I went to Brixton’s ‘Great Unleashing’ last week – don’t worry its not a cue to run for cover… It is the launch of Transition Town Brixton. It was a huge success with a packed town hall of people from Brixton and the surrounds wanting to make a difference and starting at home.
Put simply, the idea is that we are currently living at an unsustainable rate in a world with finite resources. Somethings got to give. We can start by making our communities self-sustainable (its actually based on the concept of peak oil which I won’t go into here but is fascinating and if you want to find out more look it up on Wikipedia!). It has been done with great success in Devon. Brixton is the first urban Transition Town.
The Transition Town will develop as a loose coalition of different groups doing things around domestic energy reduction and renewable energy, transport, finance, stronger communities and home grown food. I particularly liked this last point.
This group use the gardens that are not used and to grow vegetables and then share some of the produce with the resident at harvest time. How many gardens are unused in our neighbourhood? Particularly the gardens of some of the flats. The network is called Food Up Front is this something we want to sign-up to?
