Village People

All over Britain, communities are going green, without waiting for permission

Green Futures, January 2007

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

By the end of the twentieth century, though, things had changed dramatically. In 1999, the last shop and the village post office closed forever, leaving Blisland’s residents without important services and a daytime community focus. Many other villages would have –indeed, have – rolled over and died. But not Blisland. Its 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 like 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. If it weren’t for the determination of the ordinary folk of Blisland, it would not be here now. As it is, 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 can immediately see that it is the hub of the village. The shop, selling local food as well as the usual tinned goods and newspapers, is thronged. 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 café 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. Arthur is 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 raising the half a million pounds needed to make their dreams happen (£50,000 of it was eventually donated by villagers themselves).

According to Arthur, it has more than paid off. They had hoped the centre would break 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’, he says. ‘It has breathed life back into the village. 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 – a real 21 st century project. Blisland has a fighting spirit. We weren’t going to go gently.’

Blisland’s fighting spirit is not unique. All across the UK, in increasing numbers, village communities are fighting back against 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, village centres like The Glebe, community-supported agriculture schemes … ten or even five years ago, such things were rare. Today, they are almost commonplace. And most are the initiative of ordinary village folk, determined, like Arthur Ludgate and co, not to let their communities die.

But there is something else at work as well. Increasingly, such grassroots initiatives have two broad aims. Firstly, to maintain, or revive, community life and spirit; and secondly, to do it in as sustainable a way as possible. Villages are battling to stay alive all over the UK . Increasingly, they are also battling to go green.

An excellent example can be found in Somerset ’s Chew Valley , where the village of Chew Magna is home to an intriguing experiment. Last year a group of villagers, increasingly concerned about the environmental impacts of their lifestyles, set up a project called GoZero, aimed at turning Chew Magna into a zero-waste village. The villagers took on a range of projects, including home energy audits for people who wanted them, restoring the local water mill with eco-materials, producing a local food guide, researching homemade biofuels and organising carshares. 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.’

More crucially though, as Roderick explains, larger projects are growing from GoZero’s small acorn, as involvement in green issues forces people to think about the global impacts of their lifestyles. The project that Roderick is currently most excited about is Converging World, a charity which grew out of GoZero, which is running an ambitious project to set up windfarms in India . The idea is to team up with Indian villagers, and raise money in Britain to help them build 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. Most importantly, though, the push to go green in Chew Magna, however hard it may turn out to be ‘has pulled people together and given us a project’. These days, the GoZero team are touring other villages, inspiring similar project elsewhere.

These, along with Ashton Keynes [see page xxxx] are just three of the most prominent green village projects around at the moment – but the more you look, the more you will see. This is starting, in fact, to look like something of a movement.

The Dartmoor village of Belstone , for example, 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 twelve months and change their lifestyles accordingly. And countless smaller-scale projects can be found in virtually every county, from local food promotion to carshare schemes, 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; a lead from the centre would help such projects enormously, and probably spawn many more. 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. Ambitious, yes – but perhaps not impossible.