Bogan House, Totnes
“The uncertainty of our times is no reason to be certain about hopelessness” - Vandana Shiva
Totnes, Saturday November 29, Buy Nothing Day
There are lots of reasons to like Totnes. Discovering it has its own ‘Bogan House’ in pride of place opposite the civic hall has to be high on the list. No room for bogan-bashing here, Mr Doyle.
That’s not all it’s got going for it though. It’s quaint, the cabbie says, but the word hardly does the job. Totnes is the sort of picture postcard town in England that you can’t quite believe really exists. A medieval town with a high street that meanders down to the river, so narrow cars seem out of place, changing name three times on the way, a photo waiting to be taken every few feet. There’s a Norman fort up the road, and a few clicks out of town, I spent the week in a Thirteen Century building, complete with wireless and a sustainability school. It is quaint, if quaint means human-scale, beautiful, liveable.
Totnes is also at the heart of southwest England’s sustainability movement, and the southwest is known across the country for leading the nation on green issues.
Totnes' main street
The Daylesford of Devon, Totnes became a hippy haven a couple of decades ago, and in 2007, Wikipedia tells me, was declared ‘the capital of new age chic’ by Time Magazine. (According to The Guardian, new generation Totnesians ‘identify more with surfers than hippies’, which perhaps explains Bogan House.)
It’s more than that though – Totnes is the home of the world’s first Transition Town, a concept that’s starting to take off in Australia. My first reaction to hearing about Transition Towns was ‘transitioning to what?’. The answer is simple. Transition Town Totnes (TTT), their website says, aims:
1) “To explore and then follow pathways of practical actions that will reduce our carbon emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.
2) To build the town’s resilience, that is, its ability to withstand shocks from the outside, through being more self reliant in areas such as food, energy, health care, jobs and economics.”
TTT is about a low carbon, post-peak oil future, but, importantly, it’s about more than giving things up and
doing without. Here’s the website again:
“Our future has the potential to be more rewarding, abundant and enjoyable than today, and by working together we can unleash the collective enthusiasm and genius of our community (that means you!) to make this transition.”
Totnes Civic Hall, Buy Nothing Day
On Saturday morning at the Civic Hall, it’s hard not to believe them. The hall is packed. Kids are playing on hay bales in the centre of the room, there’s a steady stream of people sifting the free-to-take no-need-to-pay jumble (not) sale stall, and there are people talking about the Totnes Renewable Energy Supply Company they’ve established, how to get a tax break on a new bike, looking after worm farms, and where to get Totnes pounds. Zigzagging across the hall, partitions with drawings of Totnes in 2030, and post-it notes with people’s hopes for the future are a reminder of the scale of community involvement in all of this.
It’s a fair
indication of the energy in TTT. After three years, it has developed 38 projects, sustained ten ongoing working groups, engaged around 3270 residents, and, they say, generated at least 236,000 pounds. Totnes even has its own currency, the Totnes Pound, which is about to launch its own interest-free loan scheme. Localisation is a key buzzword, and the Totnes Pound is both a very concrete symbol of localising, and also a real way of keeping money, literally, in the community.
Totnes shows that ugly words like decarbonising don’t have to mean a bleak and ugly future.
As Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins says, “Rebuilding local agriculture and food
production, localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an extraordinary renaissance – economic, cultural and spiritual.”
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