Village people

Take a sense of place. Add community spirit, a dash of determination, and some vision. The result - village communities up and down the country getting to grips with the way they want to live. In 'Local leaders', James Goodman explores the shape of things to come. Here, Paul Kingsnorth shines the spotlight on some real life examples of rural success.

Blisland is a pretty little Cornish village. Drenched in sublime West Country light, it has an ancient stone church, a popular award-winning pub and the only village green in Cornwall. Half a century ago it also had four lively village shops.

By the end of the twentieth century, things had changed dramatically. The last shop and the village post office closed in 1999, leaving Blisland’s residents without important services and a daytime community focus. Many other villages would have - indeed, have - rolled over and died. But Blisland’s residents were determined to get their facilities back. They were determined, in fact, to expand and improve them. And they were determined to do so in the greenest way they could.

The Glebe is the result of that determination. An attractive new building of local wood and Welsh slate, it manages the feat of simultaneously standing out and looking as if it belongs to the landscape. The Glebe is Blisland’s new village centre, containing a shop, post office, café, internet hub, small business units and a doctor’s surgery. The village has come alive again. It has also set a green example to others.

For the Glebe is a deeply ecological building. Built by local architects, with local material where possible, to the highest ecological standards, it uses geothermal heating, photovoltaics, rainwater recycling, ‘wind catcher’ air-conditioning and high levels of insulation.

Visit the Glebe, and you see immediately that it’s the hub of the village. The shop, selling local food as well as the usual tinned goods and newspapers, is full of customers. The work of local artists is displayed on the walls. The café tables are occupied. Noticeboards advertise everything from a mobile hairdresser to fresh fish deliveries on Thursday.

Sitting at one of the tables, with a cup of tea resting on its red-checked tablecloth, Arthur Ludgate tells me how much difference the Glebe has made to village life. He’s one of a core group of about eight villagers who pioneered the construction of this place. Without them - and the support of the wider village community - it would never have happened. It took six years to get things off paper and into reality.

Six years in which a temporary shop and post office operated from an old shipping container, while the villagers set about finding appropriate land on the edge of the village (a supportive council helped with planning permission) and raising the half a million pounds needed. Funding eventually came from a variety of sources - the Countryside Agency, the parish council, the county council, the Post Office, the European Regional Development Fund, and the villagers themselves, who donated around £50,000.

They had hoped the centre would be breaking even by now. Instead it is in profit. And people from other villages are coming to use it. “You can see how pleased people are with it,” says Ludgate. “It’s particularly good for the elderly. They can come shopping for themselves again, and meet people; they’ve got their dignity back. We were determined to make this happen, and to make it as green as we could. Blisland has a fighting spirit. We weren’t going to go gently.”

Blisland’s spirit isn’t unique. Other villages are also resisting the creeping collapse of their communities - a collapse inflicted by the decline of agriculture, increased personal mobility, the disappearance of local shops, post offices and pubs, and rapidly spiraling house prices, which make many village homes unaffordable to all but the wealthy. Community-run shops, co-operatively owned pubs, community-supported agriculture schemes - such initiatives, rare or almost unheard of ten years ago, are beginning to multiply.

Details will vary from place to place - sometimes a new shop is owned by the community; on other occasions it is owned by the local council and leased to them; often councils are supportive, and community institutions from pubs to WI groups will pitch in; support from national NGOS like the Plunkett Foundation and the Village Retail Services Association can also be vital. But almost always, the original initiative has come from a small group of local people, determined to breathe life back into their communities.

There’s something else at work as well. Increasingly, such grassroots initiatives aim not only to revive community life and spirit, but to do it in as sustainable a way as possible. These are villages battling to go green.

An excellent example can be found in Somerset, where the village of Chew Magna is home to an intriguing experiment. Last year a local group, concerned about the environmental impacts of their lifestyles, set up a project called Go Zero to turn Chew Magna into a zero waste village. They took on a range of projects, including home energy audits for people who wanted them, restoring the local watermill with eco-materials, producing a local food guide, researching homemade biofuels and organising car shares. They have a long way to go before everyone is signed up, says Iain Roderick, one of the key drivers of the project, but “we see it as a 20-year project. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

The push to go green in Chew Magna, however hard it may turn out to be, has pulled people together to get involved in wider projects too. The one Roderick is currently most excited about is Converging World. A charity that grew out of Go Zero, it’s now running an ambitious project to team up with Indian villagers, and raise money in Britain to help them build wind turbines. The Indian villagers get clean energy and a source of income, and Converging World sells the carbon saved on the offsets market. It then uses the income generated to fund carbon-reduction schemes in Britain.

“We think this scheme gets around the problems that offsetting usually has, and it has great potential,” says Roderick. These days, the Go Zero team is touring other villages, inspiring similar projects elsewhere.

Blisland, Chew Magna, Ashton Hayes [see box]... is this starting to look like something of a movement? The Dartmoor village of Belstone, home to around 250 people, recently began a ‘green village initiative’, based around auditing the ecological impact of the village as a whole, and committing to changes based on the findings. The borough of Hyndburn, in Lancashire, which incorporates several villages, has just begun a ‘carbon footprint challenge’, in which volunteers will measure their carbon use over 12 months and change their lifestyles accordingly. And smaller-scale projects can be found in virtually every county, from local food promotion to car share schemes, from eco-housing to community orchards.

Of course, criticisms can be made of such projects. They are often run by middle-class retirees, sometimes relatively new to the area, or by local charities - not a problem in itself, unless they are allowed to become minority projects from which the wider community feels excluded. They constantly come up against regulatory and other obstacles which emanate from national or European government. Planning restrictions aimed at protecting greenbelt or agricultural land, for example, which can paradoxically militate against new green projects; lack of legal recognition for some community-owned projects; health and safety requirements which can cripple a small project by imposing punitive costs or restrictions upon it. Government moves to ease the way from more small-scale, green community projects, with more financial support and perhaps new planning exceptions and the like, could make a real difference in helping to spawn many more such projects.

And ultimately, of course, the wider impact they have will be negligible unless national action to tackle climate change and other environmental problems is not wider, deeper, and much faster.

But these are small niggles. The important story is that of a gradually rising tide of grassroots activism aimed at saving community life, local character and, well, the planet.

Active neutrality The Cheshire village of Ashton Hayes (population 1,000) aims to be the first carbon neutral small community in England - and its progress could provide a template for other communities to follow.

From a suggestion put forward by parish councillor Garry Charnock, ‘Going Carbon Neutral’ quickly became a village-wide initiative. It covers a broad canvas, from raising awareness about the impact of lifestyle choices, through to individual and collective actions to cut down and offset CO2 emissions.

The parish council has incorporated ‘Going Carbon Neutral’ into its long-term parish plan. Local businesses sponsored the launch in January 2006 - which was itself a major village event, with a turnout of 400 people. Barry Cooney, landlord of the Golden Lion, has got the pub’s owner, Punch Taverns, to back a drive to make it carbon neutral too, with a combination of energy saving, solar water heating and a switch to green electricity supplies. Employers are being encouraged to adopt more sustainable practices, starting with such basics as workplace recycling. Longer-term aspirations include persuading local industries to switch to biofuel and farmers to grow biofuel crops.

The University of Chester’s Department of Geography and Development Studies has committed itself to supporting the initiative for at least five years. Their students’ survey last summer covered 170 homes and calculated Ashton Hayes’s total carbon dioxide emissions as 4,766 tonnes. A combination of measures to cut that carbon, and the planting of some 16,000 ‘offsetting’ native trees around the village over time, will be closely tracked to monitor progress towards the ‘zero’ target. It will make Ashton Hayes a greener place in the literal sense too - an aspect the village school picked up on, launching a biodiversity study to coincide with the coming of spring.

“A lot of it is to do with mindset,” says Charnock. Encouraging residents to choose the lower carbon option for things they’d be doing anyway - from heating their homes to buying a car - is all part of “getting people to see aiming for carbon neutrality as part of normal life.” - Alison Winward

www.goingcarbonneutral.co.uk

Paul Kingsnorth is a writer and environmentalist, and a former deputy editor of The Ecologist.

15 January 2007