Transition Kentish Town Newsletter March 2019
Beware the Ides of March? Forget that! At Transition Kentish Town, March means great ideas. We've lined up an action-packed few weeks, ending with a bang on April 2 with an evening talk on the power of What if? by the amazing Rob Hopkins. Note – tickets are selling fast!
Meanwhile, taking up a good idea from our readers, we're going to add project updates to all our newsletters. It’s great to see how much we do have going on, and how positive local actions – however small – by people living, working or playing in the neighbourhood, can make a difference. Do get in touch: we are all busy volunteers and would welcome your involvement.
Petition to declare a climate emergency
Are you REALLY worried about climate change? Fed up of waiting for government to take action? Here’s your chance to put pressure on Camden to take drastic action to limit carbon emissions in the borough. Camden Transition Towns have launched a petition to declare a climate emergency and force Camden to do the right thing. Please sign and send on to as many people as possible:
https://www.gopetition.com/petitions/declare-a-climate-emergency-in-camden.html
Following a lively evening in January, come to this follow up session and help turn some of your fab ideas for Kentish Town into reality.
For more info: chdesign@btinternet.com
Wild about wildflowers?
FREE Green Gym Wild Flower Sowing workshop
When: Thursday 28th March 10.45 – 3.0pm
Where: on Highgate Enclosures.
Please RSVP to gg-camden@tcv.org, 07768 421881.
 Bees, butterflies, moths and other wild pollinators are all in decline, from climate change, pesticides and herbicides. By rewilding our urban gardens, sowing nectar rich pesticide free wild flowers, and planting native shrubs, we can create havens to help their survival while we tackle the problems of reforming farming and gardening practices.
Come along for some hands on learning from Green Gym wild gardening experts on how to create mini wild flower ‘meadows’ in your back garden, communal gardens or local green space. We’ll be creating a new wildflower habitat for moths, bees and butterflies and other wild pollinators. No experience needed and all tools, gloves and refreshments provided.
WANTED!
Local residents interested in creating a healthier and happier local community in Kentish Town and surrounding areas.
When: Mondays between 6.30 and 8.30 pm until 20th May. You don’t have to come every week! Just turn up when you can.
Where: Hilldrop Community Centre, Community Lane, Hilldrop Road, London, N7 0JE
Do you value good health and wellbeing? Do you care about your local community, your neighbours and the people around you?
If the answer is YES, then this might be for you.
What matters most to you regarding the health and wellbeing of people and the planet? Please complete this three minute survey to help us find out more:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/67DCHYB
WHAT
We have been selected to be part of an emerging community of over 300 teams from around the world. It is a major opportunity for us to be part of a global movement for positive societal change. This is a unique opportunity for us to be in the driver’s seat of change, and to work together with our local community, residents and other stakeholders in a new way.
WHY
We think we can do better! We want to be happier and healthier as individuals and as a community. The main objective of this initiative is to collectively come up with new ideas and new ways of organising our communities, institutions and larger social systems such that they support and enhance the wellbeing of each and every one of us living here.
WHO
Transition Kentish Town is a group of residents coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world. We are now looking for more brave and pioneering citizens, like yourself, individual change makers, students, and local business and organisations. Your voice is important, and we would really like to hear it.
HOW
Together we want to explore questions like:
- How do we co-create health, wellbeing and happiness in thriving communities?
- How do we nurture human health and planetary health by redesigning the human presence on earth?
Overall, there are three main steps in this process:
- Understand the deeper issues at play in our community, that are either obstacles, or opportunities for change
- Identify ideas and possibilities we can work on together
- Test one or more of these ideas
WHEN
Join us at Hilldrop Community Centre, Community Lane, Hilldrop Road, London,N7 0JE.
Between February and the end of May, we will be meeting every Monday evening between 6.30 and 8.30 pm. You don’t have to come every week!
QUESTIONS
Feel free to write to Habiba, habibanab@gmail.com with any questions you might have about this.
We look forward to seeing you!
From what is to what if?
When: Tuesday 2nd April
Where: The Grafton, 20 Prince of Wales Road, NW5 3LG.
Cost: £5.92, at bit.ly/FutureImagination
We are thrilled to be welcoming Rob Hopkins to Kentish Town to discuss his forthcoming book with us. His focus is the imagination: its neglected role in our society and our attempts to reconstruct the world. In 2019, what might a re-prioritising of the imagination in our schools, universities, media, activism and politics look like? Expect a thought-provoking session full of his ideas - and yours. All welcome! Tickets are selling fast for what promises to be a really inspiring event.
 Whilst on the subject of ‘What if?,' at one of our recent Demain movie evenings, this idea was posited: ‘What if Camden Council in association with Camden Transition Towns, allowed a group of secondary school teenagers to lead and influence the development of sustainability plans/projects in their schools and the borough?’
Six months later, April 2 will see the inaugural summit of The Sustainers, a steering group run by teenagers from 6 secondary schools in Camden. The Sustainers is a pioneering pilot project we are co-designing in partnership with Camden Council. If you have teenagers attending: Acland Burghley, William Ellis, La Sante Union, Parliament Hill, UCL Academy or Haverstock, please encourage them to sign up, and show us all what can be done!
Kentish Town Bike Workshop
When: 1st April 2019 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Where: Kentish Town Health Centre
A free monthly drop-in bike maintenance workshop run in collaboration between Camden Cyclists and Transition Kentish Town. Our mechanics will support you to fix your bike. Tea and cake while you wait! It's always the first Monday of the month, except when there's a bank holiday, when it's the second Monday instead.
PROJECT UPDATES
Power Up North London - PUNL
"Power Up North London (PUNL) is a fantastic, independent grass roots organisation in Camden, which is pioneering a new model for combatting climate change by empowering local residents to play a part in reducing carbon emissions and developing strong community resilience." Sir Keir Starmer QC, MP for Holborn & St Pancras.
Thank you to everyone who invested in the PUNL Share Offer for solar panels on the roof of the Caversham Group Practice. We are delighted to tell you that the share offer closed successfully on 4th February having raised £28,300 in just over a week from 42 investors. This is exceptionally quick and we have been delighted by the level of support we have received.
If you invested for the second time thank you for your continued and incredibly valuable support. If this was your first investment in PUNL thank you and welcome to the family! Apologies to those that weren't able to invest and had wished to do so. Please do contact us if this is the case. We will compile a list for future share offers to give you priority.
We have now selected Joju Solar as our installer and we will work with them and the Practice to install the panels and real-time display in the next few weeks. We are targeting the week commencing 11 March for the installation and once it is complete we intend to arrange a date for a celebration event at the Practice - we hope to see you all there!
The level of support for this project shows that there continues to be a high level of demand for PUNL's work in North London. We are really proud about that and it aligns with our broader strategic plans to scale up community energy in our area over the coming months and years. We will outline these plans briefly at the celebration event and then in more detail at our next AGM.
Meanwhile, thank you again for your support and do join us for our next monthly PUNL meeting on the first Monday of each month @ The Grafton if you want to hear about the projects we are working on. If you have any ideas for potential solar installation sites, let us know!
Do you have a couple of hours free a week to help with PUNL social media, or grant writing ? If so get in touchl: powerupnorthlondon@gmail.com
Camden Air Action
“Camden has a proud, rebellious spirit that throughout its history has seen communities come together to tackle problems, and to bring about real social change.”
These opening words from Camden’s draft Clean Air Action Plan 2018 – 2022 aptly set the scene for Camden Air Action’s 13 February lively, focused and good-humoured consultation workshop on the plan’s proposals. During the evening around 20 of us worked together to review Camden’s plans for cleaning up the air we breathe: by cutting NOX and PM emissions from buildings and building construction, transport and local businesses, deliveries and freight. We looked at proposals aimed at reducing air pollution around local schools and other vulnerable community locations, and for harnessing lobbying skills; and involving the local health sector to raise awareness and support change.
By the end of the evening we agreed there’s plenty to support in Camden’s proposals, but we want them to be more ambitious, and they will need clearer quantified targets and accelerated timescales to take us securely to the WHO standard for healthy air Camden have adopted.
The workshop also called for Camden to declare a Climate Emergency, to make the connection between health harming and climate changing emissions, and to ensure the necessary focus, joined up action and resource allocation are in place to take us to tackle both in the short timescales available to us. This has been incorporated into Camden Air Action’s consultation response to the CAAP, along with other bright ideas from the workshop.
A big thank-you to all who contributed, including Camden Officers Harold Garner and Tom Parkes, and to Castlehaven Community Centre who provided the venue and helped host the event. To see CAA’s consultation response go to www.camdenairaction.wordpress.com.
Planters in high street
We are sure you have all noticed the great development in the greening up of our high road: the new planters. We will be arranging a tour of our Web of Wellbeing in KT next month, but if you would like to know more about the planters, or get involved in the spring/summer watering of our greened up sites (including Platform 1 cottage garden on KT overground) contact: grantian756@gmail.com
End of the line for pesticides in Camden?
It doesn’t seem so quite yet…
Having taken her 1,000 signature petition to Camden Council, local resident Kirsten De Keyser, has not yet managed to get the Council to ban the use of glyphosate in Camden. Do read her recent letter published last week in the Ham and High. We all need to keep the pressure up to ensure that our councillors do the right thing and ban pesticides as soon as possible.
Your starter for ten ... In this land there is a body of politicians, who make no decisions. A proposal is put before them and they don't know what to do. So they dither and kick the can down the road.
Some of the politicians, from all sides, are very unhappy about this, and gather together to seek a solution. When they find one, they put their idea to their leaders, but their leaders refuse to listen.
So the unhappy politicians go away and work on a different solution. Again, their leaders close their eyes, cover their ears, shake their heads. "Go away!" they say, "We don't want your solutions."
Which politicians are we talking about? And what is the proposal they're debating? Did you say our Parliament in Westminster? And Brexit? Sorry, Nul Points! No, we're talking about Camden Council and a different kind of poison - glyphosate. The nasty stuff sprayed about by chemically besuited, booted and face-masked Council contractors, in order to rid us of a class of foliage, loosely described as 'weeds'.
Glyphosate, the main ingredient in weed killers like RoundUp and Weedol, has been pronounced 'probably carcinogenic' by the World Health Organisation. Law Courts in the U.S. have sentenced the manufacturers of Roundup to paying out many millions of dollars in compensation, for failing to warn of the devastating effects of exposure to the chemical.
In October 2018, Camden Council was presented with a 1000 signature petition asking for a stop to the use of glyphosate and a switch to safe, mechanical methods of weed control. They wouldn't listen.
In January 2019, the Council was presented with a cross party motion, backed by councillors from all four parties on the council, suggesting a way forward. There "was no time" to hear the motion, so it was kicked into the (liberally sprayed) long grass.
This week, at the February 25th Council meeting, the motion was again put on the agenda. The Labour group had, by now, cobbled together an amendment to the motion, practically rendering it worthless. In the event, however, there was again "no time to debate the motion".
So, from around 29 March, Brexit doomsday to continue the analogy - the 'chemical brothers' will again start spraying their toxic mix on our parks and gardens. They won't be spraying in Hammersmith & Fulham or in Croydon or in Lambeth, Bristol or Brighton. These are only a handful of local authorities, who have stopped using glyphosate.
But if Camden Council, for some peculiar dark reason, refuses to be dragged into a cleaner 21st century, we demand that they publicise clear time-tables for the dates on which they will be spraying and the locations where they will be spraying.
That, at least, gives ordinary citizens the opportunity to avoid these areas, or, like the men-with-sprays, don their chemical suits, boots and face-masks when they take their children and dogs out for a walk.
Kirsten de Keyser
Green Party Parliamentary Candidate
Holborn & St Pancras
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