Seamus Hoyne and Kevin Healion.  There’s Dr. Anne B Ryan at NUI Maynooth, who has researched and published on the whole notion of ‘enough’.  There is the permaculture course at Kinsale Further Education College, started due to the vision of its Principal, John Thuellier, and the ongoing training work done at The Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability by Thomas and Ulrike Riedmuller and others.

There were those who argued for treating waste water in a different ways, promoting the idea of composting systems and of reed bed construction, Marcus McCabe, Feidhlim Harty, Olan Herr, John Dolan, often found up to their knees in water, but who did much to shift the idea that the septic tank is king.  Who can forget Marcus McCabe, at a conference in Dublin full of planners and architects, passing a bucket round the audience containing the well-composted output from his family’s bucket toilet system?  There were the economists, people who argued that the financial path being pursued by Ireland in its Celtic Tiger boom was unsustainable, in particular Richard Douthwaite, the only person mentioned here who does get a mention in Liam Leonard’s book.  The pioneers of the early local currency experiments in the country, both LETS schemes and printed currencies.  And of course Dr. Colin Campbell, the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, who gave talks up and down Ireland, and whose presentations to the Irish treasury led to his nickname of ‘Dr Death’.

And then finally of course, there are the networkers, the people who connected all the bits together.  Davie Philip, networker par excellence, initially with Caoimhin Woods, who put on the Convergence Festival every year as a way of networking and building a movement, and who has provided an extraordinary service to it ever since.  They produced the ‘Source Book’, the country’s first green directory, which subsequently moved online.  There are, of course, many many people I have forgotten or never heard of who should be in here.

I think that the work of these, and other pioneers, should not be forgotten in any history of the environmental movement in Ireland.  Of course such a movement needs the campaigners, those who lobby politicians, who mobilise campaigns against environmentally disastrous projects.  But there are also the stories of the pioneers, the craftspeople trying to retain and promote traditional crafts, the people who have often taken great financial risks and leaps into the unknown because they felt that certain things had to be done, allowing those who came after to learn as much from their failures as from their successes.  With the Celtic Tiger well and truly now unravelled, and Ireland staring into a very uncertain future, it may be that much of the work of those mentioned above is finally coming into its own, and deserves to take its place in the history books.

Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival stops the traffic.

Traffic on Tooting High Street came to a stop today when the Tooting Trashcatchers Carnival came to town!   Over 800 participants from local schools, community groups and clubs took part in this unique carnival made almost entirely from household rubbish. Over 1 million plastic bottles and shopping bags, half a million crisp packets, half a ton of renewable willow and half a ton of materials were collected over a six month period to create this extravaganza.  Check out the great piece on local ITV News… and this film, filmed from the Turtle, which gives a flavour of the event…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePOx9H3Llxs

Organisers of the carnival were jubilant that it had gone so smoothly and according to plan. Lucy Neal, Co Chair of Transition Town Tooting speaking this morning to ITV London Tonight news had this to say, “individually we may seem insignificant, but when we connect up in a community, we are very strong, we can make a huge difference. We are thrilled at how well it’s come together and amazed at the support we have received from the people of Tooting”.

One of the more amusing floats we saw today were the cycle powered living rooms transporting some of the elders of the community. Sitting comfortably on her recycled armchair, Jaya Patel, born and bred Tooting resident said “ the best bit about this carnival is that its bought the whole community together from all sections young and old from all ethnic backgrounds”.

The South London Swimming Club had a cycle-powered float with swimmers, iceberg and sea made entirely out of plastic bags and bottles. The swimmers themselves came dressed as the colourful doors of their changing rooms at the Tooting Lido.

The Lady of Tooting, a 6 metre high animatronic creation told the story of Tooting on her crinoline Victorian dress decorated with over 170 faces of the ladies of Tooting.

Antonia Field-Smith, a Tooting resident said “It was great to see Tooting High Street without traffic and to be able to walk down the road without worrying about getting run over. I loved it, what a fantastic event”.

Steven Cooper of the Metropolitan Police thought the carnival was a fantastic idea and one which he would like to see happen again next year.  The grand finale at Fishponds Playing Fields with a shared picnic followed by dancing and music performed by local school children was a fitting end to a spectacular day.  (Check out this great blog post about the day too…)

For further information please contact:

Malsara Thorne – malsaraw@gmail.com

www.transitiontowntooting.org

Slug

duel with a non-dualist

low-born land mollusc

high-impact intruder

free-loader, sprout-spoiler

meandering marauder

disrespecter

of my broad-beans’ border

you’ve a one-track mind

in a one-track body

diligent pillager

soft-horned invisigoth

slow silver scribbler

paradoxically busy sloth

you’re a tithe-taker, hole-maker

indiscriminate direct debitor

bold-as-brass brassica editor

you’re a squishetty spoilsport

a glistening drag

the liquorice all-sort

nobody wants to find in the bag

it’s time that you were brought to book

you’re not as tasty as you look

listen chum, you are disposable

look at my thumb, it is opposable

unwelcome invertebrate

this might just hurt a bit

I pluck you and chuck you

into distant dew-drenched greenery

isn’t that mean of me?

slug, when all is said and done

you can  hide but you can’t run

I hadn’t heard of this until a couple of weeks ago, when a group of folks visiting from the US dropped by, en route from London, where they had visited an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum called ‘The Ministry of Food’ (which runs until January 3rd 2011), gave me their copy of this book.  Having read this book, I will definitely make a point of going to see the exhibition next time I am in London.  The book is the exhibition catalogue, but it is also a superb stand-alone publication, offering many useful insights on how the British people managed during the war, how the Ministry of Food successfully promoted the Dig for Victory/Kitchen Front campaigns which kept the country from starvation, and, ironically, led to the healthiest population in the country’s recent history.

Fearnley-Whittingstall was granted unprecedented access to the Imperial War Museum while preparing this book, and it is packed with posters, booklets and other memorabilia from the time.  Prior to World War Two, the UK was at its lowest level of food self-sufficiency at any point during the 20th century, and it had to try and rebuild food self reliance in a very short period of time.  It needed to get people growing food on any spare patch of ground, it needed to revolutionise output from the nation’s farms, and it needed to ensure that people were still able to cook healthy meals in spite of rationing and the unavailability of some key foods.  One of the keys to this was the Ministry of Food, and the book offers numerous insights into what it looks like when government creatively attempts to promote thrift, and what a Great Reskilling might look like in practice.

The author is also careful not just to write a historical piece, but to also draw lessons out for today.  That same ethic, she argues, of not wasting food, eating seasonally, and growing some of your own food, is just as relevant today.  She writes “today, instead of fighting Hitler, we are combatting economic recession.  But unlike our forebears, we are fighting on several fronts – against waste, junk food and the depletion of fossil fuels.  In hard times the battle for survival can be exhilarating, and it does bring rewards: the satisfaction that comes from self-sufficiency; pride in seeing children grow up strong and healthy; and the friendships that develop through co-operation with neighbours”.

The book is divided into three section.  Section 1, ‘Dig for Victory’ focuses on the revolution in food production that took place, both on the nation’s farms, and in the backgardens and allotments. Between 1939 and 1945, food imports to the UK were halved and there was an 80% increase in the amount of land in cultivation.  As well as writing an informed and fascinating history of the times, illustrated with quotes from diaries of the time, she also includes recipes and some great gardening guides.  For people with no gardening experience, the booklets clearly explained how to dig, how to set out an allotment and so on.  There are also some of the wonderful posters created by the Ministry of Food, and the rather odd one I am still trying to figure out which says “The Radio Doctor says ‘an ounce of cabbage is worth an inch of lipstick’”!

Although some advertising at the time was pretty rudimentary, with none of the pyschological tricks we are so accustomed to in advertising today (there is a Marmite advert which simply says “Marmite definitely does you good and you’ll enjoy it too”…), it was very powerful.  There is a story about how in 1942, the Ministry introduced ‘the National Loaf’, similar to today’s wholemeal bread, because scarcity of wheat and the push for national self-sufficiency in wheat, meant that every part had to be used, and the National Loaf was more nutritious and less wasteful than the white bread most peopel favoured.  Some saw the National Loaf as the source of every ailment, calling it “this nasty, dirty, dark, coarse, indigestible bread”.  The Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, started a rumour that it was an aphrodisiac, which seemed to help with its acceptance, and by the end of the War, 20% more bread was being eaten than in 1939. Just imagine the banning of white bread and other similar processed foods today, and the resultant health benefits (and the potential political suicide of the government that introduced it!)

The second section of the book is called ‘The Kitchen Front’ and looks at how people made their food rations go as far as possible, what shopping was like at the time, and how people coped with celebrations (birthday cakes, Christmas and so on).  This section, again, offers a fascinating history of the times, and an insight into a culture with a different attitude towards food.  Looking back from a culture today that wastes 30% of our food, Lord Woolton’s approach to overcoming wastefulness in the population is fascinating, stating “above all – whether you are shopping, cooking or eating – remember “Food is a Munition of War”. Don’t waste it”.  That culture of not wasting any food at all lasted into the early 1960s, and many people I talk to who grew up during the War still hold it strongly. The culture we inhabit today is as far from that as possible, but as Fearnley-Whittingstall notes, with the resurgence in interest in food growing, allotments and so on, perhaps we are starting to see its return.

The final section ‘Turning Over a New Leaf’, focuses on the practical gardening advice given to people at the time, and offers a month-by-month guide to food growing. It is an excellent and clear guide, offering useful insights into how gardening can be communicated in such a way that people could pick it up quite quickly.  Not one for the no dig gardening fraternity, but again, fascinating insights into how such things can be communicated (although how many of you reading this can honestly say that after every time you work in the garden you clean your tools afterwards?).

The exhibition behind this book is also accompanied by an excellent blog, with some of the information films from the time, and other useful stuff too.  As someone who is fascinating by the period 1939-1945 as the most recent example we have of a national government-led, intentional ‘Powerdown’, (something discussed in ‘The Transition Handbook’), this book is one of the best histories of the time, but it also draws out lessons and comparisons to today.  In full colour, packed with images from the time, this is much more than just a cookbook of wartime recipes, it is a historic case study showing how thrift, adaptability and self-reliance are key aspects of resilience, and that frugality had many benefits.  Above all, it shows what it looks like when government promotes those values, rather than the ones that dominated from the 1960s onwards, of consumerism at all costs.  ‘The Ministry of Food’ is a superb book, rich in insights and learning, yet also one only too aware of its relevance to today.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The story goes that this guy lived next door to a huge stables, and had stacked their manure for them in big heaps every year for the past 30 years.  Some of it he had on his farm, a heap of some 20 years of age.  A far bigger one stood on the main farm and he had a deal with them whereby he could sell it to local gardeners.  Then the stables was brought it, and the new owners didn’t share his passion for muck, and spread the lot around the farm.  All that remained was the small amount he had on his farm, which is now nearly all gone.  I got a good trailer load for £40, and what arrived is just gorgeous.

The compost in situ in one of the raised beds.

It poured from the trailer, crumbly, dark and delicious, moist and sweet-smelling into a big pile which is gradually being transported onto the garden beds (see left).  Compared to my most recent manure-gathering experience, where I shovelled semi-rotted muck into sacks in the pouring rain and returned home exhausted, sodden and filthy, only to be met by my neighbour who gave me the phone number of the guy with this muck (might have mentioned before I set off!), this was compost heaven.  So anyway, here it is… delicious.  I just hope my veggies agree.

Last Sunday, myself, my wife and our 2 youngest headed to the edge of town with a borrowed car and trailer in order to get some muck for our vegetable beds (yes I know we should really have done it months ago, but there we are). We went to a local rare breeds farm which doubles as a visitors centre, and is home to chickens, goats, donkeys, guinea pigs, geese and many other more wierd and wonderful creatures. Unfortunately the owners don’t pile their manure methodically, i.e. starting a new heap each year, rather they just keep piling it on top of what is already there, resulting in a huge pile, with the freshest on the top.

The thing with muck is that age is everything, you can’t just put muck of any age on your plants. You need something that is easily digestible by the worms and not too strong for the plants. The gardener Geoffrey Smith, who was a familiar voice to listeners to Gardeners’ Question Time, and who died recently, used to advise people to leave manure as long as they possibly could, until it was “good enough to put in your sandwiches”. If you haven’t composted, haven’t run your hands through 4 year old compost, and haven’t spent time rootling about in muck heaps, this sounds like a ridiculous statement. However, in my multi-animal muck heap on Sunday, I hit such a seam, and it looked as delicious to me as a good chocolate brownie.

Muck left for one year is still clearly muck. It contains visible straw and other bits, and is too strong to put on vegetables. After two years, it is usable, and looks more uniform, but is still recognisably manure. But after 4 years or more, it is friable, crumbly, light, moist, and feels as rich as a double chocolate pudding. In the same way that Italian lime plasterers would leave some lime to slake for 10-20 years and produce the lime that was considered the champagne of plasters, well aged muck is really the Holy Grail of gardeners.

As I prodded and ferreted with my fork, I first came across the muck seam shown right, which had been at the centre of the pile. On first inspection it looked fine, dark brown and quite crumbly. But having been at the centre of such a huge heap, its rotting process had taken place in a relatively anaerobic environment (ie. In the absence of air) so it was still quite strong, a bit slimy and not that well rotted.

Herein lies the problem with such an ad hoc system of composting, the centre of such a huge pile will take much longer to break down given the lack of air. Also, the pile had never been covered, so rain travels through the heap and has kept the bottom of the heap too wet. It would have been far better to make smaller piles of no bigger than 8ft cubed, covered them, and it would have rotted wonderfully in half the time. At least it could have been done as a new pile each week. Oh well.

After a bit more digging around, we hit gold. A section of the pile that had clearly been there a long time, but which was on the edge, so the air had access to it too (see left). Fantastic. It was dark, friable, crumbly, and felt like the most wonderful of woodland soils. If we are really concerned about gardening for the long term sustainability of both society and soil, then the shift for the gardener becomes to think of gardening as being not so much about growing food, as being about growing soil. With such a perspective, the production of such fine, well rotted compost should be an art taught to everyone, and in the same way that the unveiling of a new, flashy mobile phone leads to exclamations of “wow” and “cool”, so should the proud unveiling of a cupped hand full of 5 year old compost. It should be as valued as a fine wine.

One of my composting heroes is Marcus McCabe, of the Ark Permaculture Project at Clones in Co. Monaghan in Ireland. Marcus was fascinated/obsessed with the composting of human waste, and as a commercial reed bed installer, held firmly to the belief that the best way to treat human waste was to not mix it with water in the first place. As a result, over the years, he tried virtually every dry composting toilet system available (each fresh visit would find you sitting on a different toilet) and ended up concluding that the humanure bucket system was by far the most superior, the Rolls Royce of composting toilets

I will always remember going to a conference on green building at the Cultivate Centre in Dublin, where Marcus was billed as giving a talk about constructed wetlands. The audience consisted of many suited folks, planners, directors of construction companies and other people of great gravitas and importance. Within the first couple of minutes, Marcus had dismissed the entire idea of mixing human waste and water, and spent the next 15 minutes extolling the virtues of, in effect, shitting in a bucket and composting it in the garden. It was a wonderful tour de force, back up with the science of composting and an unarguable plea for common sense and an end to faecophobia.

The climax of the talk, having set out the case for humanure and for the revival of the fine art of home composting, was Marcus producing a large bucket of his finest homemade humanure compost, which he then gave to the audience who then proceeded to pass it round the entire hall. It was fascinating to see how each new person reacted as the bucket approached them. First they were all ‘yuk’ faces and giggling, then as they looked over the rim of the rather large bucket, there was an ‘aha’ moment and a real fascination, all sense of ‘yuk’ gone, as they saw what was not the bucket of putrid excrement they had been expecting but some rather fine and crumbly compost. It was wonderful to observe.

So go on, give yourself a treat. Get a load of muck delivered to your garden. Pile it in a neat stack, as close to a cube a possible. Pee on it occasionally if you feel so inclined. Cover it and leave it for 4 years. The tension will be almost unbearable, but I challenge you to leave it for that long, peel back the cover, pull out a fistful of it and not be amazed at what you (and the worms and the billions of bacteria) have created. I will be standing by, awaiting your emails of profound gratitude.