View this email in your browser

Transition Kentish Town Newsletter December 2019

Think&Do

In our final week of the Think&Do pilot, as we enter the party season, our attention turned towards consumption - and how to cut down on it! This led to a series of inspiring workshops and thoughtful debates.

The Sustainers from William Ellis school talked about the need to cut out tax evasion in the fast fashion industry. We were blown away by their passion and knowledge about how little tax is paid by some high street fashion chains and how much pollution is created by throwaway fashion. Our future leaders are speaking out!

Meanwhile the arty Acland Burghley Sustainers customised a Swop Shop clothes rail to take back to school. Next year, we hope to get clothes swop rails into every LB Camden secondary school. Let’s kickstart Camden's circular economy by putting the swopping back into shopping!

Year 6 of Kentish Town Primary school came in to talk about what we can do as consumers, to cut down on our throwaway culture. Their great ideas ranged from persuading parents to give up buying single use plastic to toy swops; from the need for school lessons to learn how to mend ripped clothes, to setting up swop shops with neighbours to share items like tents!

Creation is the antitode to despair. We were later honoured to host a Culture Declares event to spark everyone's creativity in the form of a letter writing and spoken word workshop. This inspiring session was an opportunity to share our hopes, visions and fears for the future and to write a Letter to the Earth - from future or past generations. Attendees were then invited to read and perform their letters as a way of sharing each others hopes, fears and dreams. This session was inspired by the recently published collection of letters: Letters to the Earth, published by HarperCollins.

Poet Rakaya Esime Fetuga

Our attention turned to energy consumption. The solar together team explained to us how the council are making having your own solar panel array affordable.

How can we reduce the energy we use for getting about? Our focus was then put into gear (!) as Camden Air Action, with Imperial College, led the way in a bid to reduce private car use in the borough, and how we can clean up our air around local schools and high streets.

One idea that has developed at Think&Do is the replacement of car parking spaces with parklets: putting the park back into parking!

The residents of a particularly traffic heavy section of Leighton Road project have shown us the way, as this week, they persuaded Camden Council to let them turn two parking spaces into skip gardens. These were delivered last week. Bravo team: Greening Leighton Rd ! If you have a parking space you would like turned into a parklet contact: danielcolmanlondon@gmail.com.

Divest Camden

While Camden Council is happy to focus on reducing consumption of carbon fuels in our transport and heating, we the community feel it is contrary that they are still investing their pension fund in fossil fuel companies. We note that
other local authorities, including neighbouring Islington, have greened up their pension portfolio amid the declaration of a Climate and Ecological Emergency. Whilst we understand the need to protect people’s livelihoods in retirement, we would welcome a commitment to fully phase out divestment in the major fossil fuel companies by next year. Further details can be seen in an article in the Camden New Journal.

Finnian from Divest

Camden Forest

The final events of Think&Do phase 1 kicked off with another Camden Forest tree giveaway.

Within the first two weeks of this project, trees have been given away to 250 story tree guardians. The next step will be to map these trees on an interactive website and watch our Camden Forest story trees take root! Coming up from January there will be regular tree giveaways. For more info: camdenforest2025enquiries@gmail.com

Here’s a picture of Shana Tufail of Model My City with the wonderful Alex Smith of Alara Wholefoods and Sue Sheehan, the Camden Council officer who has gone well beyond the call of duty to help curate Think&Do. They are encircled in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Watch out early next year for news on a brilliant new Camden SDG Sustainable Development Goals initiative.

What a load of rubbish?

Did you know that at Christmas we produce 30% more waste than at other times of the year? We throw away the equivalent of 108 million rolls of wrapping paper and 54 million platefuls of food? On average we spend £363 on xmas presents (source: Independent December 19) To do our bit to help address this, Friends of the Earth Camden hosted a fab gift swop with help from Mary Young.

Here’s a picture of Ellie with Dadheesha. There must be a joke somewhere about a frog turning into a prince(ess!)

We also made seed crowns and homemade decorations.

After a session making homemade wrapping paper, Think&Do was a (w)rap !

Vegbox Supper

The week ended with a wonderful surplus food supper provided by Tom from Vegbox. Thanks to everyone, including Mike Yule and Farhana Yamin for all the delicious food offerings. And of course Astrid Jacoby from Littlehandsdesign.com.

Next Phase of Think&Do

The six weeks of Phase 1 of Think&Do ended on 7th December. The last two weeks have seen a period of reflection, writing up and evaluation. Everyone who had visited Think&Do and left an email was invited to attend a follow-up workshop which was held on 15th December. The workshop was facilitated by Sue Sheehan, Farhana Yamin and Carlos Queremel and attended by around 30 people, including Council Leader Georgia Gould, Noel Hatch, Harold Garner and many of the groups that had helped Think&Do convene events and provided food. The workshop focused on attendees' experience of the six weeks, what had been learnt and how we can take things forward. A more formal evaluation is being done by UCL.

There are plans to try to keep the Think&Do space in Kentish Town open from January to March to allow for more community groups to meet and to take forward the many proposals that were sparked from the six weeks of Phase 1. We are not short of ideas and energy for Phase 2 of Think&Do. What is certain is that many hundreds of us who have come into the space over the past few weeks agree that Think&Do is an exciting space for new co-created projects for positive climate action. Watch this space for more Think&Dos in 2020, and if you want to host a session or run your own Think&Do please do get in touch with us:
ThinkandDo@camden.gov.uk
farhanayamin@gmail.com

OTHER NEWS

Rewilding Camden

Last Thursday saw us working in collaboration with the fab TCV Green Gym to plant over 150 hedgerow whips at the Raglan Estate NW5. Great, muddy fun was also had by all building a fence out of coppiced hazel and willow.

The next stage in our Growing Raglan: Growing Community project will be the planting of fruit trees early afternoon on Saturday January 18th. We will have a wassailing ceremony. Do save the date.

For more info contact: rewildingcamden@gmail.com.

Power Up North London

Hampstead School Share Offer

Invest in community solar at Hampstead School

Power Up North London is launching its next share offer for the installation of 48 kWp of solar panels at Hampstead School, Westbere Road, London, NW2 3RT. The offer will open on December 16th and close on 31st January 2020, or whenever the target is reached. PUNL’s previous share offer closed within two weeks of opening.

Hampstead School is large comprehensive school in the London Borough of Camden, England and the school building is one of the oldest in the borough. It has about 1,300 students between the ages of 11 and 19 attending the Lower School and the Sixth Form College.

PUNL will enter into a 20-year roof licence with Camden Council and the school and will receive income from the sale of the solar electricity to the school and from the Feed-in Tariff. The school will receive discounted electricity during the life of the licence and will benefit from free renewable electricity thereafter. Any surplus generated after paying for running costs such as insurance, maintenance and investor distributions, will be put towards a PUNL community energy fund that can be used to invest in other community renewables initiatives.This will help to build resilience of the local community in tackling climate change.

The minimum investment is £250, and the maximum investment is £4,600. Investors will receive 2% interest a year and their capital back over a 20-year period. The school will benefit through lower consumption of fossil fuel energy, reduced carbon emissions and lower energy bills. Annual carbon savings from the project are estimated at 11 tonnes which is equivalent to the carbon sequestered by 4.5 acres of new forest.

For more information, see: www.powerupnorthlondon.org.

To invest in the scheme: https://members.powerupnorthlondon.org/crowdfunding/school.aspx

To see the share offer document: https://powerupnorthlondon.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/punl-share-offer-hampstead-school-final-digital.pdf

Save the Hero Trees of West Kentish Town - Report Findings

Camden Council is planning to demolish the existing West Kentish Town estate and redevelop the area with three times the number of flats: the current proposals replace 318 flats with nearly 900 new homes, most of which will be privately owned. The price of this is the loss of the majority of the existing trees, green space and biodiversity on the site.

In order to better understand the value of the nature on the site, Transition Kentish Town has crowd-funded to enable an independent survey of the trees to be carried out. With the generous support of individuals, we appointed an arboricultural consultant from Tree Musketeers and the survey was carried out on 19th May 2019. The results of this are summarised in the report on the Transition Kentish Town website. The full report is available for downloading as a PDF.

Hanging mistletoe provided us with the opportunity for some festive fun at our #snoggingstation. Do pop along to our Platform 1 cottage garden at KT overground station. Post your pictures of festive smooching on @tkentishtown!