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Investing in High Wycombe – creating the future

What does a football club in Manchester, a local food delicatessen on Crendon Street and a school photovoltaic system in Oxfordshire all have in common? Can’t guess? Well all exist because their supporters funded them. FC United is a supporter-owned football club in Manchester. It aimed to raise £1.5million for a new ground and has already raised £700,000 through a well-supported share launch. Like the shop Local Roots (33 Crendon Street in High Wycombe) they didn’t need conventional Banks alone to fund them. They could go much further – all they needed were a lot of friends.

Wanted: Stars in Cars

Readers of the South Bucks Star may be familiar with the “Me and My Motor” section towards the back pages. The Star is a free newspaper produced by the Bucks Free Press every Wednesday and distributed (at least in our neck of the woods) on a Thursday night. One day in January this year we spotted an appeal on Facebook by the “Me and My Motor” journalist Lawrence Dunhill for more people to tell him about their cars. So we thought: why not? So I penned the following request to local Transitioners:

Pann Mill on the Rye, oh my

Pann Mill on the Rye in Wycombe has always held a special place in our affections. There is something very serendipitous about its position in our town’s culture. It represents something important. For us it has been a very natural home: a place where we discover both the local food economy AND local power generation all in one package.

The only garage on my street

John hauled the ladder out of his garage. The only garage on his street. How things had changed. Surely November was not meant to be THIS warm? John is about to paint his house white. The last house in his road to be painted. John liked to be the last. He prided himself on being the stick-in-the-mud. After-all, at age 87 what other pleasures in life were there? He was born in 2012 where they didn’t have such nonsense.

The City that thinks it’s a Village

Jill returned home from her trip in the airship. It is November 2099. She sits up on the window sill to stare at the trees and gracefully-arcing wind turbines. She daydreams of winning that trip to Totnes – the cultural capital of Britain. All she has to do is write a really good essay on what life was like just 90 years before. She shudders… She had done the research and spent hours on the Bucks Free Press archive site. But it hadn’t been easy. She had not much liked what she had found. How to turn it into the needed essay? Maybe a letter? A letter to her own long-gone relatives? So she flicked open her EWallet-Phone and whispered the words “open file” and this is what she wrote:

Jack and Jill

Jack and Jill went up the hill to hitch a ride on an airship. They cycled as quickly as they could but the Marlow Hill was a tough nut so they occasionally enjoyed a boost from the onboard electric motor. When they reached the Booker Airship Park they slotted their bikes into the free chargers and ran off to find their teacher. She promised she would be here. Jack and Jill couldn't be more excited. Their grandfather had told them so much about flying. They couldn't wait.

Climate Impacts Day

Climate impacts you. But we treat it like a problem with a solution. Climate Change is not simply a problem, it is a predicament. Predicaments have mitigations, you can get insurance but you cannot make the problem go away. I have spent my time at the pit face of this predicament and have observed the vast array of responses. Today I conclude that Transition is one of the few modern ideas that has realised Climate Change as a predicament. Some of the brightest brains in the world have yet to figure this out, and even many individuals within the Climate Change movement haven't woken up to this.

Planning for reality

We would like to thank Community Impact Bucks for inviting us to a Community Resilience evening at the Oasis Centre way back in early February. It was an interesting evening with speakers presenting on Chinnor’s emergency planning strategy for the flu pandemic and Chesham Action volunteers presenting on their heavy snow strategy. However I left the meeting troubled.

Hot Wycombe

Doesn’t everyone with an internet connection just love Google Maps? Fun aren’t they? (But I guess most of us wouldn’t admit it.) So THIS could provide endless hours of fun: http://bit.ly/Ik8lFS (or, if you prefer http://ceo.decc.gov.uk/nationalheatmap/). It is a Google Map with a heat fingerprint. It covers just England but if you follow the link above you get to zoom in on High Wycombe.

On a clear day...

A post-carbon, more resilient, High Wycombe is coming. On a clear day I can see it in on the horizon. However last week's debacle at the petrol pumps still obscures this trend. Those petrol vapours make the horizon shimmer and distant - lost in people's minds as the queue frustration let the red mist fall instead. Despite a long quiet spell (4 months) on this Transition Town High Wycombe blog there has been a LOT to talk about. So let's get on with it.....