Oswestry21

There’ll be a fuller piece on how this went in the next day.  But briefly, Oswestry Transition Town’s Green Fair filled the Memorial Hall with colour, light, music, magic, information, people, children and was busy and alive for the full four hours. Footfall’s first short term lease of an empty shop, between Argos & O2 on Festival Square, made the shop bright and inhabited presenting an exhibition of environmentally themed Art by local school children and made one realise how such simple interventions improve the town and raise spirits.

The Question Time event in the evening bought an audience of 120, beyond expectations, and represented the wide range of opinion possible from even within a panel of people who are all involved with emvironmental and ecological concerns whether in  political, business, campaign or individual contexts. Many thanks indeed to Ian Lucas MP, Peter Harper, Felicity Norman, and Paul Mobbs, and to Jim Hawkins for chairing. And not least to everyone who attended and made the evening the success it was.  We will be looking to promote and host another before too long.

It says a lot for Oswestry that this day was the only 350 event in Shropshire, and that it became the full and rounded day that everyone enjoyed and hopefully took some thought and deeds home from. There’s a hell of a lot going on here for a town it’s size; action, thought, talk, music, writing, Art - the best of it bubbling under the surface fermenting nicely. People making the lives they wish to live in the place they wish to live them. Thanks to all who made the day possible - these things make life memorable and fun.

 Footfall Launches October 24^th

A group of us from OS21 have been very active in getting this project off the ground in partnership with other community groups and Shropshire Council. This partnership, now called Footfall, was only formed in early August yet we will launch using the first empty premises on the 24^th October.

 The Footfall umbrella has so far brought together otherwise disparate groups and we see this as very much part of our vision. We aim to be more than just a group who ‘tart up’ shops to look better for the moment.

We want to make Footfall a really sustainable, innovative, vibrant force within the town, utilising empty shops and other underused spaces for a variety of community projects, thus encouraging more footfall throughout the town.

It’s taken a lot of hard work and perseverance to get agents/landlords to allow their empty shops to be used, but we are very nearly there, with two shops on Festival Square and three more in the pipeline on Bailey Street and the Queen Anne Passageway. We have also secured the use of empty space at the Old Station Building, thanks to the Cambrian Railways.

Footfall will endeavour to link with events within the town, organised by other groups to maximise publicity for all concerned. Our launch event on the 24^th October links with the Green Fair organised by OsTT (Oswestry Transition Towns) and OS21. The organisation www.350.org has nominated the 24^th October as an international day of climate action to help raise awareness of how we all need to actively work towards lowering our carbon footprint. Oswestry’s Green Fair is the only 350.org event taking place in Shropshire!

Win this bike!!

Footfall has orgainised an art competition, for local primary school children, based on the theme, ‘Green Oswestry’. The children’s entries will be displayed in the two shops on Festival Square(fingers crossed Shropshire Council manage to get the leases finalised in time!) We shall link these shops with the Memorial Hall, where the Green Fair is taking place, with our logo of a footprint, by literally creating footprints on the pavement between the buildings; should be a fun activity on the day for young and old alike!

We hope to run the exhibition for about four weeks, open initially on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Judging will take place during the first week.

We need lots of people to help!!

• to be in the shops whilst they’re open in two hour shifts
• to help clean, clear the shops ready for occupation
• to organise foot painting on the day
• to help organise and display the children’s art work
• to film/photograph all our activities
• to help advertise and promote the event and Footfall
• to help set up and run our new website

We would welcome help from young and old alike, even if you can only spare the odd hour or so.

Contact Details:

Wendy Unwin 01691 680203 wendy@thegatesgifts.co.uk

Buz Thomas 01691 600605 buzthomas2002@yahoo.co.uk

Nicki Young 01939 237419 nicki.young@shropshire.gov.uk

The dog days of summer are over. The meeting at the Memorial Hall on the 28th Sept. was a successful event, with almost 100 people attending.

The intention was to initially provide an update on the long drawn out super-market planning application process, still wending it’s way slowly through the corridors of the Borough Council offices and yet to land on the Planning Committee’s doormat. So more news to come on that, and until that point, formal letters of objection cannot be fully put together,

Secondly, the meeting was an opportunity to bring together interested parties, individuals and supporters of OS21, and it was gratifying to hear so much constructive feedback and suggestions, and just to see so many faces.

Apart from an update on the supermarket issue, there were two guest speakers. Angus Hannagan, Chairman of the local Primary Care Trust, spoke to the meeting as a concerned resident of Oswestry Borough. He gave an incredibly thorough and concise breakdown on the mental and physical health issues surrounding the introduction of out-of-town retail into a community, with well researched and sourced statistics on job losses, the experience of other towns, low wage economy, fast food and low price alcohol etc. It was requested by members of the audience that a version of this should be issued as a print-out, and that a letter containing some of this information should be sent to the Star and the Advertizer. When Angus Hannagan’s talk has been transcribed, we will be posting the content on this website.

This was followed by a presentation by Gordon Hillier, who has spent his working life in the oil industry. His retired life he has spent giving talks such as this on the dire state of global oil reserves and the inability of the industry to deliver to consumers at the rate to which we have all been accustomed. The message is that we have already reached peak oil NOW - at 2009-2010, and that we are unprepared at all levels to deal with this change that will be forced upon us. Fortunately his talk was delivered with humour, a positive stance being the only sane one to take, as he steered us towards initiating a Transition Towns movement in Oswestry, which is a way forward into controlling our descent from high consumption to sustainability.

As hoped for, this meeting generated great interest and many offers of involvement, both to strengthen the role of OS21 and to instigate a core group interested in Transition Town Oswestry. There will be meetings for both groups in the near future to maintain momentum, and news of these will be available on this website, in the the newly renovated library, by e-mail and, we hope, some sympathetic shops in town.

A big thank you to everyone who gave up part of their Sunday afternoon to attend, offer support to Os21 and to the TT movement, and who contributed financially. There was a sense of urgency that change is upon us, like it or not, and a feeling of momentum building in Oswestry to address this change.

Note that in the menu bar at the top of this web page there is now a page for Transition Town news and events.

  I was delighted to meet Patrick Holden, Director of the Soil Association, last week, we discussed many things including OS21.  He was extremely supportive and suggested that we become members of Transitions Town, which Mark has posted about.  Patrick and his family launched a cheese they make on their farm near Lampter that week called Hafod.  I have yet to try it but I am sure it will be made with dedication, care and passion. 

Below is a piece from the Guardian I just read about Patick’s dairy farm that also grows carrots which he sells through Sainsbury’s.  I think there is an important message to all producers, shop keepers, service companies.  If you have a good story tell it and if it is a good story people will keep buying your goods.  I feel our local stores all have great stories. 

I recently had lunch with Justin King, the head of Sainbury’s,’ Holden reveals, ‘as you do in my privileged position.’ They talked about Holden’s organic carrots, grown on his Welsh farm, which last year outsold and replaced Sainbury’s own in eight Welsh stores - despite being 20p dearer. A labour of love, their packaging carries a picture of the farm painted by Holden’s oldest daughter, Barley, and four paragraphs on the back, written by Patrick, explaining the merits of organics.‘I told Justin I’d like to do English stores,’ he explains, ‘but he said he thought it wouldn’t work because it was a Welsh thing. But when they went into the English stores, sales went fantastically. It shows that people will pay more for a product with a story behind it.’  

It seems more than timely to take the Transition Town issue further. This year is bringing so many issues to the fore - Peak Oil and energy costs, food costs, car use, the rural/urban divide etc., and we seem to have councils that have not, and are not, taking these challenges seriously.

OS21 think it is time to start to implement Transition in Oswestry and would like to gauge opinion and start to build support from those already on the OS21 e mail list and readers of this website. The aim of Transition Towns is to is to raise awareness of sustainable living and build local resilience to the issues mentioned above. For further information click on the Transition Town link here on on the list of links on the right of the page.

There are currently over 500 cities, towns and villages in the British Isles actively taking this step and a further 800 considering it. So it’s not exactly a radical or left field suggestion, and for a town like Oswestry to be not considering it at this time would seem to suggest a resolutely head-in-sand position.

Rob Hopkins, the originator of TT, will come to Oswestry to give a talk and advice on starting to get this issue on the agenda in this town. We can book the Memorial Hall and it would be good to see it filled with interested parties.

So if you are interested, you know any one or an organisation who would be interested, contact us at os21group@yahoo.com and leave an expression of interest by commenting below and we will take it further by arranging a meeting and discussion with Rob Hopkins.

Does Oswestry really need a hypermarket three times the size of Sainsburys, (whether at the Smithfield or Burbidges), which will retail food, electrical goods, chemists goods and clothes? What effect will this have on the town centre?

How does such large scale retail promote authentic choice when the effect it has is to force out independent retailers and the variety that they provide?

When an out of town Safeways opened in Leominster the number of empty shops rose from 16 to 36 in 5 years and the town unfortunately found itself qualifying for £2.2 million of Single Regeneration Budget funds as a result of town centre decline.

www.competition-commission.org.uk/rep_pub/reports/2000/fulltext/446a13.1.pdf

The need for increased retail is recognised and there are alternatives. Smaller, varied outlets within and nearer the town centre of scale in keeping with the size of the town and it’s population. (e.g. M and S, Somerfield opening in the old Choices building).

At a time of steeply rising oil prices and declining resources after peak oil, is such car dependent consumerism wise planning for the next 20 years?

It’s time for Oswestry to become pro-active; traders need to coalesce and face development and economic challenges together. It’s time the town demanded a Town Council that was voted in on merit and not longevity of tenure, that didn’t whiff of nepotism and self interest, and that had a genuine and visionary interest in dealing with a post peak oil town at a time of huge environmental and economic change.

Is it not time for Oswestry to join the other 50+ towns and cities in the British Isles which are realistically facing the challenges of peak oil and climate change and become a Transition Town?

http://www.transitiontowns.org/

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” - Charles Darwin