Diggers

“Come and get evolved” beckoned the sign. Amazing when you think about it: knowing how messed up the sign reader would be and offering a superior life. It’s a combination I’d only seen in ads on the sides of religious buildings. A second sign gave a thumbs-down to cars and a big yes to bikes. The camper vans parked on Rotten Row looked like they shared a few million miles between them. Still, it was reassuring to know they wouldn’t be trashing the planet further by hot-rodding up the 20 yards of driveway from the gate.

The occupation of the old St Anne’s School site in May and June this year already feels like a hallucination. Walking by now you only know it happened because of the new fences and trespass warnings. I’m left wondering though what it was all about. What did the St Anne’s Diggers, self-dubbed “STAND”, actually achieve before they were removed? What, in short, did STAND stand for?

They did of course highlight the neglect of the St Anne’s site and pose the question of what to do with it. (What do you do with land in Lewes if flogging it off for housing isn’t an option?) Local blogger Dave Bradford provided a good summary of the history here. It’s led to a public consultation and open day. Raising awareness of environmental issues was also a given, but with an interesting twist. When I trotted up there for some digging myself (of information rather than soil) I encountered more scepticism about our local environmental movement than I was expecting. The flagship initiatives -Lewes Pound, solar panels, organic veg boxes and the like- seemed generally considered the blingy trappings of the rich who can “buy green lifestyles”. Which of course they are. You don’t hear much about poor people in environmental debates, unless it’s contempt for their love of cheap flights or of shopping at Tesco, so this was quite refreshing.

The broader agenda of the Diggers themselves on the other hand seemed less coherent. Beyond testaments to how well behaved the protestors were (and indeed everyone was incredibly polite), the main point seemed to be to demonstrate sustainable, self-sufficient living by gardening. Just exactly how this was going to work was unfortunately never made clear and, judging by the number of commodities in evidence not grown on site (tins, tents, stoves etc), that old devil money had already crept into the Garden of Eden. The point has been made in these pages before that the trouble with everyone returning to the land to save us from environmental catastrophe is that it’s an idea belonging on the compost heap of heroic failures.

In a link to history, the Diggers of St Anne’s identified themselves with the Diggers of the 17^th century England. These were an interesting bunch who envisaged us all living in a network of egalitarian communities, tilling the soil in harmony. While they were basically crushed by bigger landowners, there also wasn’t much of a popular wave behind those Diggers either. Our society elected instead to have private property, consolidated estates, spices, tea, coffee, industry, iPads and a global economy. You may question whether that was the right choice but we managed several hundred years of prosperity on the back of it. For most of us that was considerably more appealing than the alternative of spending our short lives in grinding poverty. One of the troubles with taking your cue from history is that ideas which flopped back then don’t necessarily get any better with time.

So now we’re left thinking what to do with the St. Anne’s site. What the Diggers have at least shown is that it is easy to point out what our council have done wrong. Balancing public obligations, safety concerns, what’s useful and (crucially) how to pay for it is considerably more difficult. However, the public consultation is giving everyone a chance to get involved. There are some good ideas there. Some nonsense too but well worth a look.

As Josiah Bartlett, the fantasy U.S. President for all who are liberal at heart, said “Decisions are made by those who show up”. Don’t think we need more allotments? A green burial site? A wild space? Perhaps you have a better idea? And perhaps some thoughts on how to pay for it! Now it’s over to us.

The old St Anne’s School site will be open to the public for consultation on Saturday 13^th August, 10AM- 4PM.

Normans

Photo: Alex Leith

Just to be clear; that’s “Normans” rather than Norman. For those who need to recalibrate (and everyone else) here’s a question: what do Lewes and Sicily have in common? Both obviously have a history of exporting dodgy people abroad: Tom Paine (seditious in France and the Americas) and the Cosa Nostra. There’s also a sense of separation from, and occasional superiority to, the country to their north. Do you deny it? However the answer on the card is the presence in both of Norman castles. We all know about 1066 but perhaps may be less informed about the Norman adventurers who terrorised the Mediterranean at the same time. Both Lewes and Sicily were subjugated by the Normans and have big stone towers to prove they lost.

Lately I’ve been wondering about the consequences of these invasions. In Sicily the Hauteville dynasty didn’t do too badly, turning chaos into a stable government which enhanced Sicilian prosperity for a couple of hundred years. Given that 1066 is so central in British history just what did the Normans do for us? Was it all the “Norman Yoke” with foreign usurpers destroying our English ways?

It’s more intriguing because, like an England World Cup campaign, it could so easily have gone the other way. While the continentals possessed the quality strikers (lance-wielding, blood-curdling cavalry), the English had their traditional defensive hard men (in this case tooled-up with double-handed dane axes). Indeed if Wayne Rooney... sorry King Harold hadn’t had an awkwardly-timed away game at Stamford Bridge, William I might be remembered (if at all) as simply another French tourist who got a good kicking in Hastings.

It is clear that the Anglo-Saxon nobility had a rough ride post-Conquest. Their estates were removed and given to William-the-Conqueror’s buddies, such as Lewes’ William de Warenne. Many left the country. For the average Sussex peasant though, one wonders whether one feudal overlord would have been so different to another.  It’s clear that English standards of living hadn’t really recovered since the Romans left. One minute a cosmopolitan international empire, with indoor plumbing and wine; the next, intellectual decline, sharing huts with animals, and tepid beer. Mightn’t the Normans actually have improved things with their central authority, stone buildings and wine back on the shelves of the offie?

Perhaps so, but it can’t have been easy for the dyed-in-the-wool Rooks, what with those Up From Rouens literally lording it over them. Like DFLs a millennium later, the UFRs probably pissed people off with their poncy soft-furnishing shops and slick, metropolitan free magazines. French rather than Old English became the language du jour (though clearly not enough to stop my spell checker questioning “du jour”) and England was very much an occupied country. Increased central power meant both more efficient tax collection and a decline in the democratic structures of what had been a pretty sophisticated government. Next time you’re in town take a look at the Castle again. Is it the sort of thing you build with a contented population? I can’t help feeling it’s more in the “I’m in charge so don’t f#@k with me” vein. It wasn’t only the toffs who dusted off their passports in the late 11th century.

Still, as we’re being told by our rulers today, short-term pain is the price of longer-term gain. And indeed, a mere 700 years after Norman hegemony established a coherent English state, there we were at the head of a global empire. Sometimes it just takes politicians with the courage to make the unpopular decisions and clear up the mess left by the last lot. We’ll all benefit in the end.

Now, which Norman were we talking about again?

Beach Huts

One of the features of life in Sussex is that every so often a friend will announce that they have a beach hut. This news is invariably delivered with great excitement, as if the person had just acquired a beach-house in Santa Monica rather than a small shed in St. Leonards. They are thrilled and can’t wait to tell you about the luxury of being able to make a cup of tea down at the shore.

I find myself a little reluctant though. Perhaps this is something to do with being from Scotland. There the beach scene mainly involves running out of the freezing waves while a sandy gale whips your goose bumps. Actually the main beach activities in Scotland are putting on a woolly jumper and hitting a golf ball, but you get the idea. The beach isn’t really somewhere you hang out. Can it be so different down south? The troubles with beach huts are obvious. Not only are they diminutive, they are usually located on a stretch of stony ground in a locality whose summer climate is a byword for unreliable weather. For the rush of making your cuppa in such an environment you will pay a truly eye-watering sum.

In Notes From a Small Island Bill Bryson made much of the tentative pleasures beloved of the English. Tea-cakes and the like. Nothing too fancy or over-stimulating. Of course the adoption of racier grub and brassy Aussie wines over the last couple of decades does suggest a change in tastes. Yet the beach hut sails on, perhaps even literally during especially high tides.

Clearly, fathoming the appeal of this enduring institution required rigorous investigation. Accordingly I posed a question to all the beach hut owners of my acquaintance (five in total): what are the main benefits of owning one? Though this was a small sample I’d say that the results nonetheless capture something of the English soul.

Responses clustered into four main themes:

1) Community. Not just a community but as one respondent put it “being part of an eccentric subculture” (her hut is in Hastings). Love of others was however, accompanied by an equal desire to pretend that no-one else is actually there with you. An Englishman’s windbreak is his castle after all.

2) Escape. From teenage spliff-smoking to getting away from relatives on Christmas day. A beach hut is near enough to get to but far enough to distance you from your loved ones.

3) Being at home in the wild. All respondents cited this, as befits a nation of campers. Enjoy the elements for five minutes then retreat back for a cup of, well... tea. A subsidiary benefit cited under this heading was having all your stuff there. I would note though that on occasions when I’ve been invited to partake of the beach hut experience, my hosts have never minded filling their cars to bursting with a load more gear to supplement their store of coastal essentials. Clearly the emphasis is on home rather than wild.

4) A receptacle for the projection of fantasy. Unlikely as it sounds this seems to be the key benefit. From recreating childhood idylls to fantasising about a simpler life, beach huts are the place for it all. At its best a beach hut seems is play house for grown-ups to fulfill their more low-key aspirations.

Perhaps it is this modesty that appeals to something in the English character. Let’s face it, announcing you had that house in Malibu would strain friendships with excessive envy. Inviting friends down to Bexhill for the day is a far more agreeable exchange. Of course the comfy chairs already being there when you arrive helps. And did I mention you can make a cup of tea?

With thanks to my respondents for all their help.

Growing Your Own Vegetables

“If I could show you the cabbage that I planted with my own hands”

Thus spoke the Roman Emperor Diocletian, more famous for chucking Christians to the lions, but also someone who gave up ruling the world for the pleasures of his allotment. There are days when I fantasise about following his example, especially as it involved a palace in Croatia and a load of slaves. As well as the other pleasures of growing your own, it seems that it can end the careers of tyrants. What could possibly be the trouble with it?

It turns out you don’t have to look far. Only in fact to Lewes’ own Seedy Saturday. This is an event where you can think about interesting things to plant, the more sedentary joys of others planting things for you, and listen to Marguerite Patten reminiscing about digging for victory. Then you turn into the bookstall and find yourself in a survivalist fantasy land. Wall-to-wall self-sufficiency manuals full of advice on preparing for the apocalypse by getting in your brassicas.

The idea of us producing our own food to protect ourselves is an important part of many responses to current environmental concerns. For example the magazine “The Land” envisages an agrarian idyll where, following the collapse of capitalism, we return en-masse to growing food. An increased emphasis on food self-sufficiency is also a staple of our local Transition Town movement (they like the word “resilience”). The recent Climate Camp even invited me to “Grow my own Future”. Though I’m as fond of a metaphor as I am of a ripe Ailsa Craig and realise I won’t be picking juicy futures directly from my cold-frame, the implication is once again that growing your own is the way forward.

While this reasoning is seductive quite a lot is missing. For one thing food self-sufficiency leaves populations grubbing out a precarious existence vulnerable to climatic variations or crop failures. The opposite of resilience really. We protect against this by buying food from a number of sources and countries. We can do this because for 7,000 years or so (and especially since the industrial revolution) human society has been moving away from the mass of the population being involved in food production.  This fosters the development of income-earning and more diverse skills. We have modern medicine and science and art and philosophy and a reliable food supply because primarily we’re not all stuck on the land.

If you think the fossil fuels of capitalism are going to run out soon (though a more likely danger for our environment seems to be that they won’t) a kind of post-apocalyptic subsistence life might be one way to go.  At times it’s hard to avoid the impression that vegetable gardening has become the latest meaningless gesture for the environmentally pious. While home grown food can be great the benefits of not relying on it are even greater. So, while I’m going mulch spreading soon, I have to do a quick shop at the greengrocer first and strike a blow for a better world.

John McGowan, 5^th May 2011

Republicanism

A few years back during the Golden Jubilee, a lad in my village asked if our chimney could be used as an anchor point for some street party bunting. The source of the request allowed me to inveigh against monarchist feeling in much the same way that my elderly aunt would fret about homosexuality:  I wasn’t biased but it was sad to see it among younger people. I seemed to be a lone voice as the village was taken over by royalist fervour. It’s something of a relief therefore to be in Lewes for the Royal Wedding.  Here the heirs of Tom Paine are mustering just a single street party. Republican kudos for a town of 16,000. A quick look at the papers suggests though that this may not be the national mood. What, one wonders, is the trouble with republicanism?

It isn’t that we British necessarily have a tradition of deference. Quite the contrary; we’ve been overthrowing kings since the Battle of Lewes in 1264 (an extra republican feather in the town’s cap, though the victory was short-lived). Another near miss was the Peasants Revolt of 1381. If Wat Tyler’s mob had not arranged to negotiate with the teenaged Richard II at Smithfield (as opposed to, say, killing him) the history of Britain might have been rather different.  Regicides had better luck in 1649 with the beheading of Charles I. However, 11 years later a monarch was back: the hedonistic Charles II no doubt a welcome antidote to the Taliban-style government of the Puritans. The Brits got rid of James II in 1688 because they didn’t like the cut of his Roman Catholic jib. He was replaced by his daughter Mary (with William of Orange) and ultimately by the current dynasty leaping over 50 or so more eligible, but Roman Catholic, candidates. We’ve also been curtailing the  powers of the Sovereign since Magna Carta leading to the current “Constitutional” (all the trappings but little of the power) arrangement. The popularity of individual monarchs has yoyo-ed wildly (there were even assassination attempts on Queen Victoria) up to the last significant dip in the late 1990’s.

Despite all this we never quite seem to get rid of the monarchy itself. Perhaps the trouble is that most of our anti-royal feeling has not been about republicanism at all but rather about disliking the Sovereign's beliefs (James II, Prince Charles), behaviour (Charles I, Prince Charles) or personality (Henry III, Prince Charles). Rather oddly it’s still treasonable to advocate certain forms of republicanism. Perhaps more significantly anti-royalists continue to be marginalised as young (The Sex Pistols – at least they were once), cranks (Tony Benn) or troublemakers (Benjamin Zephaniah). Opinion polls suggest we’re still keener on the institution than a presidency (i.e. a retirement scheme for seedy political hacks). Politicians too find the royals useful and have been reluctant to act on proposals to reduce their religious and political roles further. 

Another displaced royal, King Farouk of Egypt is alleged to have said, "Soon there will be only five Kings left... Spades, Clubs, Hearts, Diamonds and England.” And who would bet against him. Though handsome young Wills hasn’t turned out quite as many would have wished, commoner Kate is looking like helping the Firm well into the post-Diana era. It seems that storming the Bastille may have to wait once again.

100 monkeys: solar so good

Last weeks sceptical assessment of the prospects for solar power led to a few responses and some further discussion. Probably only for the hardcore though...

100 monkeys: solar so good: "It was odd last week to have tow Viva Lewes columns with opposing views about solar pv, with me singing its praises and The Trouble With fe..."

Solar Power

Solar power is flavour of the month around town. With the proposed community owned power station and the Rooks thinking about getting panels, it sounds as if Lewes is leading the way into a low emissions future. In the face of environmental catastrophe, free energy from the sky certainly sounds like a tempting option. Lately I’ve been wondering though if the optimism around solar power is justified. What, one is tempted to ask, could be the trouble with energy from the sun?

Looking more closely at solar, the primary trouble is something familiar to Brits: the weather. Blighty is not a sunny climate and we use the brunt of our electricity in winter when the supply of sunshine is at its least abundant. There is also cost of installing panels. Photovoltaic panels (that’s the kind which generate electricity) for a typical house are likely be somewhere between 7 and 15 grand.  When you stick these factors together the figures don’t look encouraging, either from an individual point of view or from the wider social angle.

For individuals even the most promising scenarios suggest that if you install such panels, you might get electricity worth about 25% of the installation costs over the life of your system. While money isn’t everything, this picture would leave solar unlikely to catch on except among people who have spare cash and enjoy the warmth generated by their own piety rather than the small amount of energy they’ll get in the British winter. The last government recognised this and set up an incentive called the feed-in-tariff to encourage take-up. This involves buying any unused electricity householders generate from solar panels they’ve hooked into the National Grid (presumably mostly in the summer). The rates of payment for spare lecky are generous to put it mildly: often several times the cost of electricity generated by other sources. The question is open as to how many people this will encourage but it’s undoubtedly a nice investment opportunity for those who can afford it. The social perspective comes in when you realise that the people paying this enormous subsidy are the rest of us. Clearly this isn’t sustainable and a rather hot debate among environmental commentators right now is about whether this money would be better spent on the development of other alternatives to fossil fuels. The feed-in-tariff represents a big bet (with our money) that the price of the technology will ultimately come down and that of other energy sources will rise, to the point where solar is cost-effective.

Solar isn’t a significant energy source at the moment and there are plenty (including many earlier advocates) who doubt it ever will be, for the UK at least. You might want to consider this if you were thinking of taking a shareholding in the local power station. Is it a good bet? Or is it as big a leap of faith over sense as the Lewes Pound? For now it is worth remembering that, for something free, solar sure is expensive.