Transition Town news

The Transition Town team have sent round some info about what’s happening locally that you might be interested in. Check out their website for more details about their activities.

St Leonards Warrior Square Community Garden

Another great sun-filled garden session! After making use of the donated compost from Gardenscape Direct, volunteers enjoyed a cup of tea with doughnuts at Southwater Community Centre. They met a delightful Shiatzu practitioner who helped carry buckets of water out and pour it over the plants too! They also cleared some of the rubbish near the storeroom and planted wild flower seeds.

Next steps. The most urgent thing is getting raised beds made and in situ. We are in touch with Littlewoods Fencing who are happy to donate materials. Then we need soil and plants to put in the beds. We have some plant donations ready and waiting, but please get in touch if you have anything suitable such as edible plants, herbs and flowering plants.

Several committee members recently met with the station manager, Natalie Leister, who is looking into supplying various items including high viz jackets, ID badges for volunteers, a promotional poster for the platform we can update regularly and a bin for the north platform (to encourage people not to litter). They are also planning to refurbish the buildings on the south platform in the near future. They are also likely to give the go-ahead for a mosaic on the wall to the left of the station entrance.

Household sustainability talk

It’s quite hard to get your head around which of our actions create the largest CO2 emissions. Also, how much do we need to reduce to keep temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels?

Ian Smith’s talk on Household Sustainability at Nico’s Kitchen in St Leonards provided some answers. The talk encouraged us all to consider our personal contribution to global carbon emissions. Did you know that travelling on a cruise creates more CO2 than flying in a plane?* Also, turning your thermostat down by 1°C could save 8-10% on your heating consumption?*

We all need to make big changes to our lifestyles to reach the ideal target of two tonnes of CO2 a year!

[Download Household Sustainability presentation file from the Transition Town website here.

*Statistics above and in the presentation come from Carbon Conversations.]

We’d really like to hold some Carbon Conversations for local residents. Please get in touch if you are interested in getting involved.

Hastings Old Town Hall

Don’t know if you’ve seen the odd poster about turning the Old Town Hall (in High Street, Hastings Old Town) into a community arts hub? There is ‘almost’ a promise from HBC to give it to the community for a six-month trial to see if it can be viable, but they need to know it’s wanted.

Money would only be needed for heat, light, furniture and insurance, not much else, to start as rent-free. The idea is to hold exhibitions and sell work, run workshops, run classes, etc, all on tiny rents/profit share. The aim would be to fill the space 7 days a week, morning afternoon and evening.

All ideas welcome at the moment. It’s got to be QUALITY, though, which is where you come in! If you have a moment, could you have a look at The Hastings Town Hall website and register interest? (Click on ‘contact’). It won’t tie you in to anything, but the more people we can get that would like to use the space – or even just support the idea – the more we can prove to the council that it’s needed.

Anything rather than a Starbucks!

Weekly meetings held Monday 6.30pm at Hastings History House, 21 Courthouse St in the Old Town. All welcome.

There will be also be Reading and Writing Group starting in early July, 6.30-9.30 on Wednesday evenings. Do come.

Hastings Bites Back

Abigail Wincott, Senior Lecturer in Broadcast Media & Broadcast Journalism at the
College of Arts and Humanities at Brighton University, writes that she has “just submitted a bid for some seed funding to help develop their food research from the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP). Now cross fingers and toes for its success. If we’re successful, the funding will run from October 2016-March 2017, and we will hold our first workshop in October.

“The plan is to use our individual interests in food and history to map food production in the town, past and present. So we will be walking, photographing, recording sounds, visiting archives and old maps and coming together to share what we have learnt, and creating an evocative and informative exhibition or walking trail for Hastings. This should bring alive past or hidden food production in the town.

“All Hastings Bites Back researchers will have the freedom to explore what interests them, and to produce ‘outputs’ which they find most appropriate, so some of you may want to write a book, others have spoken about running cooking or foraging workshops, and there will be an online map and the installation/trail too, of course.”

Bexhill Environmental Group

October 8th will be a day event with five-six speakers in the morning, with gaps to mill around in-between.There will be an exhibition around the room for all the contributors as well as groups such as Friends of the Earth.

The afternoon will be a World Café event with the speakers sitting at small tables to share topics which have come up in the morning. See more details on the Bexhill Environmental Group website here.

PLEASE PASS ON TO ANYONE YOU THINK MIGHT BE INTERESTED!

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