Energetic - Exploring the past, present and future of energy by Energetic

Exploring the past, present and future of energy

Edited by Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk

Published by Shed, Cambridge. Editors: Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk Section editors: Bradon Smith, Renata Tyszczuk, Julia Udall, David Llewellyn and Mel Rohse ÂŠ 2018 Shed and individual contributors. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, apart from the quotation of brief passages for the purpose of review, without the written consent of the publishers. ISBN 978-0-9557534-5-9 Printed by Cantate Communications, United Kingdom. This publication is printed on FSCÂŽ certified paper.

Exploring the past, present and future of energy

Edited by Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk

Contents

Contents Chronicle of the incandescent lightbulb . . . . . . . . . 8 Energetic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Stories of Change / TippingPoint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Charge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Energy pamphlets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Utopia Fair. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Who speaks for energy change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Energy Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Get energy efficiency right. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Unsettling expertise: The Energy Generation project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Distributed energy generation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Energy Generation: The young people's perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 A whole new energy conversation. . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 I don't really care about solar panelsâ&#x20AC;Ś. . . . . . . . . 48 Working with energy utopias. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Who Is Jules? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Jules, friendly and unfriendly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Sparks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 The cat, the lover and the laundry. . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Dear Jules. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Tom the Blacksmith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 My Friend. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Coal, Vril and solar: Energy in the novel. . . . . . . . 70 Where the wind was given number: Costa. . . . . . 74 The last miners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Energy in the news. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Community Energy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 To: Roger Harrabin Subject: Energy transitions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 This is not cheap energy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Timeline: energy use in the UK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Decarbonisation journeys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Demanding Times photo booth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 A factory is an energy prototype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Atlas of Energy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Future Works 2050. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Scenario games and energy questions . . . . . . . . 108 UTC photo booth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Disruptive energy technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 The Automation Integration Centre. . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Future primitive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 One Great Workshop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 One Great Workshop: energy stories. . . . . . . . . . 126 A lightbulb moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 Little Mesters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Future Factories and Mester Makers. . . . . . . . . . 134 Gripple Ltd: A big green tick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Impact beyond the factory walls. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 A virtual prototype. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Energy Map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Let's make energy noisy!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Towards Voltopia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Power Island. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 The House Factory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 The world's first factory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Objects of Desire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Archive and the Machine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Future Works photo booth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Water power at Cromford Mills. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Revolution, Arkwright and me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Cromford Brewery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Carbon decisions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 An energy story since 1784. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Energy at Lea Mills. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 The Rumour Mill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 Energy ballads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Song cycle / The view. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 The quickening clock. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 A tour of Strutt's North Mill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 The low-carbon revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Hydro:generation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 This is a magical time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 The Alchemical Theatre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 A short history of energy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 Utopia Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Empowering an energy landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Lessons for action?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Ynysybwl: Memories of energy production and consumption. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Smell, sights and sounds of the 'Bwl. . . . . . . . . . 220 Pea soup, power cuts, pedal bikes, and pumps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 Keeping warm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 Our modern Titans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Listen and you'll hear them creep. . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Entertainment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 An artists' workshop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Now That the Mining's Done. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Changing landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Tairgwaith: Old and new energies. . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Grey Ghosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 Open Cast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 The old coal office. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 A creative experiment: The Treherbert Story Studio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Treherbert stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 As warm as toast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 The Story Studio: A community viewpoint. . . . 254 On listening to stories from Ynysybwl and Treherbert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Butetown: Exploring energy with the Somali community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 Tales and memories of Somaliland . . . . . . . . . . . 260 Charcoal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 Trees In Abundance To Start. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 A play for voices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 Recalling energy landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Taking energy stories to the centre of power. . 274 Community, creativity and change . . . . . . . . . . . 276 Everyday Lives photo booth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

Chronicle of the incandescent lightbulb

CHRONICLE OF THE INCANDESCENT LIGHTBULB by Nick Drake

You had nothing but the moon, the guttering candle, and the dish of oil to thread the eye of a needle, read, or cast shadows on the walls, until you created us, the first light that was constant in the dark. From a heartbeat twist of tungsten and a single breath of gas to hold our whole lives long, you sowed one idea in our interchangeable glass skulls; to shine at your command. We shed no tears of wax; reliable, disposable, we lived where you lived, lit your parties and wars; one by one we brightened the hill-shanties and towers of your megacities; when you were lost, we were home waiting, just a click away to save you from the small hours' fears; when your lives hung by a thread we stayed as long as necessary; we shone when you were gone.

And when the incandescent spell of our filament blew, with a quiet tick, you cast us off; and now you wish a light perpetual and free, your highways and cities radiant archipelagoes against infinity. But if the lights go out, from time to time, lie back on the black grass, and gaze at the banished constellations; take ancient starlight in, and listen for the dark song of our source summoning, on summer nights and winter afternoons, the antiquated powers of the moon.

Photo: Tim Mitchell. 9

Energetic

Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk

The story of humanity’s relationship with energy over the last 250 years is one of dramatic changes. However, this is only rarely acknowledged. Moreover, it can be difficult to sense when you are in the middle of major energy transformations. Environmental, economic and social forces are generating a new crop of ‘stories of change’ in the present – for better and for worse. Climate change threats and air pollution are intensifying, but at the same time great strides are being made in the efficiency of energy use and generation. This book gathers together a multitude of ideas, stories and images that emerged out of an ambitious experimental project about energy system transformations. The Stories of Change project set out to provoke more dynamic public conversations about, and policy responses to, energy – by looking in a fresh way at its past, present and future. By drawing on history, literature, social and policy research, and the arts, we have sought to encourage a more open approach to thinking about our relationship with energy. We were interested in how to bring different interests, visions, and competencies into dialogue, to forge a response to this key challenge – for humanity and for the planet – that is less atomised and more collective; less constrained and more creative. We also wanted to encourage the public conversation about energy to take more account of the interests of people and places that are vulnerable during energy transitions. Energetic gathers insights and images from across this work. If the Stories of Change project were an exhibition, this would be its catalogue – a representative sample of the creative writing, songs, photos and portraits, interviews, short films, performances and museum and festival events that we have co-produced in collaboration with our community, creative, and research 10

partners. A more comprehensive collection of material is held in an online publicly accessible collection (our ‘Stories Platform’). There you can follow pathways through the materials, but you can also browse individual items, or make up your own stories of change, by threading material together using the digital tools we provide. The Stories of Change project has been shaped around the cross-party commitment to decarbonisation at the heart of the UK Government’s Climate Change Act of 2008, and has been further energised by the UN Paris Agreement of 2015. Research has shown that many people feel disengaged, disempowered, or actively hostile to the changes to the UK’s energy system that will be necessary to meet the targets embedded in the Act. At the same time it is clear that there is wide acceptance that urgent action of some kind is necessary: to reduce demand, decarbonise energy supply and prepare for future environmental hazards. Stories of Change has been, in part, an attempt to make space to work through areas of concern and test shared ideas about energy transitions. With our project partners we have gathered together people’s direct experiences of energy change in the past and present, and drawn upon accounts from early modern history and contemporary science fiction. Some of our older community partners have shared early life memories and young adults have looked across their likely lifespan to explore how decisions made today may affect their later years in the 22nd century. Our work has been inspired by the example of the Mass Observation movement’s stories of change in everyday life in mid-20th-century Britain. Their work combined a desire to give ordinary people a voice, radical innovations in social research, and bold new ideas about documentary media and the arts. Their innovative approach to valuing and

supporting lay social researchers; their groundbreaking application of arts, social sciences, and media to the goals of social change; and their novel use of documentary tools were touchstones for this project. We have worked with stories of energy transformation, large and small, because we are convinced that they can help to build commitment to positive change by linking national and global energy challenges with individuals’ everyday lives. We have put ‘stories’ to work because they offer a popular and engaging route into thinking about energy, but also because stories, narratives, and narration are concepts that everybody can gather around. History, digital storytelling, fictional narratives, documentary and scenarios of the future all explore in different ways the necessity for change, and the possible consequences of it. This book, like the Stories of Change project, is organised around three research project strands, or ‘stories.’ The first, Demanding Times, has gathered together a novel mix of communities with interests in energy policy. The focus of most of the activity for this strand of the project has been London – often seen as the world’s first ‘global city.’ The second, Future Works, has centred on the English Midlands, unearthing fresh accounts of the long relationship between energy, industrial making and landscape in this region. The third strand of the project, Everyday Lives, has examined the ways energy resources have continued to shape communities’ lives in south Wales. Stories of Change has been supported by a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Connected Communities programme. The project was our response to their call for ambitious, interdisciplinary proposals with ‘edge’ that would bring together the arts, humanities and social sciences to support action on environmental challenges. Our approach has been experimental and interdisciplinary throughout. Such a risky venture can only succeed with the help of good friends, and the

project has benefited from numerous enthusiastic partners. Many of these individuals and institutions are listed in the Acknowledgements. We are profoundly grateful to all of them for their generosity and commitment. Our experience of engaging with a wide mix of people on energy issues has revealed that most people are much more open to change than politicians, policy makers, and the media often assume. Within the life of the project we saw young Londoners with little prior experience of policy, the media or environmental issues gain the confidence to interview leading policy figures and hold these experts to account for their role in shaping the future. Our student collaborators in the English Midlands worked with a very wide range of businesses and institutions to devise industrial energy strategies. A pop up Story Studio in the South Wales Valleys helped reconnect people to their very significant role in global-scale energy stories (whether coal mines or wind farms). Over the course of the project we have become acutely aware of the need to combat a poverty of historical imagination. It is often forgotten that humanity’s relationship with energy has been varied, contingent, and experimental. Gathering a variety of stories about this history enriches the picture and makes more things seem possible. Storytelling is not just about understanding the past. Speculative fiction, imaginative play and scenario building also create narratives of alternative presents, and of things to come. The future of energy is ours to shape. Pressing environmental risks, from air pollution to climate change, demand that we take this task in hand. The thing to remember about stories is that you can always change the ending. The Stories of Change project has thrown out a provocation to exercise our collective imagination about the range of possible energy futures. The responses of our collaborators and participants have been inspiring, surprising, and richly varied. If there has been one question driving this project, it is simply this: change is coming – what sort of change do you want it to be? 11

TippingPoint

Stories of Change / TippingPoint The Stories of Change team launched the project with a two-day residential event in Oxford in September 2014 that brought the research, arts, and policy worlds into rare confluence. Peter Gingold and Mark Goldthorpe of TippingPoint presented their experience of running arts/climate events, while we offered workshops about energy system change, a performance that told the story of energy transformations by the Open University's Stephen Peake, and an evening programme curated by Clare Patey that filled an Oxford college chapel with a programme of original poetry, storytelling, (cycle powered) film, and an electrifying circus act. 12

Photos: Gorm Ashurst. 13

TippingPoint

Charge

Kevin Finnan, Motionhouse

In 2014 I attended the Stories of Change / TippingPoint event in Oxford. The format â&#x20AC;&#x201C; presentations for information and perspective, followed by time spent in informal discussion with an extremely diverse group of people â&#x20AC;&#x201C; created a wonderful space for the contemplation and incubation of ideas. I was particularly struck by a presentation by Oliver Morton in which he opened my mind to the larger picture of the Earth as an energy system. I came away from that event framing a series of questions for myself: I am part of an energy system, but what does that mean in my life, and how can I express it? How do I make energy visible? I began a process of exploring the science of electricity in the human body, under the guidance of Dame Professor Frances Ashcroft. For Charge I wanted to see energy in the micro within the

human body, and follow it through escalating scales toward the macro, such as energy use in society, and the energy of the weather. I wanted to find the intersections of this information with my life, and understand how this was shaping my everyday experiences. The award from Stories of Change with TippingPoint and DECC/BEIS helped me to develop the digital/set environment for the show that is so crucial to manifesting energy on different scales. Stories of Change helped me to develop content, but it also challenged me on notions of form. Is what I am doing valid in this context? As an artist I do not create polemical work. What is a story of change? This was a very powerful creative friction in the making process, and really helped me sharpen my own sense of the work and how to communicate it.

Energy pamphlets

Energy pamphlets Our workshops for creating these short and punchy stories of change drew on Nicola Whyte's investigations into the history of energy pamphlets, the experience of environmental campaigner Andrew Simms, and the letterpress skills of the Smallprint Company. 18

Energy pamphlets

Utopia Fair

Photos: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell and Gorm Ashurst The AHRC's Connected Communities programme marked the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's Utopia in 2016 with a Utopia Fair at Somerset House, London on 24th26th June. The Stories of Change project brought a showcase of activities on the theme of energy utopias from the three project strands (Demanding Times, Future Works, Everyday Lives) and Matt Wainwright documented the activities in a film. Storytelling, the Energy Question photo booth, film screenings, pamphlet making, and interactive performance games all demonstrated that another energy world is possible, and people are ready to play their part. 23

Utopia Fair

Who speaks for energy change?

Who speaks for energy change? Bradon Smith and Joe Smith Energy systems, and the politics and policies that underpin them, can seem remote from daily life; and yet, decisions about energy affect everyone. The Demanding Times strand of the Stories of Change project took policy as its thematic focus and located itself in London – often thought of as the world's first global city. Energy infrastructure was fundamental to the city's explosive growth, and it remains, in all senses, a powerful place. Demanding Times has sought to widen the range of voices heard in debates about transformations of current energy systems. The project has worked with a very broad body of partners, from top-flight professionals in the energy sector and leading specialist journalists to young people coming to the subject for the first time. For example, the Energy Generation project brought in researcher Luke Dickens and, with Luke's help, partnered with the Peer Outreach Team (POT) at the Greater London Authority. We trained these young people from across London to carry out interviews with participants from the media, industry, local and national government, and the third sector. Demanding Times worked with leading environment and energy journalists to gather in-depth interviews with key players in the world of energy, as well as positive stories of change. Among the more speculative work produced in this strand was the creative writing game My Friend Jules, and the performance and digital artwork inspired by written pieces that were contributed to the game. The project formed partnerships with organisations in the third sector, including the National Trust, the energy charity Ashden, the Fit for the Future network, and Community Energy England, in order to unearth powerful stories of energy transformation. Other collaborators have included The Energy Institute – a network of energy industry bodies and engineers – and the UK Government Department for Energy & Climate Change (now the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy). Ideas about – and hopes for – the future are a recurring theme through much of the work: what will the future of energy look like? What sort of legacy do we in the present want to leave for the future? This was true of the young Londoners' findings in the Energy Generation project, in the interviews with leading figures and in the vox pops they gathered across London. But it was also evident in the collaboration with theatre-makers fanSHEN, which asked participants to imagine bold interventions in energy futures. 30

In an account of her collaboration with Demanding Times – a play for voices inspired by submissions to the My Friend Jules creative writing game – artist Vicky Long notes a recurring question: "How do we work with what we've been given?" Long was thinking partly of the practical challenge of working with material submitted by others while still creating something original. In the context of energy, however, this question also becomes: "How do we use the resources we have been given responsibly?" Immediately it brings into view the past – from which society receives its hydrocarbon trust fund, to be saved or squandered – and the future, to which people in the present appear to be, in new ways, responsible. But this question is also a provocation to researchers: how to work with the material produced by all these collaborations, and how to present it? The essays, interview transcripts, photographs, poems, and graphics presented here are only a small sample of the material generated by Demanding Times. But this collage and its resulting juxtapositions give a sense of the range of this varied and experimental initiative. This work has built up a picture of the challenges involved in transforming our energy system to achieve the targets of the UK Government's 2008 Climate Change Act. In policy terms, the shift to a low-carbon society and economy involves problem solving, investment, and commitment to change on an incredible scale. But Demanding Times, like the Stories of Change project as a whole, has revealed the progress that has already been made. The challenge may be intense, but the will and imagination to meet it are also present, in abundance, across our energy communities.

Energy Generation

Bradon Smith

The Demanding Times team were keen, in the spirit of the wider project, to experiment with research practices that worked from, but went beyond, a traditional academic research interview. This idea led us to a collaborative project called Energy Generation, conceived by Joe Smith and Bradon Smith, and led by Bradon Smith and Luke Dickens with core creative partners photographer Tim Mitchell and theatre-makers fanSHEN.

– a reference point for the Stories of Change project – aligns, approximately, with the span of the working life of their generation. Thirdly, their different perspectives on energy and energy policy produced novel interactions, by asking participants to engage with a community and with approaches to the subject of energy that they may not have encountered before.

The core project team worked to enable the POT as lay social scientists: training was designed to introduce the team to current energy challenges, and to give them core skills in interview techniques and media recording. Over the course of the training days, the team generated a long-list of questions from which an interview protocol was created. The core research team used their professional contacts and institutional affiliations to invite key figures from the world of energy and energy policy to participate; the POT, employed as junior researchers, devised, carried out, and recorded the in-depth interviews.

In addition to the interviews, the team planned and led a range of creative participatory activities. In evaluation and reflection sessions, the POT stressed the importance of these activities from the outset, to avoid a 'dry' interaction. In different ways, these creative methods were intended to give the research encounters a sense of 'serious fun,' and to promote imaginative and affective responses to issues around energy. Working with photographer Tim Mitchell, the POT redeveloped Tim's photo booth concept, asking participants to pose questions about energy, which were then written on a cloud suspended above the participants' heads while they had their portraits taken. Through an iterative process, the prompt to elicit the questions evolved, finally asking participants to look back, as if from their children's or grandchildren's perspective, and wonder what they might ask us about our current energy generation or consumption. The idea, as the POT researchers developed it, was that the prompt would encourage a more personal response from the sitter, drawing them into consideration of futurity, social change, intergenerational justice, and – implicitly – a narrative connecting present energy policy with future human (and nonhuman) lives.

The motivation for working with the POT was threefold. First, young people are too seldom made a part of debates around energy. Second, the period to the year 2050 covered by the emissions targets of the Climate Change Act

The POT were keen to avoid the more factually based and instrumental responses that might be expected from a high-profile 'expert,' and the photo booth was intended as a way to disrupt this. Asking participants to pose questions in

Energy Generation is a series of interviews and related activities carried out in 2015 and 2016 by the Peer Outreach Team (POT) at the Greater London Authority in partnership with Demanding Times. The POT is made up of young people aged 18 to 25 from across London who are deemed to face a range of barriers to participation in mainstream education, employment, and training. They are commissioned by the Mayor of London to engage, inspire, and gather the opinions of other young people in the capital. They are, in effect, the Mayor's young advisors.

this way also had the effect of subverting and reclaiming the notion of expert knowledge, by placing the respondents in the role of questioner. In a similar inversion, the project team has – somewhat playfully – chosen to see all the communities we have worked with – the group of young people, the wider London publics we have engaged, and all the 'experts' drawn from industry, policy, academia and media – as 'hard to reach' communities. A second creative intervention was developed with participatory theatre-makers fanSHEN: a game called Model London. To play the game, participants suggested possible future personal or policy responses to London's energy challenges, and then responded to the suggestions of others. Through a game design that considered a narrative of possible consequences leading from each proposal, a 'least worst' idea was chosen. A model of this proposal was then collaboratively built by opposing teams, using lego, plasticine, building blocks, and other materials. When the game was played in London's City Hall, the object was then placed on an appropriate spot on the giant satellite photo of London that covers the floor of the lobby. A variation on the game started from the aim of creating an energy utopia. The game worked to highlight the causal complexities of energy policy; but the playful tone and physical modelling element promoted speculative, imaginative, and sometimes absurd suggestions, opening up space to consider afresh the challenges that energy policy faces. These creative interventions were found to have a number of benefits. As well as producing striking visual outputs and relaxing participants before a more traditional interview, they encouraged a shift of perspective on energy, towards more personal and imaginative understandings. Responses from participants and from the POT also indicated the interaction had encouraged both 'experts' and peer researchers to rethink their existing knowledges and positions.

Energy policy may not, at first glance, seem an area in which story, as a form of communication, has much relevance. But the process of creating policy on regional, national, and international levels is always predicated upon scenario building, future scoping, or modelling – even if only implicitly. The task is to imagine a desired future, and identify the narrative that leads us there. All these are forms of storytelling in a speculative mode. It is no coincidence, then, that many of the questions and creative activities developed by the project team with the POT and creative partners explicitly focused on the future. Narratives of the future allow readers or listeners to imagine the present as history, encouraging the possibility of thinking differently about things we do not normally question. It was this mild defamiliarisation that our creative interventions sought to induce, opening up imaginative space to reconsider the energy systems that we currently take for granted. During seven event days held at the Royal Academy of Engineering, City Hall, Somerset House, and in the communities of Ilford and Peckham, the POT conducted 14 in-depth interviews, and engaged with hundreds of participants through vox pop interviews, the photo booth, the Model London game, and on social media. Short extracts from a handful of the long interviews can be found in the following pages, along with portraits from the photo booth. The interviews have been edited for ease of reading, but verbatim transcripts can be found on the Stories of Change web platform. Interspersed with these interviews are pieces reflecting on this research practice – from researcher Luke Dickens, from the Peer Outreach Team, and from the theatre company fanSHEN.

Energy Generation | Get energy efficiency right

Get energy efficiency right

An interview with Richard Black, by the Peer Outreach Team

Junior: So, when my mum was growing up, 40 years ago in Brazil, they couldn't really take energy for granted, but it seems that young people nowadays do. How would you address that?

year. So you can keep doing it, keep adding, and keep getting better at what you're doing.

Richard Black: It's a really interesting question actually. One way is to broaden awareness of how other people in the world live, because there are still countries in the world where you can't take energy for granted. Another would be to find ways of visualising the energy we use. In this country, smart-metering is a way that people can do that. I was looking at an interesting demonstration yesterday, actually, using thermal cameras to show energy waste. It was very dramatic. You can immediately see, "Okay, well, in that case I should do something. I can do this, that, and the other."

RB: <laughs> How long do I get to be in power? 50 years?

Ebenezer: Where are we on nuclear energy in the UK? RB: In a mess, in a word. Firstly, governments have all kicked into the long grass the question of what we do with our legacy nuclear waste: for 20 or 30 years, governments have failed to find a solution. Also, the economics are really difficult: Hinkley Point is amazingly expensive, ÂŁ16 billion for one power station. My personal suspicion is that it won't be built, because the economics will look too horrible to the incoming government. All industries need to learn by doing: the more you do, the more you learn, the cheaper you get, the better at it. But because nuclear reactor building has really stalled in the West, no one's learning by doing. So you have these few, very big, very complex designs for reactors that clearly have big engineering issues. Other technologies are just looking cheaper and easier. With solar panels, for example, you can go from the idea to building the thing and having it connected to the grid within a 34

Junior: If you were in power, what would be your energy strategy?

Junior: <laughs> As long as you like. RB: So, the first thing is to have a long-term aim, and then make sure your short-term policies are consistent with that aim. Germany's Energiewende, its energy transformation, is a 50-year operation. Each government goes a bit further; you encounter new problems; you change your local policies; and so on. But you're consistent with the long-term goal. Not everything can be done within the lifetime of a parliament. The first thing I would do would be to get energy efficiency right. It's the cheapest thing to do, it brings lots of benefits, and it takes people out of fuel poverty. So I'd really get that right. The second thing would be to encourage the growth of renewables by getting the subsidy support mechanism right. Problems with the national grid have to be sorted out very quickly. In some parts of the country you can't add any more renewables onto the national grid because it can't take them, it's full. You would look to phase out coal-fired power stations as quickly as possible because all the ones we have are getting old, unreliable. Coal is a very damaging fuel in terms of its pollution and once you send a signal that those are going to come off the system then I think that adds incentive for people to do low-carbon generation. None of this is rocket science, all the answers are out there.

Richard Black in the photo booth. Photo: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell.

Ebenezer: We've just heard about the Sahara desert [analogy]. Junior: Yeah. Thinking of the Sahara desert as a Mars bar, if you were to make a solar panel farm about the size of a postage stamp and put it on that Mars bar, that could power the entire world. RB: I remember a pioneer on solar panels telling me if you got 4% of the Earth's landmass covered in solar panels, you could power the world. So, probably true. But of course you can't literally do that, because how do you get the power from there to elsewhere? You're much better off having a diversified system. There are ideas of having huge solar farms in North Africa and then pumping that electricity to Europe. It might happen, but it's not obvious that it has a real

economic benefit. And there are also concerns about then who owns it. Because in the same way that Europe, for example, has seen its oil supply controlled by OPEC, you could imagine – what should we call it? SOPEC or something – North African countries that could basically turn the tap off if they wanted to. So that's one of reasons why it might not happen, I suspect. Junior: Thank you so much for answering out questions. RB: You're welcome. My pleasure. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Richard Black, Director, Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. 1st May 2015, The National Grid Room, Prince Philip House, London. 35

Energy Generation | Unsettling expertise

Unsettling expertise: The Energy Generation project Luke Dickens

Our usual habit for starting a working day on the Energy Generation project was to sit round a table together, drinking coffee and sharing our reflections on the insights and challenges we encountered during our previous session. Embedding a reflexive approach in this way culminated in each member of the group being invited to offer up an example from the day where they had learned something new, and an example of something they were already good at – a personal skill, perspective, or suggestion – which they felt had made a useful contribution to our activities. This was approached as a light-hearted, enjoyable, lyrical exchange, but one that belied a serious effort to be in the business of repositioning, reclaiming, and, indeed, unsettling forms of expertise about energy. On this particular morning, Junior and Ebenezer recounted a tale about their interview with the BBC's Environment and Energy Analyst, Roger Harrabin, which they had recorded in the prestigious National Grid Rooms at Prince Phillip House the week before. Roger had arrived at the interview mildly out of breath, still wearing his bicycle clips, and a glint in his eye. Perhaps it was the recent thrill of the ride across London, but possibly it arose from the prospect of being on the receiving end of a recorded interview for a change. Either way, the glint was without doubt there, and was read as an ominous sign by the two young men about to have their first encounter with an 'energy expert.' Reciting their tale, Junior and Ebenezer expressed their initial trepidation at Roger's gentle provocations and the qualified responses that he had offered to their questions. Their first contribution to our reflections that morning was therefore something of a warning to the other young members of the Energy Generation team; that the questions they had prepared together for interviewing such experts were merely a point of departure, and that in all likelihood their interviewees would be inclined to take the conversation in any number of interesting yet unforeseen directions. "One thing I've learnt is how to ask the right questions," Ebenezer explained. "You need to use prompts, yeah, during conversation… like asking open questions and being specific about what you want to get in response." He was also clear on the ways such encounters offered mutual insight, pointing out: "I was learning from people's responses." Yet this first point was followed quickly by their second observation: their surprise at how well they felt the interview had gone overall. Junior attributed this to their success at building rapport, and the ways they had found to keep the discussion interactive. They were glad they had thought creatively, in advance, about how to engage with invited experts on the day. The group's overall reflections that morning established a clear sense that they had actually been rather good at leading insightful, refreshingly honest, entertaining discussions with a cohort of professionals whose 36

City Hall photo booth workshop. Photo: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell.

significant expertise might otherwise have remained distant from their own everyday lives. So as Junior explained, "You get like a communication with them. You're building it so they can open up. Most of them were scholars and stuff, they could have come in and it could have been like any other school thing that they were doing. But it was more interactive than that." Despite some initial foreboding at conducting interviews with such seemingly 'hard to reach' energy policy experts, then, the group of young Londoners had generated something fresh and new about the ways we all might begin to engage with the role of energy in our lives. Indeed, unknown to the Energy Generation team at the time, Roger had been playing something of a dual role, since he, too, was a member of the research project, and he too had been undertaking interviews with energy experts. Tellingly though, Ebenezer and Junior had chanced upon a way to get right to the nub of the issue of unsettling expertise. Early in the interview they ventured: "We watched The Daily Politics today, which you were hosting. What did you think about the answers?" They were referring to a televised General Election debate about climate and the environment that Roger had hosted with leading politicians earlier that week. Without hesitating, Roger exclaimed, "I was incredibly frustrated in that debate! I was very disappointed at the level of bullshit that was just spouted by people who either should know better or were trying to obfuscate." So, here we have it. Perhaps the glint in Roger's eye might actually have been something to do with the refreshing prospect of upending the stifling conventions of debate that he so often encountered in his dealings with politicians and public figures as a BBC journalist. 37

Energy Generation | Unsettling expertise

The reason I focus on this small insight from our working practice is to draw attention to the unique conditions afforded by the Energy Generation project, whereby people from very disparate backgrounds could enter into meaningful dialogue, circulating and exchanging questions and perspectives across otherwise bounded social groupings, generations, and life experiences. Roger might not have realised how impressed the POT were by his wide-ranging and personal responses, just as the POT could only begin to discern the impression they left on those energy policy experts, such as Roger, whom they had successfully encouraged to strike a pose while a large metal cloud swung precariously around their head. Yet such encounters were generative for the ways all participants shared this imaginative space, to come together as mutually interested and uniquely qualified parties in a collective, creative, open, and perhaps even risky process intended to approach a surprisingly difficult task: to talk meaningfully about the fundamental role of energy in our everyday lives. While we were seeking to unsettle energy expertise, we remained respectful of the vital role that all manner of experts can and do play in developing energy policy. We were careful to avoid aligning with a dangerous tendency to disregard and disparage expertise in public and policy debates about our energy futures. Instead, our efforts to unsettle were in part about recognising and reclaiming the everyday expertise that young people might themselves have, and which might make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the present and future of energy. Indeed, as Sandra, another member of the Energy Generation team put it, "I brought a curious mind and positivity, which was important. I didn't come into the project thinking I knew everything about energy." Overall, an understanding of the positionality behind expert knowledge was gradually achieved by affirming such personal experiences with the subjects, and situating them within a broader diversity of views. The young Londoners on the team gradually reframed their understandings about energy around the things that they knew a lot about â&#x20AC;&#x201C; their everyday lives in a diverse metropolitan city â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or aspects of the subject that they had individual interest in or passion for. On one hand, this approach served to establish an overtly politicised engagement with those currently in the position to influence energy decisions today, by asking them speculative, future-orientated, and emotionally-grounded questions about future generations. On the other hand, unsettling formal notions of expertise also seemed to help foster a slightly different model; a generative, reciprocal approach where new forms of expertise were co-produced through the exchange of different experiences and perspectives, rather than being seen as obtainable only through the pursuit of universal, objective truths. The Energy Generation project therefore sought to reposition claims to expertise about energy by nurturing a recognition of the value of everyday knowledges on the subject. It also represented an effort to repoliticise the nature of this expertise by situating the production of knowledge about energy in an explicitly broader field, both geographically and temporally. This approach was realised by finding ways for the young peer researchers on the project to be centred in the conversation about energy, while bringing them into contact with an adult policy community that, for many young people, is often deemed to be beyond their reach or influence. This has effectively subverted so-called 'deficit' models, which all too readily suggest that it is young people who lack the willingness or ability to engage with policy, or are themselves 'hard to reach.' The positive impacts of this engagement were clearly experienced by 38

Horses may kick or bite! Photo: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell.

the peer researchers themselves â&#x20AC;&#x201C; through the opportunity to recognise, articulate, and exchange their own forms of energy expertise with these high-profile individuals. It was in this spirit that the Energy Generation team conducted 14 interviews with energy experts from national and local government, print and online media, academia and policy think tanks, community energy projects, the energy industry, and campaigning organisations. They also went 'on tour' to areas of London where several of the team lived, taking with them their questions, their metal cloud on a string, and an ever-growing confidence and enthusiasm for striking up conversations about energy. The range of beautiful portraits, vox pop interviews, and an exciting film from their time working inside the GLA can be found on the Stories of Change web platform, storiesofchange.ac.uk.

Energy Generation | Distributed energy generation

Distributed energy generation

An interview with Matthew Pencharz, by the Peer Outreach Team

Ebenezer: Do you think the level of education on energy in our public community causes them to think that it just comes from nowhere? Matthew Pencharz: In fairness to our education system, I think that kids are taught quite a lot about where energy comes from. I was saying to one of your colleagues when I was waiting to come in that we get a lot of letters from school kids about climate change issues or air pollution issues â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I think perhaps it is coming up in their school classes. So people are taught about sustainability, and the fact that we need to move to cleaner fuels etc. I think we are taught these things in school, but it's a wider cultural thing: we've just become more used to warm homes and cheap and boundless energy. I don't want us to go back to cold homes or our grandparents having to go off and dig up trees or shovel coal into hearths or whatever, but there is the issue of thinking about energy as a resource, in the same way that everything else that you consume is a resource. Ebenezer: Is wind power really the solution for the future? MP: Well, it's not the only solution, it's all a mix. We need a mix of energy sources so we can have more distributed energy. At the moment, in the UK at least, we have a number of large power stations supplying electricity to the grid. I think in the future you're going to need more distributed energy, so you've got lots more smaller generators in cities, especially. And wind clearly plays a role in that, but so does solar, so does new nuclear, so does gas for a while. John: What sort of legacy would you like to leave the future generation around energy? MP: Well, I've been very lucky to be asked by 40

the Mayor [of London at time of interview, Boris Johnson] to lead his team on Environment & Energy Policy, and there are a few things I would certainly like to do. Some of it is actually introducing more of those distributed energy systems, through a combination of policies, such as the planning system and also market measures, so that having more distributed energy generation here in London becomes a better thing to invest in because you get a better return. Or finding ways for small generators to get a better rate for electricity than they get through the current system. I hope to be able to look back in time and see that it was me that started off, or helped start off with the current Mayor [at time of interview], that increasingly distributed generation here in London, as an example. Another project is to do with increasing biodiesel use in London in our buses, to stimulate the market to have more refining capacity in the southeast and in London. At the moment, the major biodiesel refining capacity is the north of the country. Once you haul that down south, you lose a lot of the cost benefit, and it isn't economically viable to run our bus fleet on. As soon as you have major refining capacity in the south of the country, you lose the haulage cost, and it becomes cost effective. I want to see a circular economy, so that London's used cooking oil or fats are refined into biodiesel to run our buses or our waste vehicles. We're close to landing that and I'm quite hopeful that, again, I can look back and think, "That's my used cooking oil that is now going to fuel the bus, and that was a project that this Mayor drove forward." That's just two examples, I think, of real change that we have driven through. Ebenezer: Last question: are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of energy for London?

Matthew Pencharz in the photo booth. Photo: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell. MP: I'm optimistic. I think you hear too much doom and gloom about decarbonisation and there's an element of lecturing or preaching to people, which turns most people off, or wanting to wear a hair shirt and feel guilty. I think that the opportunities to decarbonise, which I think we have to do, are extremely positive. We have cut our carbon emissions in London by 14% since 2008 despite our population growing by a million, and – despite the recession – astonishingly robust economic growth. Urban centres around the world – not just London but I represent London so I'm going to big us up – have really shown the

world what can be done: how we can create a better quality of life for our residents; how we can alleviate fuel poverty, which we've talked about; how we can alleviate air pollution, which we've talked about; how we can create jobs and growth; give people better lives, wealthier lives, healthier lives. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Matthew Pencharz, Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy, Greater London Authority, 2015-2016. 23rd June 2015, City Hall, London. 41

Energy Generation | The young people's perspective

Energy Generation: The young people's perspective Peer Outreach Team The Energy Generation project had aims that went beyond recording interesting interviews with a range of 'experts' and publics on the topics of energy and energy policy. As part of the project, we organised and recorded reflective evaluation days to capture the thoughts of the young people about the project. Some important themes emerged from these conversations. The following synthesises some of these observations in the Peer Outreach Team's (POT) own words. 'A conversation about energy' Right across the project, Stories of Change has worked to hear a wider range of voices on the subject of energy. Discussing their short vox pop interviews around London, the POT immediately recognised one challenge that this presented: that people don't initially recognise the value of their contribution. But they also identified strategies to encourage participants. Antara: People are very insecure when answering questions about energy 'cause they think it's the wrong question and they lack education for it. When they said that to me I said, "No, every answer is just as valuable as someone who actually works for an energy corporation," and then they felt like, "Oh, OK." I have made them feel like a queen or a king, and they kept elaborating on their answer. So it's just giving that confidence boost that they need, that's what I did. Ebenezer: People don't get it in the first instance so you have to keep speaking to them, and that's a skill that I didn't know that I had before I started the project, which is just drawing out conversations with random people. You need to build up a relationship. Sandra: I think it's just getting that conversation 42

going, isn't it? Because [before] this project I wouldn't have had a conversation about energy. We don't talk about it. It's not a conversation that we have. Natalie was clear that in talking to members of the public as part of the project the team were creating conversational environments around energy that could have transformative potential. Natalie: the aim was to create conversation and I think it did, because without [members of the public] even wanting to, you've already got in their head, you can't un-talk about energy. So if someone asks them about their day, "These random people asked me about energy." "Oh, what did they ask you?" And in one go you've got it. Because it doesn't happen every day. We're young people and we wasn't rude and it was kind of fun what we were doing. Even if they don't talk about it with other people, they might research it themselves or think more about how they use energy after the conversation that you had with them. These observations led to the POT to reflect on the nature of 'expertise.' Sandra: They're everyday people. No one really goes up to them and asks them for their opinion a lot; and, say, if you write something on the news they would have someone from this organisation talking about it, or this one, but someone who has a title. It's rare that we get opinions from everyday people. So it's not a thing that they're used to, and I think because energy's not a conversation that's heard in that kind of household every day over dinner or whatnot, and it's a thing that they don't really take personal. So if you was to ask them about their kids going to school or their routine of their kids going to school, they'd be experts

How would we cope? Photo: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell. in that. Whereas energy is not a thing that they personalise to themselves, so that's why they think, "Oh, they're not experts." Junior and Ebenezer had a different interpretation. Junior: It's not that people don't know, I just feel likeâ&#x20AC;Ś 'cause they're put on the spot, so it's like oh my god, I don't know anything! But then once you start probing, they actually know a lot. Me and Natalie went up to someone and they were

like, "Oh, I don't really know that much," and then when we started speaking to them, they knew a lot more than they let on. So it's not that they don't know, it's just thatâ&#x20AC;Ś because energy is in everything that they do, so it's just about asking the right questions. But it's not that they don't know. I think everyone knows. Ebenezer: People feel like they don't know a lot, so when you're approaching people they will be like, "Ah, I don't know anything about energy." 43

Energy Generation | The young people's perspective

And speaking to them you find out that they knew more than they actually thought they did. But they were equally keen to point out that although the established 'experts' that they interviewed might be quicker to offer an opinion, this did not necessarily make matters easier. Junior: I think it's quite confusing asking the experts in Pall Mall, because everyone has a different answer to the same question, so it's just like one person would say, "Oil's running out"; the next person will say, "Oh you silly! Oil's not running out!" And then it was just like, "Well, what is true then?" "When you make it creative" The project had at its core a tone of 'serious playfulness,' and creative practices were a key part of that. The peer researchers working on the project understood the potential of these creative practices to shift the tone of the conversation. Junior: We had to think out of the box of how to create this photo booth. We all contributed and we are all very creative. We could have just had 44

people come in, we take a picture of them, they come and sit down, they do an interview, it could have been really dry. Instead, the photo booth had the effect of opening up the engagement with participants. Junior: [one of the participants, Milly Darling from the charity 10:10,] came in and she interacted with it and she was on her knees and she put her hands in the air and stuff like that, and there was a map behind her, it looked really cool! Then the whole process was a lot easier, they were more relaxed and they interacted more, so I think creativity was essential in that. Sandra insightfully observed that these creative approaches were important in addressing an intangible and often abstract topic like energy. Sandra: It's important because [energy is] a subject that can be easily ignored, even though it's a big part of our lives, and no one really stops and talks about energy. When you make it creative, it allows us to really think what it is in our lives, and think more openly about it and connect to the topic a bit more.

Photos: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell.

These creative interventions were not only significant for the participating interviewees, but also for the research team themselves. Tim Mitchell set the team a task to create a contextual photo essay: to take five photographs about energy that they would then present to the rest of the team. The exercise prompted new realisations. Sandra: I like oil spills in water and it does that weird rainbow thing, I saw that and it reminded me how we use oil for electricity and that, and how a lot of it does get wasted. One of Natalie's photos was of wind turbines that she saw on waking up on a train. Natalie: I opened my eyes to see where I was, I saw this, and I thought "Oh my god! Energy!" And I've seen [the power station] before, but never really seen it seen it, so I thought "I'm going to take a picture." I thought it was nice to get that in and also the [power] lines at the top. The POT saw that these creative approaches had the capacity to generate new reflections on a topic that the POT realised was ubiquitous, but also invisible. 45

Energy Generation | A whole new energy conversation

A whole new energy conversation

An interview with Fiona Booth, by the Peer Outreach Team

Natalie: What would you like to see to reduce fuel poverty?

Antara: Do members of the community have access to that information?

Fiona Booth: To reduce fuel poverty? I think more people talking about it, friends and peers and at work. We need a whole new energy conversation in this country. More energy-literate people, more schools engaged. I think working with schools and colleges and things like that is a good opportunity.

FB: Yeah, so we know there's about 5,000 groups across the UK working on community energy in some form. We talk to a lot of stakeholders and we do all sorts. They're very active, but again it goes back to the fact that they are the usual suspects. So how can we find the not-usual-suspects that need to learn more about energy? But we think at the local level these community energy groups are better at reaching people than a government campaign.

Antara: I'm really interested in what you're saying, because you're saying that in order for policy to happen, there needs to be an energy conversation about this. What communities are lacking in [this conversation]? FB: So with community energy, it's your usual suspects that are aware of the issues anyway. People that have worked in the renewables industry, or they're financiers, or they're lawyers or whatever. We need to get better at talking to people who aren't engaged, and I think with community energy, having those projects in local communities. So that you know that there's a wind farm down the road or something. I think it's an opportunity, definitely. So we have a couple of policies to help support development – a £10 million urban community energy fund and a £15 million rural community energy fund. They help groups explore what types of technologies work in their area. Something in the centre of London would be different from what's outside. It's at that local level, what people want to work on. We're not dictating what should go where. It's for the communities to find out what they can do.

Natalie: What sort of legacy would you like to leave future generations around energy? FB: I think making decentralised energy happen, so local communities can actually reap the value of energy, rather than paying an energy bill that goes off to a big six company that's not owned by the UK. So it just goes out the door. Cornwall, for example, spend a billion pounds on their energy bills every year, and that money just leaves. So really recognising the value energy can play in social, economic, and environmental terms, and maybe even diverting a little percentage of spending to fund local energy projects. And my legacy hopefully would be I made it slightly easier! ▷▷An extract from an interview with Fiona Booth, Head of Community Energy, Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2014-2016. 29th June 2015, The National Grid Room, Prince Philip House, London.

Fiona Booth in the photo booth. Photo: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell.

Energy Generation | I don't really care about solar panels

I don't really care about solar panels…

An interview with Agamemnon Otero, by the Peer Outreach Team

Antara: In terms of renewable energy, what is the future? For London, for the UK, internationally, what is the source of energy that we'll all be using? Agamemnon Otero: I have a feeling that in 20 years when you guys are having kids and they are 15, 16 years old, solar panels will be like fossil fuel. The point is that right now the best technologies that we know and can use are things like solar, things like combined heat and power, like solar thermal, wind turbines. That's what we can do right now, but we have to be flexible and open to the new things that are coming. It might be new and innovative right now to invest all my time and energy into getting communities to invest in renewable energy, but in 10 or 15 years there might be a completely new type of thing, and you have to be open and willing to move to that. When they set up those first oil fields they thought they were saving the world, and they really did help the people that were close to them. Now we have to be open to the idea that this system right now can be solved with certain things we have. But there is no set answer: if I told you solar panels are the answer, I would be wrong. It's wrong to just say, "This is it, this is it for good." The next technology is what we need to have. The systems that Repowering set up in London, inner-city community renewable energy projects, they're about giving people… I don't really care about solar panels, what we do is we do 40-week paid internships for young people, we do 60 weeks of mentoring for adults that live on estates so they can own and run their own power station. It's all about allowing people to understand that they have a choice in doing things and they can be involved. And we teach people how to make solar panels, how to do the engineering, how to get involved in all those different ways. 48

That's what we're trying to do, we're just using renewables as a catalyst to empower local people. Antara: So what sort of legacy would you like to leave for future generations around energy? AO: Devolved power to localities. So that means: say you live on a housing estate in Brixton, it means you know how energy works, you're integrated into that process, that you can see how the energy flows work for your estate, and you can see how that works in your local area – so that's energy, it's waste, it's everything, it's all the inputs and the outputs. My legacy for the communities that we've worked with would ideally be that local people are engaged and enabled to understand their actions on the Earth, but also the Earth's actions on them. The dumbest thing in the world is to take fossil fuel out of the ground – oil, it makes plastic. It's like if I gave you a wool jumper and I said, "You can be warm for about 30 seconds and smell horrible when this burns or you can wear it for like 30 years." And that's the mentality, you're using this incredible material and burning it. It's obscene. Junior: Yeah. Our last question is: are you optimistic or pessimistic when thinking about the future of energy? AO: I'm optimistic thinking about the future of energy in the sense that there is a viable, real direction to go. There are a lot of people who are part of a very big system which is moving in one direction and they don't feel that they can even stop it. But change happens slowly until it happens exponentially, like everybody saying, "Ahhh, I don't want to change!" and then all of a sudden it goes boom! So I think that I'm actually realistic in saying that there's a lot of goodwill and energy going into changing this current system, and it will flip. The thing is that when it does, we

Agamemnon Otero in the photo booth. Photo: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell.

need to be ready to (a) not hold onto whatever it is we change it into, and (b) make sure that it's transparent, and that it's not just an energy system, but that it includes social responsibility and financial responsibility, which means ingraining that into local communities. So I think we are at a pivotal moment, and there is cause to be optimistic or pessimistic, but if you are realistic you recognise that there are a lot of people working in the right direction.

â&#x2013;ˇâ&#x2013;ˇAn extract from an interview with Agamemnon Otero, CEO of Repowering London. 29th June 2015, The National Grid Room, Prince Philip House, London.

Energy Generation | Working with energy utopias

Working with energy utopias

Dan Barnard

fanSHEN were asked to create an activity to engage people of all ages with the ideas of the Stories of Change project. What I'm going to share below is how we approached creating this activity, in the hope that it is useful to others who want to encourage people to reflect on our energy story and imagine where that story might go next.

climate change?" by recalling these debates. Instead, we began our activity by asking participants, "What can we do to make London's energy and transport greener?" This framing takes for granted that there is a problem and that making London's energy system less carbonintensive is desirable.

fanSHEN create theatre, live events and interactive experiences. Our mission is to take massive, important subjects like climate change or political agency and synthesise them into playful, approachable formats. We're obsessed with story and with dramaturgy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which we define as how you arrange things in a way that gives them more meaning than they'd have in isolation.

Frame questions positively Climate change is a big, frightening global problem. Telling the story in this way, however, can make individuals feel as though there is nothing they can do about it and can cause them to switch off because thinking about genuinely frightening things is unpleasant. Instead of focusing people's minds on the problem, we invited them to think about possible solutions. When teams had an idea they wrote it down in the middle bubble on one of our game sheets.

We ran the Stories of Change Energy Utopias activity at Utopia Fair, Somerset House, at City Hall and as part of YOUTH DAY. Below are the guiding principles that we used in crafting the activity. We aren't the first people to think of any of these, but many of them are often forgotten in communication around energy and climate change, so it seems valuable to raise them again. The activity was created by Rachel Briscoe and delivered by Dan Barnard, Clare Dunn, Shireen Mula, and Bradon Smith. Assume that the problem exists As has been extensively discussed elsewhere, for a long time the mainstream media framed climate change stories as a debate about whether or not it is really happening. In pursuit of 'balance,' non-expert sceptics such as Nigel Lawson were wheeled out to debate the issue with better-informed but often less media-savvy climate scientists. While this trend seems to have diminished, many people might respond to a question such as "What do you think about

Admit (and celebrate) that all solutions are imperfect and incomplete None of the possible solutions for our energy future are perfect. This is hardly surprising, since no technology is perfect. Instead of allowing this to be a problem, the activity celebrated this by making a game where two individuals or teams initially came up with ideas for how to make London's energy or transport greener and then were invited (as part of the game) to think of all of the problems with the other team's ideas. They wrote these in the surrounding bubbles on the game sheets and were then invited to list these to the team who came up with the idea. That team were then invited to counter these criticisms and, crucially, at the end of this phase, both teams were invited to vote for the 'least worst' of the two ideas. This idea was at the centre of the game because, in the face of climate change, doing nothing is not an option. There may not be any Photos: Gorm Ashurst.

Energy Generation | Working with energy utopias

perfect solutions, but in that case we need to go with the least worst ones. This seemed really important to us. Many people who do not spend much time thinking about our energy future can easily become disengaged from supporting solutions (or thinking of them) when someone points out the flaws in the solution. Pointing out flaws in potential solutions without offering viable alternatives seems to us to be a strategy that those with a vested interest in the status quo will often use.

Make it personal People find it easier (and more pleasurable) to think about things when they are personal in some way. To capitalise on this we invited people to "think of an idea to make London's transport or energy future greener, that you would suggest to the Mayor." Especially when we were doing the activity in City Hall, this did not seem like a ridiculous idea. I also enjoyed the way in which this reminded people that their mayor served them, and not the other way around.

Make it fun To those who are not already converted, the environmental movement doesn't have a reputation of being fun. We ran the activity at stalls in a variety of contexts: as part of the Utopia Fair at Somerset House (where we were 'competing' with a range of other stalls); as part of YOUTH DAY; and at City Hall, where we engaged a mixture of visitors and staff who played the game on their lunch or coffee breaks. If the activity hadn't been fun, people wouldn't have done it, and certainly wouldn't have spent as long doing it as they did.

Give the idea concrete reality Once the two teams had decided which was the 'least worst' of their ideas, they were invited to build their selected idea from lego, duplo or k'nex. We have found on several projects that building an idea (with these materials or with plasticine or with clay) is more creative than just discussing it. Discussion has the potential to go round in circles, whereas when you are building an idea becomes more specific and detailed. This also meant that over the day a collection of models of people's ideas would gather on the stall and many players (as well as those who chose not to play or didn't have time) enjoyed looking at other people's inventions.

Make it quick People are busy and Londoners are especially busy. A key factor that helped us to engage people was the speed of the activity. But making it quick was important for us in another way. We have found again and again in our work that if you give people only just enough time to do something, they are more creative. There isn't time for self-censorship and self-doubt to kick in. We gave teams a minute to think of the initial idea and two minutes to come up with all the problems with the other team's idea. This helped people be more creative and also made the activity feel more fun and game-like.

Give the global challenge local relevance Many people have found that you can engage a wider audience in environmental topics when you make them locally relevant. This is the great lesson of the Transition movement and also the central thesis of Green Philosophy by Roger Scruton. We very consciously framed the question about how to make London greener â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not "How can we combat global warming?" Once people had built their models, we invited them to choose where on a map of London we wanted to place them. At City Hall this happened on a giant map on the floor, in Somerset House it was a tabletop version created by Gorm Ashurst: London unravelled. People thought carefully about where to place their invention and enjoyed this extra level of making it specific. 53

Energy Generation | Working with energy utopias

London unravelled by: Gorm Ashurst. This artwork was created to form a playing board for the Model London game at the Utopia Fair stall at Somerset House. 57

My Friend Jules | Who Is Jules?

Who Is Jules?

Joe Smith and Bradon Smith

A central theme of the Stories of Change project is that humanity's relationship with energy has, since the first technologies, been constantly shifting. Since the Industrial Revolution the changes have come thick and fast, although that hasn't always been perceived in the moment. In the past our relationship with energy may – perhaps – have been simpler; now, as we understand the consequences that our energy choices have for us and our environment, it has all got – well, 'complicated.' Climate change above all is asking new questions of the relationship, and is triggering a profound rethink. Of course, we rarely think of the relationship that we all have with energy in this way. A 'relationship' with energy is difficult. But the Stories of Change project is founded on a conviction that a little prompting can help nudge fresh thinking. A consistent response we have uncovered in working with very diverse partners across the project – from young Londoners and Midlands apprentices to retirees in South Wales and senior business and policy figures from around the world – is that we don't care enough about energy because we can't see it or touch it. But what if we imagined this relationship in a different way, casting energy as our friend, our sibling, our colleague, our lover? This was the thought experiment that My Friend Jules threw out to the world of amateur creative writers. The project has worked with a very wide range of creative partners to test new approaches to encouraging people to see energy in their own stories, and in those of the wider human world. In almost all of these partnerships we set strict rules rooted in principles of co-production. We weren't simply seeking co-production between artists and communities, but between us, an interdisciplinary team of scholars, and these diverse parties. This led us to invite online interactive games maker Ken Eklund to respond to the challenge of making humanity's relationship with energy more 'visible.' Some of the team had been following Ken's 58

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previous narrative games, including World without oil and FutureCoast, and were confident he would bring a unique new approach to our challenge. In addition to the online game, we developed the format into face-to-face activities at various locations. Ryan Bramley worked with a University of the Third Age creative writing group in Barnsley, and Chris Bonfiglioli and Kim Hammond developed a live workshop approach which they piloted at a community energy festival in Oxfordshire. The first edition of My Friend Jules showed that creative writing can bring to the surface (or, coyly, hide in plain sight) our relationships with energy in novel and engaging ways. All shades of emotion, and a mad mix of literary genres, were offered up by the players. Their insights into our difficult but also compelling, often rewarding, relationship with energy could not have been revealed by a survey, a focus group, a diary, or historical research. They have different textures and emotional reach. They do different work. To draw some of these stories together, we commissioned artist and theatre maker Vicky Long to immerse herself in the material submitted to My Friend Jules, and to create a new work built out of these fragments of insight. She, in turn, brought together a further group of creative partners (actors, sound artists, and digital artists) to create a collage of voices that reveals the heterogeneity of our responses to energy. As with so much of the work on the Stories of Change project, this was an experiment. As such, we see the summer 2017 round of the My Friend Jules creative writing enterprise as a first edition; one which shows the power of the central conceit. There are already plans – perhaps working with schools, book clubs, or creative writing students – for future editions.

Jules, friendly and unfriendly Just as a fish may be unaware of the water it swims in, so with us and energy. We flip a light switch or drive to the store, heedless of the energy impact these acts entail. To participate in modern civilisation is to enter into a relationship with energy, but typically we don't give that relationship a moment's thought. We have words for relationships like these – 'shallow,' 'dysfunctional,' even 'abusive' – but we don't typically think of our relationship with energy as a relationship in this human way. Modern systems have insulated us from our partner in this relationship, like a roommate that we rarely see (but with whom we share a home – in this case, the planet…). My Friend Jules is a collaborative storytelling experiment in making energy, our invisible partner, visible, by engaging our natural human urge for story and thus calling attention to the relationship each of us has with commercial energy systems. The premise is very simple: 'Jules' is energy personified. When you tell a story about Jules, you are also telling a story about what energy systems do for you and how you feel about it. The project is an open invitation to play freely with this storytelling prompt. The stories people generate are published at myfriendjules.org, an offshoot of the Stories of Change parent site. People find the project through Stories of Change, through the My Friend Jules social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, through directed outreach by the My Friend Jules team and friends, and via a live presence at energy-themed events. The My Friend Jules idea sprang from twin goals: to create a game-like, narrative-driven open prompt for contributions to Stories of Change, and to find a fresh way to catalyse reflection on the role that energy plays in our lives. In a little over a month, My Friend Jules engaged over a hundred people, who submitted stories in the form

Ken Eklund

of audio, pictures, and writing ranging in length from a word or two to short essays and plays. In each case, a 'fish' had the occasion to sense and perhaps more deeply understand the water s/he swims in. The open design of the My Friend Jules prompt inspired contributors to approached the abstract concept of energy in a wild variety of creative ways. Artist-producer Vicky Long has produced a work inspired by this first round of contributions. This artwork rewards the contributors for playing; pulls together and makes tangible some common threads of thought that run through the contributions; and celebrates the sheer variety of ideas that emerged organically from the idea that energy is 'your friend, Jules.' My Friend Jules begins to answer leadingedge questions about the potential for playful, participatory narratives to reframe collective problems. It should be of interest to anyone looking to move conversations past barriers that are impeding productive dialogue, or for innovative ways to engage more citizens. It's an example of how to use the imaginative freedoms of storytelling in the service of promulgating science-based knowledge. It's unusual and perhaps counterintuitive to think of fun as being the core ingredient of a serious dialogue. But to a game designer, fun is the core that's necessary to build a successful participation engine – it's the basis for a good invitation to play and the common ground that makes the play engaging and meaningful. As we look to integrate science more fully into our daily discourse and into policy, it's worth considering how fun and games can contribute to a more holistic approach and a more inclusive, humanised outcome.

My Friend Jules | Sparks

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Sparks

J. Pritchard

At the beginning, there were sparks. Not the metaphorical start-of-relationship sparks, but real sparks, vivid blue and bright as camera flashes. I was catching the tube with Archie, taking him back to meet his mum at Heathrow. He was excited: the excitement of a railway-obsessed four-year-old who had spent the weekend in London repeatedly asking whether we could "go on the trains now." Other kids would have been excited by the dinosaur skeletons or the zoo giraffes, but Archie was much more interested in turnstiles, escalators, and maintenance cupboards: the grubby innards of the commuter transport network. Now was our final time to take the train together. I'd bumped two rucksacks and a bulging Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase down the station stairs. It was midday on a Monday, so the platform was thankfully uncrowded. I gave Archie the usual reminders about holding my hand, staying behind the yellow line, and sitting down as soon as we got on the train. He seemed nervous, restless, and not entirely happy, even when I let him swipe his own Oyster card through the gate. We heard the train as it approached, and we peered down the tunnel. The wheels shrieked, and there were the usual sword fight sounds of metal-on-metal as the train slowed. Down the tunnel, one of the rails suddenly sparked, sending out bright flashes like tiny bolts of underground lightning. "The train is splashing!" Archie said, "It's splashing!" 60

"What's splashing, Archie?" "The splashing light! I don't like the splashing!" "It's okay," I said, crouching down, "it's just sparks flashing from the wheels." "But I don't like it! We should go on a different train." "No, we need to get on this train, Archie, when the doors open." He tried to hold himself back on the platform, but I manoeuvred us clumsily through the doors, and we dropped onto seats in a graceless crash of rucksacks and suitcase. "Why were they splashing?" he asked. "I don't know Archie, the wheels just spark sometimes, it's nothing to worry about." Archie was unconvinced, nervous in his seat, but I didn't have the energy to reassure him any more. There was a man sitting opposite us. The ID on his lanyard said 'Tom Jules â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Apprentice Electrical Engineer' and 'London Underground.' At his feet was a fluorescent orange rucksack, with the straps held on with velcro. He smiled, and I gave an apologetic smile back. "I'm scared of the splashing," Archie repeated, quietly. I could tell he was getting upset. Usually I would have given him my phone to distract him, but it was running low on battery. His anticipation

of the train journey had worn off, and my reassurances that "it's just what happens" weren't having any effect. He was getting quiet – the quietness of a child on the edge of tears. "It's safe," said the man opposite, "the sparks won't hurt you." I remember the way he spoke. And I remember the way his voice calmed Archie immediately. It was strong without being strict, authoritative without being patronising. I made eye contact with the man, and then with Archie, sharing the unspoken reassurance that it was okay to speak, and to listen. "There's electricity in the rails," the man explained, "and a part underneath the train works like a big wire, which joins up with the electricity. Sometimes the electricity has to do a little jump onto the train, and that's what makes the flashing light. It's not a dangerous thing." I know now that that could have been the end of it. He might never have written down his number. Tom Jules and I could each have each spent the next month forlornly reading the 'rush-hour crush' section of the Metro in search of a message for "blue-eyed guy with knowledge of electricity" or "overtired woman with damp hair and a Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase." It scares me to think that we might never have spoken, that all this might never have happened. "Is it electricity like in a hairdryer?" Archie asked, suddenly. The man looked across at me and I smiled. "Yes," he said, "but it's more powerful. The domestic supply, in your house, that's two-forty volts, but this line's operating at…" he paused, realising he'd perhaps misjudged the level of detail required, "…at six-thirty volts – it's nearly three times as much as a hairdryer. But yes, it's all electricity."

I interrupted: "Is it okay if he asks you questions?" The man smiled and nodded. "Yes – it's all electricity – some of it gets to makes the light shine, some of it makes the train go forward, and some of it makes the doors open." "How does it make it the train go?" The man asked me an unspoken question with a slight lift of his head. "Holborn," I answered. He pulled a sheet of graph paper from his orange rucksack, and began to talk and draw. There were running rails and power rails, and a sketched train engine, and some things I half recognised as the symbols for batteries and bulbs. Archie was fascinated – not understanding everything, but hanging on every word of 'regenerative braking' and 'solenoids' and 'direct current.' I listened for 20 minutes, enjoying the calmness of the man's voice and the way he patiently followed the labyrinthine logic of Archie's thoughts. Other passengers listened too. Archie's questions were answered, and the paper grew busy with circuitry and motors – pluses and minuses, the arrangement of wheels on the track, and finally a scattering of lightning sparks to show the power arcing between the train and the rail. "This is us," I said, when a pre-recorded voice announced that customers "should change here for the Piccadilly Line." Archie seemed reluctant to leave. He could have spent the whole day talking to his new friend about trains, and wheels, and electricity. "Come on," I said, "we need to go and meet your Mum from the plane." The man reached forward and wrote something else on the paper, a phone number in a gap between a wire-end and a battery.

"And in light bulbs?" Archie asked. "Thank you," I mouthed, and he smiled back. 61

THE CAT, THE LOVER AND THE LAUNDRY by Ariadne Radi Cor [1] Revisiting ancient sites of winter mis-takes on a line of clues, a cruise of thoughts, circumnavigating Venus and the lamp beside the golden door, I recall. [2] My father used to demolish metal and magnetic fields, manoeuvring cranes laying his warmer right hand on the spine of the subalpine skyline. Then he became a star, shooting back and forth like a drunken cyclist on a dynamo bicycle slaloming heaven, pedalling to be seen. While my mother on earth used softener liberally because the world has been so harsh: at least the laundry is dreaming. She used to leave the lamp on, to pretend we were in but the burglars stole her necklace nonetheless, and the bailiffs the television, in the end.

[3] In the early '90s, when everything was fine my sister used to do her hair for half an hour every morning. She melted the ice caps with her hairdryer, and left the house at 7 so soft, while I stayed in bed, six years old mesmerised by the hum of the age. [4] Twenty years later, a stray cat would settle, enchanted on my overheating laptop, dreaming in the fan noise the way I would in the winter At the laundrette, hypnotised for 20 pence a minute pressing my spine on the golden door of a tumble dryer, tempest-tossed absorbing the repetition of tropical hurricanes.

My Friend Jules | Dear Jules | Tom the Blacksmith

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Dear Jules Sophie

Jules, Truth is, I can't imagine my life without you. I am very lucky to have known you my entire life. I've never had to worry about you not showing up when I needed you. I've never had to wonder where you were. You were always just here, and I never thought much of it. I'm not usually so trusting. But with you, well, I've never had any doubt. You've always been reliable and never worth second-guessing. You might be wondering why I'm telling you all of this. You see, lately some of my other friends have voiced concerns about you. They're afraid you're getting old and that our relationship either won't last or won't remain the same. And I think they might be right. I mean there's no denying that my family and I rely on you for a whole lot. We expect a lot from you and maybe that's unhealthy. Maybe it's time we make a change. You deserve it. I've been naive enough to assume that life will always be as it has been. But recently, I've been spending more time with some new friends and they've encouraged me to look at the world differently. They've taught me that change is good. In fact, change is necessary. I will, of course, miss you though, Jules. I'll miss the inseparable us. I hope you know that I'll never forget everything you've done for me and everyone else you've known. I also hope you see where I'm coming from with my letter today. I hope you see why you and I both play important roles in bringing change to life. Take care. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Sophie

Tom the Blacksmith Tom the Blacksmith

Photo: Chris Bonfiglioli. Joules, although I have to keep pumping the bellows hard on a windy day to keep the fire lit, you're a good companion, none the less. As you heat the metal and power my arms, I take inspiration in what I may create with your help. I'll try to be responsible with you if you can help me use my skills to further my craft!!!

My Friend Jules | My Friend

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My Friend

Vicky Long

As an artist with an interest in telling stories through performance and multimedia, and with some experience of producing work with artists on the subject of climate change, I jumped at the chance to make an artistic response to the My Friend Jules contributions when the Stories of Change team asked me to. How I responded was left up to me. To have such an open commission was exciting, and a little terrifying. I had a feeling from early on that it would be good to give voice to the words people had shared, and I was keen on there being a visual element to the work, but other than that… I clocked the contributions as they came in and as I connected with this fascinating range of work, I found certain thoughts, ideas, and vocabulary were shared across material. The stories, statements, plays, and poems were rich with wonderful words and phrases, which would replay themselves in my head as I cycled to work or made a cup of tea. I began to feel a collective consciousness at work, at once humorous, sober, critical, searching… The searching, in particular, struck me: What was this relationship, really? 66

If you had to name it, describe it? Where did it begin and where on earth was it heading…? A variety of rhythms pulsed through the texts and it seemed a natural step to share selections with actor collaborators, to further explore these rhythms and the resonances between them. I was keen to see what happened when text was not only read out, but played out – embodied. So, with all the contributions to hand, four of us (Philip Bosworth, Anyebe Godwin, Joyce Henderson, and I) spent time in a studio space at the New Work Department of the National Theatre, working with the material. First we talked about the human energy needed to bring words to life – breath enabling thought, followed by articulation. We worked through breathing exercises towards the production of tonal sound, and then began to voice the text. Moving about the room, we played with space, our position in it, and the physicality behind the delivery of words. In this active mode we enjoyed discovering associations as well as contradictions across the material. We began to layer and

Philip Bosworth, Anyebe Godwin, Joyce Henderson and Vicky Long, My Friend workshop, National Theatre Studios. Photos: Gorm Ashurst.

intercut text, building on existing rhythms through collage and collation. The collaborative experience informed decisions made outside of workshop hours as I pieced together a script, first for a live sharing at the studio (which prompted helpful feedback), then for recording. I wanted to take the work into a digital format to allow greater freedom of layering and intercutting, and I was keen to involve sound designer Helen Atkinson, who I knew could help create an acoustic world that might communicate the idea of a living, evolving collective consciousness. I also wanted to make the work accessible online in the same place as the contributions were posted. The studio work produced a strong memory of text and dynamics, which enabled us to record in one short session. From that, I took away four voice files, which I cut together while listening for further associations, making adjustments and tweaking timing. The challenge was to mould something that would honour the rich material, so generously gifted, and be of value in itself.

Towards the end of the piece comes the line, "What's the best way to work with this material?", a phrase taken from a collaborator. For me, the question of how we work with what we've been given has been core to the project – a question asked in so many and diverse ways in the My Friend Jules contributions. As I worked on the piece, a particular poem stood out – 'The Cat, the Lover and the Laundry' by Ariadne Radi Cor. With great imagination it described a relationship with energy over time and I thought might provide a helpful backbone. It features in full in the finished piece, as does 'Sparks' – an arresting story by J. Pritchard about a moment on a tube train when a child learns about the miracle of energy. 'Miracle' was a word used by another contributor, and I wanted to hold onto this sense of the miraculous through the piece, suggesting that somehow, behind all the mistakes we make, something greater is at work, a miracle we are free to return to, work at, and reengage with in new and more successful ways.

My Friend Jules | My Friend

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Having led with an aural element, I was, in the end, undecided about whether to accompany the audio with visuals. But I knew a colleague of mine, Levan Tozashvili, could create a simple but evocative 3D-animated environment that might help transport the listener between the 68

earthly and more ethereal worlds represented in the piece. So, in the interests of continued experimentation, we began to construct these two worlds. We borrowed from the iconography of the Stories of Change project to create a nodal, expansive structure that could represent the realm

of the imagination, as well as a 3D replica of the studio we worked in to represent the everyday. We hope that the dynamic combination of animation and audio helps the listener meditate on our moment in time, where we're at and where we might travel nextâ&#x20AC;Ś

Video stills from the My Friend animation, by Vicky Long and Levan Tozashvili.

Coal, Vril and solar: Energy in the novel

Axel Goodbody

One of the aims of the Stories of Change project has been to set current energy challenges and choices in their historical and cultural contexts. It has sought to do so by juxtaposing oral stories of people's contemporary experiences with changing patterns of energy production and consumption with those described in historical documents and in literary narratives. A proper comparison of the three kinds of energy stories remains to be made, but the insights gained into historical and literary narratives of energy in the course of the Stories of Change project suggest that there are many parallels between them, and that familiarity with the tales told about our relationship with energy in literature can, like historical knowledge, play a part in shaping contemporary debates and informing energy choices. Ian McEwan's Solar (2010) is one of dozens of recent novels in which either the plot is focused on energy, or energy issues are a subject of discussion. Authors such as David Mitchell, Sarah Hall, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Andreas Eschbach have crafted scenarios of the looming exhaustion of fossil fuels, the search for alternatives, and the consequences of major climate change. Many of these energy novels are works of popular rather than high culture: they are thrillers, disaster novels, and crime stories, and their first goal is, unashamedly, to entertain. There is of course also the genre of the young adult novel, in which self-discovery goes hand in hand with learning about the world. And speculative future fiction has emerged as a form particularly congenial to discussion of climate change, its psychological impact, and its political, social, and cultural consequences. Novels presenting future energy scenarios typically include exegetic passages in the dystopian or elegiac mode, detailing the current state of social collapse or remembering and mourning a time before the fall. Fewer energy novels are set in the present: Solar is unusual in this respect, and also in being written in the satirical genre. While 'peak oil' and the prospect of needing to decarbonise the economy have triggered a flood of novels on this theme since the turn of the century, surprisingly similar energy-related fears and hopes were present in 19th-century society, and are reflected in Victorian fiction. In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens voiced concerns over the impact on public health and wellbeing of pollution, urban overcrowding, and the bondage of workers to economic calculation and rigid work routines, which he saw symbolised in the monotonous rhythm of the machine-powered looms in the mills. He wrote of the dangers of coal mining, the loss of life as a result of poor safety practices, and the hardships of child labour. The rapid growth of coal extraction and consumption in the Industrial Revolution led to a huge increase in manufacturing and a resulting concentration of private wealth in the hands of factory owners. There was an overall rise in living standards, but this improvement was not equally distributed. Underlying Dickens's novels is an acute anxiety about the transformation of the energy system and the resulting loss of social cohesion. 70

Though it might surprise us today to learn this, many Victorians also recognised that coal was a non-renewable source, and were worried by the spectre of the exhaustion of coal supplies. The laws of thermodynamics were formulated in the first half of the 19th century. The older understanding of energy as a constant, and energy conversions as cyclical, persisted well into the century, underpinned by natural theology. However, from the middle of the century on, anxieties were expressed about resource depletion, finding their most cogent expression in William Stanley Jevons's book, The Coal Question (1865). The replacement of wood and water power by coal was interpreted as 'living off capital,' and understood by some as hastening the heat death of the universe, an inescapable future phenomenon which William Thomson first theorised in 1852 (the concept of entropy followed in 1865). Hard Times has striking images of glowing coals turning to grey ash, and describes human activity as an accumulation of dust and ash, suggesting the fruitless and irreversible dissipation of energy. The moral ambivalence which Dickens felt toward Britain's coal-driven industrial development was compounded by a curious anxiety that the new energy abundance would lead to moral degeneration. The traditional meaning of 'energy' was mental strength, force of character, willpower, activeness, and creativity. It was not until 1805 that energy was defined as a physical force â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that is, a measurable quantity of motive power or work â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and energy continued to have a dual meaning throughout the century. Dickens and other novelists (such as George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Joseph Conrad) saw it as their task as writers to counter the purely materialist conception of energy by fostering the use of the creative powers of the mind and community spirit ('mental energy') to transcend physical laws. The Victorian novel most explicitly concerned with energy issues is The Coming Race (1871). Though now largely forgotten, its author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was highly regarded at the time, and he lies buried in Westminster Abbey. The plot of The Coming Race spatialises time travel: the narrator encounters a people resembling an advanced future form of humanity after descending into a rift at the bottom of a deep mine shaft. The subterranean world he discovers knows no war or social conflict, and enjoys infinite, waste-free energy. Initially greatly impressed, the narrator gradually becomes disillusioned, and eventually escapes back to the surface of the Earth. 'Vril,' the name which Bulwer-Lytton gave this utopian energy force, captured the public imagination and prompted the marketing of a new beef extract drink as bovine Vril, or 'Bovril.' Vril is a mysterious force, simultaneously physical and immaterial. On one hand it resembles electricity, being generated by machines but also stored in this race's humanoid bodies and released like the charge of an electric eel. On the other, it is a form of mental energy, enabling telepathic communication and mesmerism. It is a healing force, but also a terribly destructive one. Its vast power enables the Vril-ya to fly (they are describes as 'angels'), and affords them a life of leisure. But their affluence 71

Coal, Vril and solar: Energy in the novel

is achieved at the expense of less advanced neighbouring races, which are wiped out as the Vril-ya population expands and takes over their land. Vril has, then, a darker side: the Vril-ya are mercilessly rational. The author expresses misgivings about the world of Vril in a number of ways, the most significant being that mastery of Vril, perfected over the centuries, has been accompanied by a loss of willpower, passion, ambition, and artistic creativity. The Coming Race is a deeply ambivalent vision of an energy-abundant future. The world of the Vril-ya may initially have been conceived as a wish-fulfilment fantasy of the author's, but the duplicity of their society is definitively exposed when we discover it is based on child labour. Bulwer-Lytton thus associates unlimited energy with moral degeneration and the exploitation of others. Strangely, the novel has attracted a cult following among extreme right-wing racists: an attentive reading suggests that it was not the author's intention to celebrate the Vril-ya, but rather to warn against the 'demonic' lure of high-energy modernity and reactionary political utopias. As witnesses to what was arguably the last major energy system change before that of our own day, the Victorians anticipated many of today's concerns about energy. While they were fascinated by the wealth, freedom and power it afforded, they were troubled by the unintended consequences of the new forms and volume of energy generation and consumption for individuals, society as a whole, and the natural environment. The Coming Race shows how literature contributed to what Allen McDuffie has called an "ecologically anxious" counter-discourse in the face of the 19th century's heroic, energy-intensive industrialisation. As McDuffie comments, the representation of energy in Victorian literature both echoed and challenged the way it was represented in scientific discourse. Poets, novelists, and critics offered a "tentative and equivocal" window onto the Victorians' growing consciousness of unsustainable energy use. The central themes of Solar and other 21st-century energy novels are, then, not new. McEwan's writing strategy is, however, innovative in its combining of domestic comedy with social satire to tell an energy story. For all its humour, the book has a serious message. Whether humanity will be capable of adapting to the requirements of climate change is for McEwan a question of human nature, and his view of this is a dark one. Self-interest is hard-wired in humans, he suggests through his protagonist, the physicist Michael Beard, and humanity is no more likely to manage its energy needs rationally and equitably than it is to halt its genetically imprinted urge to multiply and take possession of the Earth. 'Solar,' which stands in the novel for a cheap, clean, renewable form of energy obtained from a new process of artificial photosynthesis that Beard has invented, may or may not become reality â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but if it does, it will not solve the problem of humanity's apparent inability to face reality and exercise self-restraint. Ultimately, Solar suggests that conflicting desires and human weakness may be the hardest barriers to overcome in responding to the challenge of climate change. Appropriate to its theme of elusive balance, the novel concludes with an open ending carefully positioned between Dickens's optimism and Bulwer-Lytton's pessimism. Novels are a medium from which much can be learned about how the energy problem is perceived and contested. As records and dramatisations of individual 72

and collective experience, they map discursive conflicts and modes of being in the world. Some novelists have celebrated the material benefits and freedoms gained from fossil-fuelled modernity, but more often authors have explored its unforeseen consequences. The question remains, though, whether there is a sense in which novels are different from other energy stories â&#x20AC;&#x201C; do they provide a unique kind of insight? Certainly, they mediate ideas and arguments in scientific, political, economic, and media debates to a general public. However, at least in some cases, they go beyond this to enrich debates by recalling forgotten events in different times and places, and allowing us to see things through the eyes of others. With the licence of fiction as a depragmatised form of discourse, they imagine alternative realities and conduct thought experiments which shape our understanding of the challenges we face. By making abstract choices real and personal, novels translate them into the realm of perception, experience, agency, self-expression and collective selfidentification. And as extended workings of imagined futures characterised by multiple uncertainties, they break up the sermonising of missionary ecopolitics; challenge the status quo; and provide a space in which the many ambivalences of energy change can be grasped. Literary narratives of energy tend to be more representational, 'political,' pluri-voiced, and elaborately framed than the relatively simple, fluid, usually first-person stories in oral accounts: this gives them greater ability to capture the diversity and complexity of society's relationship with energy. As can be seen in the Victorian novel, it also renders them transhistorically effective sites of knowledge that can be activated in different cultural contexts by new generations of readers. By reflecting our attitudes towards energy and holding them up to critical scrutiny, novels play their part in informing and shaping debates on energy choices. It is a part which has hitherto been unjustly overlooked in studies of the political and social dimension of energy system change.

Where the wind was given number: Costa

Where the wind was given number: Costa Alec Finlay Every region proposes a different relationship between energy production, environment, and culture. A peripheral community was defined as one with no grid connection â&#x20AC;&#x201C; remote crofts and villages with short cables, out of reach of the British National Grid's sockets. Archaeological discoveries are shifting our concept of what is peripheral and what central. In the future we could return to a revitalised culture of energy independence: locally sourced energy, stored and shared locally, communities responsible for their energy needs.

How related are the ideals of decentralised culture & decentralised energy? Islands are rich in species variations that slot into habitats, and rich in dialect fitted to forms of labour. The microcosm of the island cautions: technological innovation is subject to local conditions. An archaeological alignment runs from the Mesolithic tidal cult in the straits between Evie and Rousay to the rationalist wind cult established by EW Golding and the Electronic Research Association (ERA) at Costa Head, Orkney, in 1950.

Opposite: word-mntn (Costa Head): poem Alec Finlay. This view shows the gentle sloping contours that made Costa Hill so attractive to E.W. Golding as a test site for the UK's first modern windmill turbine. Photo: Alistair Peebles.

Above: Tirlo: Alec Finlay & Alistair Peebles; images from the collection of Orkney Museum and Archive. The photograph shows a tirlo at Smoogro. Photo: Alistair Peebles.

Stroma: the tidestream isle. Swelkie, Swelchie: Swirly, from svelgr, the cauldron, a tidal whirlpool, grinding quern, and origin myth for the cult of sea energy.

Energy technology juxtaposes instrumental reason with the irrational forces of nature

These names foretell a harvest of power that will transform the Pentland Firth into an adaptor.

A turbine expresses the power of nature.

in terms of specific landscapes.

A windmill's blades are signs of the invisible wind. Tirlo, Ork.: from tirl, whirl, or turn; wheel-around; a spell of bad weather. Tirlo: manufactured or improvised windmill, popular on the Orkney Islands c. 1930-1950. A tirlo turned enough power for a light at night and to tune in the radio.

The end of each blade is a tipping point. Design is modified by metaphors: there is nothing more beautiful in anatomy than the wing seeking lines of least resistance.

The Tirlos: local name referring to the experimental windmill turbines installed on Burgar Hill in the 1980s. 75

Where the wind was given number: Costa

Archival photograph of windmill turbine on Costa Head, c. 1950-52. Photograph courtesy of the Orkney Library Archive.

"Costa Head is popularly known as the windiest place in Britain." – Ernest Marwick (2012) "Two pilot plants, both of 100 kW capacity but of quite different designs, were built some 9 or 10 years ago. From the first of these, a machine of conventional type with variable pitch blades and the generator at the top of the tower, much valuable information was obtained during the period of its experimental operation in the Orkney Islands. Its design – undertaken with but little information to draw upon as a guide to the building of a machine of this type and size – was found to be unsuitable and the plant was eventually dismantled." – Edward William Golding (1960) "Much valuable information was obtained during the period of its experimental operation in the Orkney Islands" – Edward William Golding (1960) "The Costa Hill experiments show… all Britain could have run on the screaming propellers slicing through the black night with tips 22 feet from the ground… The future lies with the super-windmills, the 'lordly ones of the hollow hills,' the silver giants that we shall expect to see striding over the moors, as they pour their power into the grid and save the last of our coal and diesel oil…" – Lawrence D. Hills (1972) An international conference of 'wind-wrights,' The Wind Power group, met in April 1950, agreeing that before successful windmill designs could be developed first of all the wind must be understood in the manner of its operation. Costa Hill was selected as the site of the UK's first large-scale wind turbine, or 'aero-generator,' designed by the pioneering 'wind-wright' EW Golding, and installed in 1951. The ERA produced models of wind structure, and windroses predicting the yield that might flower in the future.

Pitched variable blades were adopted from a helicopter, added to a nacelle welded on Clydeside. The experiment was brought to an end by a hurricane. The ERA's research was forced to the margin, undermined by successive governments, and the influence of King Coal and Petrolio, just as today's energy innovation on Orkney is opposed by wilful lack of government support. Rejected at home, the ERA had to work under the auspices of UNESCO, promoting small-scale wind turbines for off-grid locations. Golding's innovations included simple designs for blades made from local materials, such as reed mats, intended to benefit the developing world. Golding is the presiding genius of the Renewable Era, yet little is known about him – not even the year of his birth is certain. His 'bible,' The Generation of Electricity by Windpower (1956), remains in print to this day, passing on the understanding of natural forces and how to harness them gleaned from the Orkney experiment. What remains is the hill, Costa – the place where our culture came to understand The Wind, and release its potential to transform lives worldwide. Time has reduced technology to archaeology – the shell of the radio hut, remains of the bays, rusty pegs, thick twisted cables and metalled stobs sunken in the moor. Costa hasn't yet been declared a monument to the great technological revolution of the postcarbon era. There are no plaques to Golding. Costa is where the wind was given number.

The stochastic complexity of wind was measured using a cup-counter anemometer to gauge the shock inflicted by a storm and calculate the stress on steel. 77

The last miners

The last miners It's early morning, and Sheldon is preparing his packed lunch. On the kitchen surface he has placed bread, easy-spread butter and – today's filling – ox tongue. The one sandwich he never makes is cheese: working half a mile underground, as he does, the temperature can rise to 33 degrees, and the cheese melts. The camera follows Sheldon from his kitchen to his car as he drives to the "Big K." Once there, he swipes in, banters with his colleagues, and heads to the lockers to change into his orange vest and trousers. He gets into the cage with his packed lunch – the grille clangs shut – and the cage descends 800 metres. At the bottom of the shaft, he transfers to a squat grey train which, after a few hoots and whistles, transports him four miles to the seam. The journey takes over an hour. As one of his colleagues says, "You'll see a darkness down here which you don't see anywhere else." But not for much longer: a few weeks after this footage was taken, Sheldon and his colleagues were made redundant. The miners' final weeks at the Kellingley Colliery in north Yorkshire are the subject of The last miners, an intimate BBC1 documentary that was broadcast nearly a year after the pit's closure. When Kellingley opened in the 1960s it was the largest pit in Europe and employed 2,000 people. When it closed on 18th December 2015 the remaining 450 employees lost their jobs. The two-part documentary follows Sheldon and his colleagues – from kitchen to coalface and washroom to boardroom – as they become the last deep coal miners in Britain. But there's a wider story too: the closure of the pit marks the end of a 250-year-old industry that can claim some responsibility for the Industrial Revolution, the British Empire and anthropogenic climate change. The leitmotif of the documentary is the finality of it all, with the words "last" and "end" tolling with almost monotonous regularity. This was reflected in the British media which described the closure 78

Robert Butler as "the end of an era," "the final farewell," and "the end of coal." The documentary presents many endings. The shearer, the awesome piece of industrial machinery that cuts the coal, powers down to a standstill. Miners take lumps of coal the size of bread loaves off the conveyor belt to keep as mementoes. The voiceover intones that these are the last pieces of coal to be mined in British coalfields. After the final shift the miners walk towards a barrage of press cameras. One says to the others, "Smile, you've lost your job." Another says, "It is a shame that we couldn't have had the same level of interest when we were trying to keep the mines open." The format for the documentary is a countdown: this is a story with a clock on it. Titles appear that run from "Four Weeks Until Closure" and "Three Weeks Until Closure" through to "Last Day." But it is about temporality in other ways, too, as the past and the future are kept constantly in play. The last miners opens at the coal face, with Kev, a paunchy, chuckling figure in his fifties, standing in front of his workmates, singing 'Northern calypso.' The lyrics are about "a fat northern bastard" who drinks ten pints, goes home, and beats his wife. A little later, the documentary shows Kev at home, sitting in an armchair with a dog on his lap, while his wife decorates the Christmas tree. She says she's not putting a fairy on the top. He says, "I've got a few fairies at work I could have brought home for you." She says, "You're going to have a big shock coming to you when you get another job because you're not going to be able to talk like that in the next workplace." He says, "Like what?" She says, "How you do now." He says, "I didn't swear." She says, "You don't have to. It's just the way of the world these days." He pauses, and says, "Maybe I'm a dinosaur." Deep time is one of the themes. The narrator informs the audience that coal was formed many millions of years ago. In a rare moment when the documentary offers a wider perspective, David Cameron addresses the House of Commons on

the need for diverse and secure sources of energy that cut the impact of carbon on the planet. The Labour MP Dennis Skinner berates the prime minister for his cowardice in not supporting the miners. Cameron's response is quick and sneering, "It's very good to see the Labour Party in full voice cheering on Jurassic Park." A geologist might pick up on three allusions to the Mesozoic era: the millions of years that had gone into forming the coal; the miner describing himself a "dinosaur"; and the prime minister dismissing the industry as "Jurassic Park." Each places coal and the culture around coal firmly in the past: a long way from progress, modernity and "the world these days." The countdown gives the documentary-makers plenty of scope for irony. The din and dust of the coal face contrasts with the Christmas cards and tinsel forlornly decorating the colliery offices. As the fiancée of the youngest miner says, "It's not the best time to lose a job at Christmas, is it?" The New Year's Eve parties and the dawning of the new year only underscore the sense of the miners' uncertain future. But Christmas and the New Year aren't the only concurrent events that have relevance. Kellingley closed six months before the Brexit referendum and 11 months before Donald Trump won the American presidential election. The largely unexpected successes of Brexit and Trump gave new prominence on both sides of the Atlantic to long-held resentments around industrial decline, regional unemployment and the threat to white working-class identity. The weeks leading up to the pit's closure also overlapped with the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21, held in Paris, where a global agreement on climate change was negotiated between nearly 200 countries. Across the two hours of The last miners, there is no mention of Brexit, Trump, or COP21. Yet unemployment is a principal theme in the documentary and decarbonisation a major factor in the government's decision to close the last deep coal mines. What had come to an end was quite specific, and it was certainly not coal. In 2015 the global consumption of coal stood at a colossal four

billion tonnes (of metric oil equivalent). This worldwide industry ranged from the gigantic Hambach Surface Mine in Germany, where the machines are the height of a 30-storey building, to the all-too-human scale where Chinese labourers shovel coal onto conveyor belts, Indian women carry basket loads of coal on their heads and Indonesian children smash up coal with hammers. What had actually come to an end was a tradition of labour which held a firm grasp on the British imagination. The British coal industry had been steadily declining for a century. At the same time, its cultural significance – from Billy Elliot (2000) and Pride (2007) to The pitmen painters (2007), Husbands and Sons (2015) and The last miners (2016) – flourished and resonated ever more widely. When Henry James described the task of the novelist he wrote that any story could expand to include an endless set of relations but at some point the novelist has to draw a circle and only consider the relationships within that circle. The same applies to the documentary maker. Out of the 450 miners still working at Kellingley, The last miners could only concentrate on a handful. Two of those who featured prominently have been mentioned already: Sheldon, the command supervisor and Kev, the shift overman. But the viewer also gets to know – both at home and at work – Jonesey, the shift manager, who later finds employment in a car showroom, Jack, an underground fitter, who goes north to look for a job, and the youngest, Andy, the electrician, who plays on the carpet with the eldest of his two small children. A documentary is defined by its presences and absences and a persistent note that runs through The last miners is a sense of injustice and rejection. The narrator says that Britain has "turned its back" on coal and the country is "burying a once-proud industry." After Kev sings 'Northern calypso,' the other miners laugh and applaud, and Sheldon says, "David Cameron, you can take away our jobs, but you can't take away our sense of humour." "Too true, Sheldon," says Kev. The closure of Kellingley is understood in terms of a political decision that can be put down to a single politician. 79

The last miners

That leaves a good deal on the outside of the circle. Two of the most common measures of the British coal industry are production and employment. It's necessary to go right back to before the first world war – to 1913, to be precise – to find the year when annual production in the British coal industry peaked (at nearly 300 million tonnes). After that came a drop, or series of drops, such as the collapse in 1925, which came after Winston Churchill returned sterling to the gold standard. British coal became too expensive to export, which led to the miners' strike and the general strike. It has always been a global story: across the 20th century, Britain faced economic competition from first Germany and Poland and later – among others – from Russia, the United States, and Colombia. But the production of coal was also affected by changes within Britain. The decline in coal consumption in Britain over the last 70 years needs to be considered in terms of the various sectors such as steel, factories, homes, town gas, railways and electricity. In the 1950s, these were all major consumers of coal, but significant structural changes within each sector led to rapid declines in demand. Domestic consumption, for instance, fell dramatically after the introduction in 1956 of the Clean Air Act. The demand from the railways fell, on the one hand, with the Beeching Report which led to massive cuts in branch lines, and on the other hand, with trains switching from coal to diesel and electric. Inevitably, the coal industry was challenged by new energy sources: oil, gas, nuclear, and renewables. The decline in employment has gone on for nearly a century too, with jobs in the coal industry peaking at 1.2 million in the early 1920s. The numbers collapsed during the Depression years, and again in the 1960s, and then again in the late 1980s. The steepest fall came under Harold Wilson's Labour government. But over the last 30 years an uncoupling has also taken place between consumption and employment. After the 1984-85 Miners' Strike there was a fall in coal productivity in Britain, but coal continued to provide 40% of Britain's electricity. Fewer miners 80

were employed and more coal was imported. These long-term shifts are not touched on in The last miners, which spends almost no time tracing what the literary critic Raymond Williams has called "the interaction between general forces and personal histories." The miners appear as figures who are largely detached from societal change. There is no discussion about how competitive British coal might be in world markets or where it goes or how it's used or what environmental impact it might have. Sheldon is the only person in the documentary who ever mentions carbon emissions. He doesn't have an argument with the science but he doesn't see why mines in Britain have to close while mines in China and Germany stay open. No one who might have an answer to this is invited to respond. No economist is interviewed. No climate scientist is interviewed. Not even the government minister responsible for taking the decision to close Kellingley is interviewed. It isn't that kind of documentary. The temporal focus – the countdown to the men's last day of work – largely excludes the spatial one, which might explain why this last day has arrived. It's impossible to imagine a documentary about the closure of a newspaper – however colourful the journalists' personalities – which didn't also place it in the context of the digital revolution and social media. How, then, could the end of deepcoal mining in Britain be understood without reference to globalisation and global warming? One answer might be that The last miners is not really about the end of the British coal industry at all. The documentary is a proxy for another story. What seems to attract the documentary makers most to the last miners is their exceptionalism. The narrator explains that "miners are a breed apart" and that these men are "a band of brothers." After seeing the miners at the coal face, working long hours among dust and noise and splintering shards of coal, the journey in the cage back to the surface is followed by one of the big set scenes – the showers – where the men, now naked, get hold of flannels and sponges and (sometimes using Fairy Liquid) scrub the coal

dust off each other's shoulders and backs. One miner says, "It's easier to describe it as a family. You're all one." Another says, "It's a bond that can't be broken, honestly." What's comes with this exceptionalism is a deep conservatism, an instinct for tradition and history that's reflected in a soundtrack that draws on brass bands, Elgar and Woody Guthrie. "This history that we've got," says Phil, the HR manager, "you'll not find in any other industry." They are surrounded by people who are very like them: male, white, northern and mostly middle-aged. "This is not what I wanted," says Sheldon, when he has to attend a retraining centre. "I thought I'd retire a miner, to be quite frank." The world these men are leaving is tough and dangerous, but it is also enclosed and secure. Sheldon's commute from the kitchen to the car to the locker room to the cage to the train to the coal face is a journey through a series of contained and regulated spaces. The pit offers order and routine. The production at the coal face is monitored by the assistant manager on a laptop in the office upstairs. When the conveyor belt breaks down he knows exactly how much money they are losing per minute. The contrast between the workplace and home is stark. At home, Kev opens the door to his utility cupboard. "Cleaning. Cleaning," he says, pointing to the array of cleaning equipment. "Any stain you've got, any marking you've got, I can get it off." The documentary-maker asks, "Are you a bit obsessed, Kev? Are you obsessed with cleaning?" "I think so, yeah," says Kev, "I've got several hoovers. I've got me Dyson. I've got me Dyson Animal. And I've got a steamer." Several turns out to be an understatement. "And I've got two more in garage." Sheldon also has high standards at home. After the pit has closed, he is interviewed once more in his kitchen. He stands by the sink, wearing a red polo shirt (with a Union Jack emblem), and stares mournfully out the window. "There's only so many times you can wash the windows, cut the grass, hoover the carpet." He looks at his watch. "I've hoovered twice today – before twelve o'clock."

The last miners could have ended with the men leaving the pit, the lights turning out, the gates closing, the cars driving away, and then darkness, stillness, and silence – and, finally, "the end." But the last 25 minutes follow what happens when men who have worked in a highly specific job (many since they left school) have to do something else. If Kev is a dinosaur, will he be able to adapt? The most vivid example comes when Jonesey gets a job at a prestigious car dealership. It's a dramatic moment when Jonesey, usually seen covered in dust, walks into the Mercedes Benz showroom in suit and tie. His new boss comes over and introduces him to the account manager. Charlotte has blonde shoulder-length hair. Other than a couple of female reporters doing interviews on the day the pit closed, she is the first woman any of the miners has encountered on a professional level. The boss says, "I'm going to leave you in Charlotte's capable hands." Jonesey gets in the driver's side, and Charlotte gets in the passenger's side. The physical proximity is almost a shock. "The main thing for me to show you," Charlotte says, "is the controls." There's a close up of her hand leaning across Jonesy's body. There's a close-up of Jonesey's face with his tongue held between his lips. "It's a bit surreal really," says Jonesey afterwards. "This is the new me. Onwards and upwards." The new me. Sheldon retrains as a fibre optic engineer and Kev becomes a handyman. But over the five weeks they speak candidly about their fears for the future. One of the miners suffers a heart attack and Sheldon thinks this isn't unrelated to the closure. They are men's men and don't like to show their feelings. Banter is the default mode. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the closure of "Big K" was forcing some of them to move from the 20th century to the 21st. The work had always been tough physically, but the closure had made it tough psychologically. The message of The last miners – which has a significance which reaches well beyond this story – is that uncertainty is a far darker prospect than a coalface. 81

Energy in the news

Joe Smith and Bradon Smith

Journalism is one of the most influential forms of storytelling, so it was natural for the Stories of Change project to develop partnerships with journalists. Universities are now working hard to place stories based on research in the news via eye-catching press releases. But we wanted to sustain our experimental approach in this field too, engaging journalists as co-researchers, drawing on their experience and skills, but also inviting them to work in new ways. We approached three different kinds of news storyteller and developed ways for them to work with us and our partners to draw out distinctive stories of energy. The veteran reporters of the Climate News Network give their time to the mission of telling a wide range of news stories linked to climate change. The four core journalists draw upon a cumulative century-plus of experience of covering the topic for the BBC, the Guardian, the Observer, the Times, the Financial Times, and the Economist. Their stories are syndicated around the world, including via Chinese and Indian partners to many millions of readers. But it is in the nature of both the topic and the craft and culture of journalism that most of their coverage is 'bad news.' We invited them to turn around and view the future through a more positive lens. We drew their attention to the astonishing catalogue of transformative stories of local sustainable energy solutions around the world that are recognised annually by the Ashden Awards. We challenged the journalists to transform these engaging but often quite complex case studies into readable, quickly digestible news stories. As one of our project partners, Ashden supported the journalists with quotes, images, and background. And we gave the Climate News Network team one further task: to try to draw out of these stories some common threads that might help us understand what could take these initiatives from remarkable exceptions to being the norm. Our second strand of collaboration was undertaken with Roger Harrabin, BBC Environment Analyst, who has covered environment and energy issues for more than three decades. His normal journalistic practice centres around interviews designed to elicit pithy and quotable responses that can be slotted into articles or short radio pieces. We gave him an invitation to work in a different way with us. For this project, we asked him to carry out long-form interviews of up to an hour, to really follow questions through, to get into the details, and to give interviewees the space to fully explain their position. In 20 in-depth interviews, Roger spoke with CEOs, US senators, scientists, energy industry commentators, climate sceptics and others, asking the hard questions about our energy system. A third journalism-based partnership was developed with the Fit for the Future Network, which serves as a hub for energy and sustainability managers from across major not-for-profit civic and amenity organisations. This network's mission is to support members as they respond to the threat of dangerous climate change. This involves swapping best practice and tough lessons learnt in the process of trying to 'green' everything from historic palaces to charity shops and lifeboat stations. It is in 82

the nature of the network that much of its work is rather technical and uninviting to the outside world. Yet we found the underlying stories profoundly inspiring, and were convinced they deserved a wider audience. The Stories project partnered with one of the network's larger organisations, the National Trust, who look after one of the most extensive estates of historic buildings in the world. Â The communications team toured the country with freelance journalist Robin Clegg and photographer Tim Mitchell gathering multimedia bundles of material, comprising written introductions, audio interviews, and pictures, that add up to compelling human stories of achievement. These have gained media attention and are being used within the 77 member organisations to inspire further action. They are also being deployed as case studies in education. Furthermore, the content will play a role in these organisations' policy advocacy, pressing the case for support of 'local energy,' and of course will travel out into the wider world in entirely unpredictable ways via our internet platform. Together these three collaborations show how partnerships between academic researchers and journalists can go far beyond the mere 'publicising' of completed research, to pursue initiatives that neither field of activity could have achieved in isolation. With our journalist partners, we have worked to apply a critical but positive lens to a number of stories of energy change, helping those stories travel and multiply.

Energy in the news | Community Energy

Agamemnon Otero. Photo: Tim Mitchell.

Community Energy Robin Clegg and Joe Smith

Saskya Huggins. Photo: Chris Bonfiglioli.

The Stories of Change project joined with the National Trust, the Fit For the Future network, and Community Energy England to gather together a powerful collection of stories of energy transformations. Fit for the Future is a network of organisations from across the not-for-profit sector, including bodies such as the National Trust, the RNLI, and the RSPB. Its members collectively own more than 40,000 buildings. It aims to help its network of nearly 80 member bodies to become climate-friendly, adaptive, resilient organisations. Using written texts, audio, and photographs, the collaboration with Stories of Change has shown: how a wind turbine has benefitted the Hebridean island of Tiree; how Gloucester Cathedral has embraced solar technology; and how reducing

carbon emissions in the RNLI means more funds are available for front-line services. The multimedia bundles of images and text are being put to work in local and national media stories, in education, and in policy advocacy. Above all, these stories of change show how action to mitigate climate change can have manifold benefits for human society and the natural world alike. â&#x2013;ˇâ&#x2013;ˇThe whole body of stories and media materials is available at storiesofchange.ac.uk, tagged 'Community Energy.' The photos can also be accessed via the National Trust's public online photo collections.

Energy in the news | To: Roger Harrabin

To: Roger Harrabin Subject: Energy transitions Roger Harrabin and Bradon Smith

The following is a lightly edited exchange of emails. From: Bradon Smith Date: Wednesday, 27th September 2017 To: Roger Harrabin Subject: Interviews, and energy transitions Hi Roger, So, I thought we could have something of an electronic conversation about your experiences as an environmental journalist, and your own opinions about our energy system. Since you've started all the interviews you've done for Stories of Change with this question, it seems appropriate to ask you: how did you come to be interested in energy and climate change? You've been covering these issues for a long time; how far do you think we've come in that time? Thanks, and all the best, Bradon From: Roger Harrabin Date: Wednesday, 27th September 2017 To: Bradon Smith Subject: Re: Interviews, and energy transitions Hi Bradon, I started at Radio 4 as a general reporter in the late '80s. At that time the only correspondent working on the environment in the UK mainstream media was the great Geoffrey Lean. I began to follow up some of his themes with reports on the radio and received a warm response from editors and the public. I then steadily specialised more and more in environmental issues (the BBC didn't have an environment correspondent at the time). I first heard about climate change from Professor Sir John Houghton, then chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. In the early years the issue was highly speculative, but once the science started to harden and the risks were more sharply defined it was obvious to scientists that we needed to decarbonise our energy systems. 86

I remember negotiating hard for a budget to travel to Denmark for what may have been the first report in the UK media about wind farms. The trip, for The World This Weekend on a chill winter's day, is printed on my memory thanks to the breakfast I was offered before visiting the village turbine – raw egg yolk washed down with Schnapps. Highly recommended. If the UK had followed the Danish model of encouraging communities to have their own turbines to profit from cheap energy, we might have avoided in the UK some of the turmoil over wind farms in the countryside. The UK government took the different and not illogical approach that large-scale commercial wind farms would be more efficient. As I write, there are voices calling for a lifting of the de facto ban on onshore wind power in the UK, especially when they are backed by communities. When I started reporting on energy issues I don't recall anyone else covering the issue outside the financial media. I plugged away because I had decided it was a massively important subject spiced with ever-changing complexity. If the projections were even nearly accurate, most other environmental issues would be affected by a changing climate. It's most fun writing about subjects that present policy-makers with difficult decisions (I'm glad I just have to report on issues rather than making decisions on them). Some people inside and outside the BBC thought reporting on energy was dull or eccentric. Now energy is recognised as an important subject throughout the media – and many talented young journalists have been drawn into the field. (I am slightly concerned that environment journalists invest so much effort in reporting on climate change and energy that other important environmental issues don't get the attention they deserve.) In my view global environmental change should be a key topic in the media. Some editors are still uncomfortable carrying more than one 'green' story in a bulletin – even if they are as diverse as, say, ocean plastics and small nuclear reactors. Yet when historians look back 100 years from now, environmental change will be one story that endures after other currently compelling crises have melted away. In terms of how far we have come in responding to our energy challenges, it depends whether this refers to journalists or society or politicians. We are doing better in the media, I think. The wide swings in interest from the past have largely been ironed out and we're reporting energy issues routinely and with a fair degree of prominence. Much of the coverage is well-informed, although there is still a tendency sometimes to swallow spin by vested interests. Since the Paris climate deal, some of the media voices claiming that climate change is a myth have died away. Sceptics still exist, but they have lost two key battles, as the whole world (except the US President) is trying to cut emissions, and renewables have proved much cheaper and pervasive than even optimists thought possible. The debate has mostly shifted from "should we decarbonise?" to "how should we decarbonise?" 87

Energy in the news | To: Roger Harrabin

In society at large young people are clearly much more concerned than their elders, although I still get people (mostly men over 70, it has to be said) who'll tell me that it's impossible for our CO2 emissions to be impacting on something as big as the climate. In the USA climate scepticism is part of a political opinion tick-list. Almost all sceptics are Republican. I interviewed one former Republican Congressman who was deselected after being persuaded of climate science. In politics generally there is a genuine wish to decarbonise – but many pressures in the opposite direction. These have been eased by the extraordinary renewables boom – but we still can't see a path ahead to the sort of emissions cuts we're said to require. We should never underestimate the scale of this challenge. And we should have some sympathy with our leaders who are tasked with delivering the change. Best, Roger From: Bradon Smith Date: Wednesday, 28th September 2017 To: Roger Harrabin Subject: Re: Interviews, and energy transitions Hi Roger, That's a helluva breakfast. You alluded to various possible drivers of change in the energy sector – political intervention, changing economics of renewables, community ownership, more sustained media (and public?) interest in the intersection of energy and environment. What do you think has been the most significant factor in the changes we've already seen? What will be most significant as we go forward? And what's the missing ingredient, what do we need (more of ) to get the sort of energy transition we're talking about? Thanks, Bradon From: Roger Harrabin Date: Wednesday, 28th September 2017 To: Bradon Smith Subject: Re: Interviews, and energy transitions Hi Bradon With regards to the drivers, I think it's impossible to separate them because they are all intertwined – and without all of them action can't occur and society can't change. Political leaders won't act unless they think they have public support (often falsely using the media as a proxy for the public). But much of our news agenda is set by 88

politicians, so it's a bit of a Catch-22. Business is key. No leaders are going to propose plans which will make their people noticeably poorer (although you might argue that Brexit disproves that old rule). But that's where technological change comes in. Thanks to the judicious application of subsidies, the UK government has managed to stimulate an extraordinary fall in the cost of offshore wind. Critics of that technology can no longer argue so strongly that it's a burden on bill-payers. It's also important that by application of strict standards on boilers and appliances, average household energy consumption has gone down – which has more than offset the cost of the subsidies. Standards have been the single most effective and cheapest way of dealing with energy – lowering demand and bills for consumers – but they are rarely discussed, except as an imposition on free choice. With offshore wind the government has achieved something of a magic trick – and probably hasn't been given enough credit for it. One key factor was the policy of auctioning subsidies to the lowest bidder. People complain about the high level of initial subsidy, but again I have some sympathy with government – they had to lure in firms who were borrowing dearly to promote unknown technologies. We all owe a debt to the German government, which mandated one million solar roofs for their cloudy nation. That was arguably foolish at worse, quixotic at best. But cheap solar power is Germany's gift to the world. Their roofs programme gave venture capitalists in the USA the confidence to fund solar tech in the knowledge that there was a market. Then Chinese firms came in to drive down the cost. And solar power is flooding the world. Sadly there are many missing ingredients for the path ahead. The UK is rich in offshore wind power – many other nations are not. And many aren't sunny either. Solar farms take vast amounts of land and will, as they expand, be increasingly in conflict with wildlife and farming. Environmentalists just defeated a plant in California that would have impacted on wildlife. The Last IPCC was clear that further new technologies would be needed. But I can't see any obvious candidates – certainly not yet. Small modular reactors are touted by the nuclear lobby – every home could have one… but they won't be ready for a decade or more. And even then the task of turning them into a major industry from scratch is hardly credible. Especially as security concerns will mean they have to be clustered on heavily-guarded sites rather than peppered around the nation to supply power when it's needed. Carbon capture and storage might do the trick – but not with carbon prices at the current level. So that leads us back to politics… Best, Roger

Energy in the news | Lord Nicholas Stern

This is not cheap energy

An interview with Lord Nicholas Stern, by Roger Harrabin

Roger Harrabin: So did you set out to prove that climate change would be damaging to the economy, was that the remit? Nicholas Stern: No, it wasn't the remit. I had been a lifetime, a professional lifetime in the economics of policy so the remit was to look into the economics of climate change from the perspective of policy. RH: But by then Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were completely on board with the need to act on climate change; some people saw it as the academic response backing up the policy. NS: Gordon, I think it's fair to say, he was the one who initiated the request to me. Tony Blair came on board very quickly afterwards but it was Gordon who initiated it, and I think these were days when Gordon really wanted to think through… Together with those advising him on economics – and as a treasury official I was one of those – he wanted to think through the issues. So there was absolutely no preconceived rubric or required answer, as far as I was concerned. RH: Your conclusion from the review were very clear though, "The benefits of taking action now to mitigate climate change far outweigh the costs.'" And that word "far" I think was very significant in the conclusion. NS: It was, We concluded then, the language we used, that the costs of inaction, doing not much to manage climate change, far outweighed the costs of action. And that was the conclusion. But it was a conclusion that certainly for me I came to as a result of the work. RH: You did get some criticism after an initial honeymoon period, there was criticism from 90

some academics. Let me quote you one, he said, "Hurrying the process of switching from carbonbased fuels along by boosting energy costs means that humanity will have to delay buying other good things such as clean water, sanitation, better food, and more education." NS: There will have to be substantial investment in different ways of doing things, but we've seen, over the last nine years since the Stern Review was published, very rapid falls in the costs of alternative technologies. I started work ten years ago on the Stern Review – the cost of a solar PV panel has come down by a factor of around ten in that time. So there will have to be substantial investment but the productivity of that investment in alternative ways of doing things has gone up enormously, faster even than we imagined at the time of the Stern Review. Secondly, we have become much clearer about the dreadful cost in human life of air pollution; we are killing millions now through the air pollution from burning hydrocarbons. So the costs of the traditional hydrocarbon methods in terms of air pollution are much higher than we thought. Let me give you an example. The cost of a ton of coal depends on the coal, of course, but it's around $50 per ton of coal. If you take into account the cost of carbon dioxide at around $35 a ton – that's the number that the US government uses, though I'm in print with a very powerful argument explaining that's far too low. But if you did take $35 a ton CO2 – RH: As the cost to the climate of emitting a ton of CO2? NS: Yes, exactly right. You would have another roughly $70, because one ton of coal goes to close to two tons of CO2. So at $35 a ton that is roughly adding another 70. If you look at the IMS work on air pollution, that comes out roughly

twice the cost of carbon dioxide when carbon dioxide is valued at $35 a ton. So that would add roughly another 140. So you've got 50 for the original ton of coal, 70 for the carbon dioxide emissions – which is rather conservative, my view is it should be higher – and around another 140. So you're talking about ballpark $250 per ton as the real cost of coal. So we've found since the Stern Review was published the cost of renewable energy going down very rapidly, and our understanding of the immense cost of burning hydrocarbons getting much deeper. That's from closer observation and measurement, and closer work on air pollution, and closer work by the medical profession on what those costs are. A Berkeley Earth study from the summer of 2015 showed that breathing in many Chinese cities is equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes a day – man, woman and child. RH: But this has to be offset against the benefits that cheap energy brings to developing countries. NS: I've just explained at some length, Roger, this is not cheap energy; if you price coal at $50 it looks quite cheap, but that's a deep mistake. Just take the air pollution, that's real cost in terms of killing the local population, large numbers of people through the use of coal, unless you dismiss that as somehow irrelevant or not a cost, which would be an extraordinary thing to do and very bad economics. The UK Supreme Court accepted in the summer of 2015 the figure 29,000 deaths a year from air pollution in the UK, mostly from burning hydrocarbons. And similar very large air pollution costs in Germany. Let's not kid ourselves, these plants that look clean, these vehicles that look clean, or are presented as clean still carry very high air pollution costs. So if you look at costs properly in terms of climate and in terms of human life around air pollution – the former, climate, killing people in the future; the latter, air pollution, killing people now – it's a deep mistake, a serious mistake to argue that hydrocarbons are cheap. They're very expensive if you look at the full costs of their use.

RH: Final thought – we're asking all our interviewees the same question to end with: How optimistic or pessimistic are you about the way things are going? NS: Can I split that into two bits? I'm optimistic about what we can do. What we've learnt in the last seven or eight years is how attractive the transition to the low-carbon economy will be. It's very economically, socially, and environmentally attractive. This is a much better way to grow and develop, and that's been the lessons of the last seven or eight years. So I'm very optimistic about what can be done. What will be done is a separate question. I'm less optimistic about what will be done, but you can't create the political will for action as a community unless you show the first thing, that what can be done is an extremely attractive way to grow and develop, much more efficient, much less wasteful, much less polluted, much less congested, much more dynamic in terms of innovation. There's a really attractive route that we can take. That, I believe, we've shown very clearly over the last decade or so. RH: So let me press you. Pessimistic overall then? NS: I think that what we are doing in terms of public discussion as a world is moving in a good direction. My fear is that it's not fast enough. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Chair of Economics and Government, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Timeline: energy use in the UK

Timeline: energy use in the UK Rosamund Pearce and Simon Evans, Carbon Brief

This graphic illustrates the changing pattern of use of different energy sources in the UK over the past 140 years. It was designed by Carbon Brief (www.carbonbrief.org), a UK-based journalism website covering climate change and energy in terms of both science and policy, in collaboration with Demanding Times. It demonstrates the effect that policy changes and other key events have had on our energy system. But it also reflects what we have found across the project: that in our energy use, change is a constant. 93

Energy in the news | Ben Van Beurden

Decarbonisation journeys An interview with Ben van Beurden, by Roger Harrabin

Roger Harrabin: You said that CO2 was, in the minds of many, linked to climate change. Shell does accept the IPCC findings, I think, doesn't it? Ben Van Beurden: Yes, for us the debate on climate change is over. I'm sure that you will find in our company people who will just say, "Hold on, but the science isn't completely conclusive etc.," but as a company we have embraced the fact that it's prudent and sensible to work on limiting greenhouse gas emissions and that broadly speaking it would be very, very good if as a planet we can stay within 450-500 PPM [parts per million of CO2] atmospheric concentration levels. RH: What business people often say is that in their businesses they have to take decisions based on risk, not based on absolute certainty.

comes from renewables. Then renewables supply electricity, electricity in itself is only one-fifth of the total energy demand on this planet, so while we can work and we should work an awful lot on more renewables, and more electrification of the energy system, it is probably not going to be enough, it won't do the entire trick. So the second thing we have to do is to clean up the fossil fuel part of it, which is going to grow, inevitably, unless we collectively embrace poverty as a planet, which I don't think is going to happen. So how do we clean up the carbon part of it? First of all, less carbon intensive fuels, so less coal, more natural gas – RH: Good for Shell? BVB: No, good for the planet, I would say.

BVB: Yeah, that's another way of looking at it. If you wait for the science to be completely proven, you can probably be reasonably certain that it will be too late. And moreover, you have to just also look at it from a slightly more philosophical point of view: society wants this to happen for good or bad reasons – we think good reasons, by the way – and we are part of society, and therefore we have to be responsive as well. RH: So what would need to be done to have a reasonable chance of staying within 2°C maximum [increase in global average temperature, from a pre-industrial baseline]? BVB: So what needs to happen is a number of things, and I will bring it back to policies in a moment as well, but fundamentally speaking, we have to limit the amount of CO2 that we emit. So we need as much as possible to bring renewables into the picture. Bear in mind renewables may grow very fast, but they start from a very small base. 1-1.5% of the energy currently being supplied 94

RH: Well and also good for Shell, you're not in coal – BVB: We're not any more in coal, we decided some time ago that coal had writing on the wall and that's why we went out of it. Then higher energy efficiency measures, significantly higher energy efficiency measures, and then eventually, unavoidably, we have to capture carbon and store it. So these are the core things that would need to happen. Now what policy measures would policy makers, would the world need to adopt and embrace in order for that to happen? First of all, put a significant price on carbon. If you put a significant price on carbon, you see people shift to a carbon-leaner system, and it will also drive energy efficiency measures. Secondly, stop energy subsidies. A significant part of energy is still being subsidised in key countries. Thirdly, move away from biomass, primary biomass to provide energy

to more commercial energy sources, because biomass not only has high carbon intensity, it also promotes deforestation, and it produces soot, which has another effect when it comes to climate change. We then have to adopt more policies to do with smarter and better urban development. We have to work on reforestation and better land use and ultimately we have to have higher standards for efficiency or decarbonisation, in appliances or in mobility. So there's a whole raft of measures that we can take, but they're all going to be difficult and, to some extent, also not what consumers want, in order to get this achieved effect. RH: But what about, for example, if the energy sytem were to move away from coal, what about all the jobs that are in coal? I know there are more solar jobs in the US now than coal, but there are still a lot of jobs in coal, and there are a lot of states that are dependent on coal – what are we going to do about that? BVB: Well that will have to be reordered and re-rationalised – RH: Hang on a second, you're talking as if it's a business, it's not, it's a government and there are people involved, how do you do that? BVB: A hundred years ago people had the same discussion about agriculture and this was at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Of course, we have gone through a tremendous amount of change in the world. When we moved here in the UK also out of a very significant coal position into oil and gas, that just happens, that is the nature of progress, that's the nature of technological advancement. In 50 or 60 years' time, I have no doubt or hesitation to say that solar and wind will be the single largest component of the energy system. And companies like ourselves had better find a way to adapt. and adjust and live within that world in which we can still make money, be relevant, and be a profitable player with a different business model that is probably more founded on renewables compared to oil and gas.

RH: You spoke about a scenario of zero emissions by the end of the century. But by then that means we will have to capture lots of the CO2 that is in the atmosphere already, and that's massively expensive? BVB: But we will have to do it anyway. There is no way if you go to zero emissions by the end of the century, there is no way that we will have a system that doesn't produce any CO2 anymore, because there will always be by the very nature of how the energy system works and the demands that it needs to serve, there will always be a need for fossil fuels to feed into it, because certain parts of the energy system are just impossible to do without fossil fuels, so carbon capture now is – RH: OK, that's where I was going to, carbon capture, how much faith do you have in that? I spoke to Lord Brown, and he thought the place for carbon capture and storage globally was probably really rather small, and the potential of it had been overestimated. BVB: I think you will find that there is actually quite a lot more, you will probably also find that every country will have to go through its own decarbonisation journey. In some places CCS will make more sense than in others, and maybe in some places you will find that we can carry the CO2 elsewhere, or you can carry the energy to that place in a different way. We have to look at innovations like how do we transport solar energy from the Middle East across the planet as well? It may sound fanciful in 2015 but I'm sure that by 2040 it won't be fanciful at all, we should be able at that point in time to capture solar energy, convert it into hydrogen, and ship the hydrogen in liquid form across the planet. And then of course you have another issue around carbon capture storage, it doesn't play a role then. So I think ultimately we have to look at this in a holistic, scientific way. It's a very complex puzzle to get right, that's why it is difficult to get going on this journey. But the sooner we start on it, the better it will be. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell plc. 30th June 2015, Shell Centre, London. 95

Demanding Times photo booth

Demanding Times photo booth Photos: Peer Outreach Team / Tim Mitchell

Photographer Tim Mitchell worked with the Peer Outreach Team to evolve his Energy Question photo booth idea â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a common thread through the Stories of Change project. The team developed their own version to take portraits of each of their interview subjects. Photo booths took place at City Hall, at the Open University Camden Town, and at the Ashden Awards at Royal Geographical Society, London.

Demanding Times photo booth

A factory is an energy prototype

Renata Tyszczuk, Julia Udall and Joe Smith

The Future Works story is based in a region of the Midlands between the cities of Derby and Sheffield. This is a region that has good claim to being the hearth of industrial manufacturing in England, but its industries face enormous challenges around the use of energy now and into the future. Future Works – the 'works' in the title refers to factories and other workplaces in the English Midlands and the North – has gathered communities at a series of factory sites to develop collective accounts of past, present and future energy system changes as they affect industry. Our timeframe for thinking about future factories and energy transitions stretched from the energy concerns of the immediate present to the relatively near future of 2050 – the target that was set in the Climate Change Act of 2008 for reducing carbon emissions. However, just as with the iterative cycles of industrial prototyping, our thinking also moved back and forth between distant pasts and the speculative far futures that were evoked by the region's geology, history, and industry. The communities around energy and industry in this region are powerful, even if they don't see themselves as such. Future Works sought to connect with three distinctive industry communities that have been under-recognised and under-researched in discussions about energy: apprentices (through SMEs, University Technical Colleges, and the AMRC); employers and employees (through unions, the Chambers of Commerce, and businesses); and volunteers (through industrial heritage and museum organisations). Future Works gathered energy stories (past accounts, present experiences and future projections) with these three communities via workshops, audiovisual interviews, film, performance, archive foraging, landscape walks, scenario making, participatory mapping, and small group discussions – all of which took place at the sites of industry. It was important to us to work directly with people in their workplaces. We wanted to make clear that we were doing research with, not on, the factories in the region. We were intent on finding ways to co-produce stories that would also acknowledge people and things that have often been overlooked: industrial workers of the past, present and the future, and the objects, tools, materials, and machines of an industrial landscape. Future Works' aim in gathering these stories was to invite a sense of shared ownership of the dilemmas and choices faced by a range of present-day industries (large and small) in the face of a carbon-constrained future. The project has drawn on formal histories and personal memories, present activities, and future scenarios to rethink how a range of people involved with industry have proactively engaged with change and can continue to do so in the future. We have traced the transformations of objects, materials, tools, skills, and ideas, and engaged people's creativity to address pressing questions around energy futures and the consequences of change for everyday life. The factories involved in the project have shown that they are far 102

from static or stable entities that can be steered in change. Rather, they are actively inspiring change in their approaches to energy and decarbonisation. They are part of the change, and can be understood as dynamic and evolving. In this sense they are prototypes for the future. Prototyping was recognised early on in the Future Works project as a shared concept in both design and industry. It became an effective term in discussions with our varied partners on the project to describe our collaborative approach to the production of energy stories. To our thinking, the cyclical nature of prototype making resembled the process of storytelling. Stories don't just passively relate meaning – they create it, and they transform it. Ultimately they are, like prototyping, a way of working out what to do next. We have also noted that the idea of prototyping was important when talking about provisional, often forgotten, aspects of industrial change – such as the protoindustrial landscape and its proto-industries. These include, for example, a tradition of rope making in the caves of the Derwent valley that goes back 500 years, and knife grinding in the Don Valley. These activities were sited to harness the energy of natural water courses, and went through many evolutions or iterations. Exploring these protoindustries required the recognition of the water-powered, low-carbon origins of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the processes of change. Imagining alternative futures with energy has encouraged us to rethink our connections to the landscape, to places and cities, and to industry and making at various scales. Future Works was possible thanks to the participation of project partners including the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) near Sheffield, Derby Museums, Bloc Projects, Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust (SIMT), and the Derwent Valley Mills Trust and the Arkwright Society; Transition Town groups in Belper, Derby, and Melbourne; community factories Portland Works and Mesters Works in Sheffield; and businesses such as Gripple Ltd in Sheffield and John Smedley's Ltd in Derbyshire. We also enrolled Masters design students from the University of Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA) in the project, conducting two year-long design studios with a total of 33 students and three six-week intense Live Projects with 12 students each year on the themes of Future Works. Our creative partners – who included Lucy Ward, Tim Mitchell, Bexie Bush, Gorm Ashurst and Kathy Barber of Bullet Creative, and the Smallprint Company – brought new perspectives on factory life, past, present and future. The Future Works programme was experimental and wide-ranging and our approaches, activities, outputs and insights were also hybrid, interconnected, and prototypical. Above all, however, the stories we have gathered from the project have all been intimately connected with the sites of industry. Our shared activities have reinforced the conviction that a factory is, has been, and can be, an energy prototype. 103

Studio Future Works | Atlas of Energy

Atlas of Energy

Studio Future Works

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Future Works 2050

Future Works 2050 Renata Tyszczuk and Julia Udall

Scenarios are stories of change. They are collective acts of imagination about possible futures in human-natural hybrid systems. Scenarios are enrolled in varying ways of calculating, imagining and performing futures. They draw on a wide range of approaches to, and philosophies about, the future. They ask 'what if?' and tend by their nature to invite contestation. The year 2050 is often referred to in future energy scenarios. It is the target date for the reduction of carbon emissions set by the UK 2008 Climate Change Act, and also by many other European and global initiatives, such as the EU Roadmap 2050, Global Europe 2050, and Shell Energy Scenarios 2050. So we challenged ourselves with creating our own energy scenarios for the future: Future Works 2050. We devised a series of scenario workshops for participants in the Future Works project: researchers, students, volunteers, apprentices, employers, and employees. These took place at different locations: The Silk Mill, Derby; The School of Architecture, University of Sheffield; Bloc Projects and Gripple Ltd, Sheffield; and Bristol Zoo, with AHRC Connected Communities. At the workshops we started by asking the following questions: What does it mean to imagine the future collectively? What stories of change in energy relations can we tell? What can we make of the possibilities for 2050? What kind of energy scenarios for the future do we want? The term 'scenario' has an interesting history. Its origins were in theatre – note the Latin word scena, 'scene,' and the later Italian word scenario, 'sketch of the plot of a play.' In Baroque theatre, the scenario was scribbled on the back of the stage sets as a prompt to performers. The word scenario travelled from theatre to Hollywood and was used by screenwriters. In the 1960s the word was borrowed to describe the strategic planning techniques, or 'scenarios,' developed by Herman 106

Kahn with the Rand Corporation during the Cold War. Kahn, the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, used systems theory and game theory to model the 'unthinkable' – the various consequences of nuclear war. Instead of standard projections, Kahn's techniques involved writing multiple histories of the future – or the 'futurenow' – based on contemporary trends. Scenario planning, using techniques similar to those established by Kahn, is now standard practice in business, propagated by foresight industries, used for trend watching and establishing emerging market opportunities. Scenarios based on climate models, in the processes of, for example the IPCC, as well as of the UNFCCC, are also used to anticipate the effects of climate change. The arts and humanities are almost entirely absent in the versions of climate-changed futures that are being discussed and planned for. This is surprising given that the term 'scenario' originated in the arts. Our aim was to support a more vibrant and imaginative sense of how we could be best prepared for climate-changed futures and different relationships with energy. In our scenario workshops Future Works 2050 we always worked with a map of the region between Derby and Sheffield, laid out on a table. The people round the table took it in turns to tell a story about energy – past, present, or future – which would then be drawn or written on the map with coloured pens. The aim was to create maps that could imagine the future collectively, by thinking about different scales, interests, and relationships with energy. We encouraged participants to bring their own energy stories to the table: from their research, their personal experience, things overheard, things read in the news. Sometimes these stories were about a technological innovation, a disaster, a new relationship, or the coming together or dissipation of a community. People described steps towards utopia, or dystopia. With each new addition, the

Scenario workshop map. Photo: Renata Tyszczuk.

groups were encouraged to collectively rethink the emerging situation, creating energy journeys that traversed the maps, connecting things that had previously seemed separate. One such journey took us to the web of the Silk Road and to the production of an 'everlasting global cookie,' made of ingredients shipped from a dozen far-flung places and so pumped full of preservatives it would outlast our lifetime. Other stories emerged from the various scenario mappings: 'Moving towardsÂ joy' saw a greater appreciation of those things close to us â&#x20AC;&#x201C; improved bicycle routes, for example, and the more ambivalent promise of terrestrial America-Europe travel on a solar-powered transGreenland railway (by 2050, global warming will have enabled this route). One story described the idea of an 'Energy map factory' in Derby, for the manufacture of informative domestic and

industrial energy guides. Another tale, of the 'Local Energy Authority (LEA),' considered the possibility of a network of schools contributing to energy production for their communities. Some stories were hopeful, others were cautionary tales. The scenario making game is serious and playful, and contingent rather than absolute. It all depends on who is at the table, how the members of the group relate to one another, and the particular things on everyone's mind that day. But new possibilities for thinking about energy, and with these, stories of change, can and do emerge.

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Bloc Projects | Scenario games and energy questions

Scenario games and energy questions

Julia Udall and Renata Tyszczuk

In June 2015 and March 2016 students from the University Technical College (UTC) in Sheffield worked with researchers from the Future Works strand of the Stories of Change project to develop scenarios about the future of energy and manufacturing in the region. The workshops were held at Bloc Projects, a former tuning fork factory that is now an artist-led project space in Sheffield. They involved a scenario mapping game and an energy photo booth session. Students drew on their knowledge of manufacturing, their personal experiences and imagination, to try to imagine the challenge of energy differently. For the scenario mapping game the groups gathered around a map of the region on a plywood tabletop. Lasercut towns, cities, rivers, factory sites and contours of hills stretched 108

out before us, along with an invitation to map the past, present and future of energy and manufacturing. By selecting game cards, we were assigned roles. The job titles were inspired by factories we had visited: 'Robot,' 'Head of Research & Design,' 'Maintenance Operative,' 'Apprentice,' 'Managing Director,' 'Little Mester,' 'Tutor,' 'Tool Designer.' A series of 'Event' cards described provocations to which players had to respond in character, adding consequences to the map. Each of the events described an actual situation that had taken place in the history of one of the factories we had visited during the project. As the game played out and the map changed, gradually an interconnected future-oriented energy story took shape.

Scenario mapping game, Bloc Projects. Photos: Charlotte Morgan. Speculation about mass automation and an emerging 'Robotopia' in Chesterfield led to the creation of the 'Union of Soviet Socialist Robots.' A proliferation of University Technical Colleges, each with a different specialism to up-skill the population in response to future challenges, were powered by an array of renewable energy sources creating 'University Technical Land.' Robot Moles tunnelled to discover sources of geo-energy, and 3D-printed landscapes emerged and sprouted new energy infrastructure. Imagination and local knowledge gave plausibility and nuance to the most fantastic propositions. The students also took part in a photo booth session with Tim Mitchell, writing questions about energy on a cloud that was suspended above their heads while they had their portraits taken. This prompted further conversations about energy that fed back into the scenario mapping. These animated exchanges led to thought-provoking questions, and photographs set in the streets of Sheffield: "Why should someone work hard for energy, just for someone to waste it so easily?"

The students found the workshop stimulating. Rueben observed that the photo booth project gave them an active role to play â&#x20AC;&#x201C; learning new skills in photography, and working together to create the portraits. Ben commented that the discussion between them as they were taking photos of one another sparked new ideas. He felt that the question of how energy would affect the future should be open to anyone who might want to answer it â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not just a few experts. Alex said that the workshop had encouraged him to think differently about energy and his relation to it: "Working visually, my question was: 'How important is energy?' I held the cloud with the question out in front of me to say, it's more important than me. We don't really think about how important it is, how it affects more people than just ourselves. I could use the visual to express this idea that I'm not the only thing in the picture." Jack challenged us to get answers to the questions he and his fellow students had posed from the institutions and people they were 109

Bloc Projects | Scenario games and energy questions

directed to. His own question – about what new forms of renewable energy might be on their way – was directed to power companies, such as the massive, German-owned RWE, which supplies one third of the UK's power. "I live in Derbyshire, and there are loads of wind farms, but a lot of the time they aren't very productive and they don't work every day." His scenario mapping had included the sites of old mines that could be found underfoot and had once been the region's source of energy. Reflecting on how energy generation had changed in recent times, the students considered how energy might be generated, used, and valued in the future. Ruby recalled the inventor Tesla and his battle with Edison. Her photo booth question had been prompted by his proposals for the Tesla Tower, an invention that would allow electricity to be transmitted wirelessly, so that it couldn't be "enclosed" as with other markets. She had asked, 110

"Why couldn't Tesla make energy free?" Ruby lamented that this opportunity was not taken. "If energy was free, less developed countries would get more out of it, they wouldn't have to worry about heat and light." The scenario mapping game had led her to think further about the social, ethical, and geopolitical aspects of energy. Other students questioned whether free energy would be "taken advantage of" and how it could be produced for free. Opinion was divided as to whether we should worry more about big companies or individuals not willing to pay. Rueben suggested that the open format of scenario making was really positive because it got the creativity flowing. With such a packed and demanding timetable at the University Technical College, this was a refreshing change. "Usually we work in a much more linear way. It was good learning… it was memorable."

Tabletop scenarios, scenario mapping game, Bloc Projects. Photos: Renata Tyszczuk.

Alex felt the day had given him a space to reflect on the future, which "isn't something you usually do." Rueben observed that energy was part of every aspect of their education â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but that this wasn't always obvious. They realised on reflection there was a lot in their courses about the costs of the things we make, and the ways we might power them, as well as possibilities for reuse and recycling. The scenario mapping game had brought these energy considerations together. Sam, their teacher, wondered if we should try to change the curriculum to make energy a more explicit focus.

able to think about what we need as society. Power needs to be more equally distributed." The students suggested that "people know the facts about energy and climate change but don't really care," and felt people needed opportunities to engage in discussion, so as to understand their own contribution to, and responsibility for, energy system change. "Energy conversations," they concluded, "should be more public." A collective question from the students, taken in front of a street art image of Charles Darwin in Sheffield was, "Have we evolved to depend on power?"

Ruby argued that there was a need for sustainability to be a greater part of their education, and about the impact of our actions on the world, and how we might change that. This provoked thoughtful remarks from Jack and Alex on the nature of democracy and people's power. "A vote isn't enoughâ&#x20AC;Ś we need to be 111

UTC photo booth

UTC photo booth Photos: UTC Students / Tim Mitchell

In June 2015 students from the University Technical College (UTC) in Sheffield took part in a workshop devised by the Future Works team of the Stories of Change project to think collectively about the future of energy and manufacturing in the region. As part of the workshop, The Energy Question photo booth led by Tim Mitchell took place both in Bloc Projects â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a former tuning-fork factoryand in the surrounding streets, in this industrial area of Sheffield. 112

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UTC photo booth

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Disruptive energy technologies

Julia Udall and Renata Tyszczuk

During our travels along the rivers and across the valleys of the English Midlands, and the energy conversations we had there, certain phrases recurred that seemed to capture people's imaginations. One of these was 'disruptive technologies,' which came to the fore in conversations with James Baldwin at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and Charlie Spencer of the Spencer Group. 'Disruptive technologies' – a term coined by Clayton M. Christensen in 1995 – are not identified with changes to a particular technology per se, but rather with the way that value systems and infrastructure change around it. For example, the early automobiles of the late 19th century were not a disruptive innovation. They were expensive luxury items for the few, while most people still used horse-drawn vehicles. Everything changed, however, with the introduction of the massproduced, lower-priced Ford Model T in 1908. It was the mass production of cars that was the disruptive innovation. With it came the massive social and infrastructural transformations of fossil fuel dependency. Rather than an incremental improvement on an existing thing, disruptive technologies make what went before redundant, bringing social as well as technological change. When we asked Charlie Spencer what he thought would change in the energy picture in next five, ten, 20 years, he offered: "Hydrogen field cells I think, not too long in the future, will be a disruptive technology in battery technology. And being able to jump start your car from your mobile phone. When we get that, it will change the way we think about everything. Already you've got Elon Musk installing batteries for houses so you can store energy at home from your solar or your wind turbine. When we've got 116

battery storage that can pack in as much as, say, petrol can, it's going to totally transform our transport infrastructure, and also the way we use and store energy in the home." He saw these technologies as shifting our dependency on fossil fuels: "It will make things viable that currently are not viable, like offshore wind. One of the problems with wind is that, as we all know, it produces energy even when you don't want it. But energy storage devices that are cheap – not only will they make our lives easier, and make our energy usage a lot more manageable, they will make offshore wind and wind energy in general much more economic. That energy will be worth something, whereas at the moment, at times, it's not – at times they have to give that energy away." In working with factories and those involved in manufacturing, we have come across predictions of, and progress towards, many new technologies in energy generation and storage, and beyond, that could reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. From research into advanced composites at the AMRC that could make cars and sports equipment; to small and powerful wind turbines that can operate at both very low and very high wind speeds at Gripple; to C Spencer Ltd's investigation of the Internet of Things as a means to optimise their offices and working practices. Seeking to understand disruptive technologies demands a reimagining of the problem. It often requires collaboration across department boundaries in a company, or with new partners, or even new sectors. Most importantly, if the 'disruptions' that new technology creates are intended to serve humanity and the planet, rather than merely turn novelty into profit, then the work of innovation must proceed from a clear goal.

When it comes to innovations in energy generation and storage, it is hoped that disruptive technologies will empower people to innovate at a grassroots level. More efficient batteries, for example, could enable the creation of small-scale community energy projects; or could form part of a more dynamic energy grid that can take advantage of high winds or periods of strong sunshine and keep the energy they generate for when it is needed. But the availability of new technology will only make an impact if we as a society have a good understanding of what this technology can do for us. Public education is therefore an essential part of any coordinated effort to transform our relationship with energy – as well as the fostering of a sense of investment, at the individual and local community level. It would be dangerous to invest our hopes in technology while abdicating personal responsibility. Technology is, after all, only a tool – we must decide together the aims toward which our technological innovations should be striving. It is also necessary to carefully consider the total energy impact of a new technology, which may be far wider and deeper than is at first obvious. We may manufacture fewer CDs or DVDs now that everything is on the Cloud, or streamed via the internet, but as we learned during our energy workshop with project partners Utopia Works, it takes more carbon to watch a film on a digital streaming service than to drive two miles to the cinema to do so in a more social way. No technological product exists in isolation, but rather, is part of multiple industrial, social, and ecological systems. And herein, of course, lies technology's potential to disrupt. James Baldwin of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre works on reconfigurable manufacturing systems. This topic of research has emerged in the last 20 years from attempts to increase the flexibility of machine tools, machine centres, and material handling systems. The aim is for materials and machine tools to be able to communicate with each other, and thus optimise their own schedules. He explains how significant this change will be for the factory system and why it has come about:

"Mass-produced products usually have an assembly line which is dedicated – so you never change the setup, which runs eight hours a day and doesn't stop. With more demand for mass customisation and mass personalisation, manufacturing systems need to become more flexible, more reconfigurable, and autonomous. In short, self-learning manufacturing systems. And beyond reconfigurable manufacturing systems, systems that are biological and evolving – genetic algorithms and evolutionary algorithms." Furthermore, if it becomes easier to manufacture machines and machine parts quickly, locally, and in small runs, this will have major implications for the relationship between energy and industry. The start-up costs, transport burden, and factory space required for new material technologies will be reduced, allowing organisations – both profitdriven and community-run – to more easily try out new approaches to old problems. This could also have huge implications for automation and the future of work – a highstakes issue that technological innovators cannot afford to ignore. To return to the example of the automobile: electric cars preceded the gasoline automobile by many decades. They are now returning as part of a concerted global effort to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and tackle a major source of pollution. It is possible the cars of the future will be charged by the sun, hydrogen, water, or even pressurised air. So far, so promising. But introducing electric cars will likely disrupt the well-established 'support network' that surrounds petrol- and gas-fueled cars. New types of jobs and new business models will appear, but others will be endangered. As Milan Zeleny observes, 'the electric car will probably be resisted by gas station operators in the same way automated teller machines (ATMs) were resisted by bank tellers and automobiles by horsewhip makers.' If disruption to our energy systems and working practices is to be expected, we should also be aware that change is always resisted. Disruption is a site of promise, of possibility – but it is also by its nature disorienting. The responsible introduction of new technologies includes managing the social cost of change. 117

Studio Future Works | The Automation Integration Centre

The Automation Integration Centre 118

Alex Farr Studio Future Works

47% of all jobs are at risk of automation by 2030. This project reimagines the possibilities for Enterprise Zones currently being planned for the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. To avoid a repeat of the 19th-century luddites' destruction of machinery out of fear, the 'Automation Integration Centre' proposes a new

factory model for the 21st century: one based on integration, education, and enabling the public. Inspired by research training centres, but also more public-facing theatres and community centres, the project reimagines the factory floor as a customisable space for start-up enterprise incubation and hands-on workshops and training. 119

Future primitive

Future primitive Tom Beesley

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Tom Beesley, Future primitive (2016); de-, dis-, ex-. exhibition at Bloc Projects, Sheffield October 2016. 121

Future primitive

The art space occupies an area ten metres long and five metres wide, it sits at the end of one leg of a U-shaped set of low buildings constructed around a secure courtyard accessible from the lane. The exhibition area sits within a single-storey brick building with one long elevation of metalframed windows and a timber-framed sawtooth roof with west-facing blacked-out glazing, the roof rises to six metres at the apex. The walls have been boarded and painted white, the concrete floor has been painted dark grey. Future primitive (2016) consists of three distinct formal elements. On the floor towards the centre of the space, six 2'x4' sheets of repurposed white painted plywood are held in a relationship – like the vanes of a windmill – by a water-jet cut and rolled steel hub. A short distance away a similar locus accommodates 12 gently curved smoke-fired ceramic blades and, next to this, leaning against the wall, a turbine of six rusted steel plates held in a fully welded radial assembly. 'Energy,' the impetus behind all motion and activity, is 'the capacity to do work' or 'the power to do work' and derives from the Greek energeia, 'action, act, work.' Energy – its generation, distribution, use, and misuse – was a central concern to be addressed within the Future Works studio at the Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA). The students, in addressing the needs of their prospective clients, developed a number of schemes and ideas involving small-scale and community-based energy generation exploiting wind, solar, and hydropower. Through researching historic precedents they proposed to reintroduce regional or city-wide 'micro' grids and to reestablish the visual and audible links to energy generation. In making energy generation 'noisy,' the students hoped to increase awareness among the populace of the resources required to generate electricity and instil a greater sense of its value. I was reminded of a previous period of concern for energy use in the early 1970s. The oil crisis of 122

1973 – when the oil-producing countries of OPEC had restricted production – had engendered enormous concern for energy security and painted a clear picture of what it would be like to live in a world coping with a limited oil supply. Domestic power cuts and a three-day week for industry highlighted the country's dependence on oil and was an early example of the increasing interdependence of global trade. This sense of vulnerability reinforced a concern, already established among the radical movements of the time, about the need for alternative sources of community-based, renewable energy. In 1976 the editors of Undercurrents – part of the left-leaning underground press – published Radical technology, a hands-on guide to building and harnessing small-scale technologies at the level of the home and the neighbourhood. The publication became a touchstone for the development of Future primitive, encompassing a daring and challenging vision of the future, "a fundamental re-examination of the role of technology in modern societies." Together with information on sourcing and acquiring materials, Radical Technology sets out – through diagrams, illustrations, and instructions – proposals for repurposing existing machinery and incorporating it into energy-generating devices. The imagery and language is strangely historic, and yet still forward thinking and utopian. It contributed to a growing sense that I wanted the artwork to sit in an ambiguous temporal location, suggestive of emerging concepts of decentralised local energy generation even while incorporating relics from a 40-year-old technological experiment. The time shift was echoed in the rediscovery and possible reemployment of 200-year-old riverbased energy-generation infrastructure (Strutt's Mill on the river Derwent), a time period that had witnessed the introduction, exploitation, and decline of steam power and centrally generated coal-fired electricity. Sheffield has a long and well-recognised history of manufacturing, particularly in the making and forging of steel, including the invention and development of stainless steel. The period of collaboration with the Future Works studio at

SSoA took place within the context of a citywide celebration of making organised through 'The Sheffield Year of Making 2016.' Continuing the exploration of 'making' in my own work, I chose to use a modern zinc-plated steel sheet for the central hubs of Future primitive. The components were cut from the plate using a computer-controlled high-pressure water-jet cutter, implementing instructions created in a computer-aided manufacturing programme by the machine's operator. The flat components were then rolled to form rings, a task I undertook myself on a piece of equipment that would be familiar to 19th-century steel workers, before a friend welded the rings closed using relatively unsophisticated equipment housed in a tumbledown shed. I chose to exploit these varied methods of production as a further reflection on the principles laid out in Radical technology – an ad hoc use of readily available fabrication processes, both formal and informal, that was familiar the world over yet that stood in antithesis to the Factory of the Future.

that would slot into the final steel hub. However, these vanes would be made from general-purpose stoneware clay, then rolled and cut to shape by hand before being dried on a curved former and smoke-fired in a backyard kiln. In certain dystopic futures we may need to rediscover technologies of making currently lost to domesticscale production, a situation anticipated within the present 'protect and survive'-era narrative of Radical technology. ▷▷An extract from 'Art, the Architectonic and Future Works,' a chapter of Tom Beesley's thesis, which forms part of a practice-based fine art PhD at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.

In drawing together the materials for assembling Future primitive, it was important to continue the engagement with non-artistic production. Six steel pressings were recovered from a commercial waste recycling operation and welded into one of the central hubs. A further iteration exploited precut 2'x4' sheets of plywood – a versatile and strong material created in huge volumes in dedicated production facilities by bonding together veneers of timber running at right angles to each other. What it is 'to make' sits at the core of my art practice. Indeed our relationship to 'making' was a central concern to be addressed within the period working alongside the architectural students. Having completed the hubs for the Future primitive assemblies, I had sought to combine them with other material objects that would expand the narrative of making. Given the extended conversations around energy, its generation and use that had been taking place with the Future Works studio, I decided to reference developments in turbine technologies at AMRC by manufacturing 12 ceramic blades 123

Live Projects | Portland Works | One Great Workshop

One Great Workshop 124

Live Projects

The One Great Workshop Live Project explored potential energy strategies for Portland Works, a community-owned factory in Sheffield. The project worked closely with clients, tenants, volunteers, and shareholders, with a focus on the energy demands and constraints of the Works. Out of the project emerged: two prototypes of temporary secondary glazing for the factory, developed from discarded materials; a seesaw

sawdust briquette press, which used on-site byproducts to make fuel for tenants' rocket stoves; two options for 'pod' designs that would make the artists' spaces more comfortable in cold weather; and an accompanying construction manual for each. These items were all designed collaboratively in order to help make and conserve energy at a local scale, and to provide valuable resources for the future. 125

Live Projects | Portland Works | One Great Workshop

One Great Workshop: energy stories

Julia Udall and Renata Tyszczuk

"We must regard it as one great workshop for the production of cutlery and edge-tools – a huge factory which scatters its separate departments in different parts of the town, but still retains them all, like so many links in a chain." (The Penny Magazine, 1844) The "one great workshop" of 19th-century Sheffield comprised a network of large factories and a great number of 'little mesters' – specialist self-employed craftsmen and their apprentices – which shaped the physical, social, pedagogical, and economic landscape of the city. The little mesters' individual workshops were often grouped together to share communal sources of power. At times they would collaborate to fulfil big and complex orders, and at other times worked separately on their specialty items. In recent years many of these kinds of integrated factories in Sheffield have diversified in use, with new makers like artists and musicians moving in, and traditional craftsmen bringing in more high-tech equipment and processes to use alongside their old tools and practices. The past, present and future of Sheffield's industries are tied to changing relations with energy in the workplace. Portland Works, a Grade II*-listed former cutlery factory, has been in community ownership since 2013, as the result of a successful campaign. The Works provides affordable workspaces for small manufacturing businesses as well as independent artists and craftsmen and relies on volunteers for upkeep and renovations. As a communityowned social enterprise, it is intent on promoting small-scale businesses, and all its projects must consider social benefit and the need to safeguard the heritage of manufacturing in the city of Sheffield. In achieving these aims, its tenants and directors need to consider how they use energy in what promises to be a carbon-limited and resource-constrained future, in which energy prices are set to rise considerably. 126

In autumn 2014 we mentored Masters design students from the Sheffield School of Architecture on their Live Project at Portland Works, working with the community of tenants and volunteers to devise an energy strategy for the future. The Portland Works building manager, Colin Havard, introduced the students to the site. He explained how Portland Works had evolved from a number of 'little mesters' sharing one source of power at the Works to 12 different electricity suppliers serving one building. Stories of making and stories of energy have always been intertwined at Portland Works. Here are a few stories that arose out of One Great Workshop Live Project. They are excerpted from the blog the students kept during the project. 7th October 2014 We visited Portland Works on volunteer day, hoping to talk to some of the volunteers and tenants on site. We first spoke to Jimmy, who has been at Portland Works for 32 years. He told us he has no family link with the site, but simply "wanted something doing and couldn't find someone to do it so started to do it [himself]." People now think of things they want to make and set him the task of making them, from the everyday to the highly novel (he showed us a light he was making out of a jousting helmet). All his work, he does in his own workshop, but others come to him for bits they need doing. He describes Portland Works as "like a big family." On talking to him about the building itself, he said that even after all this time at Portland Works, he still notices new

things. "One day a bit of paint will fall off," for example, creating a new image. He has quite a few stories to tell us about his time here, some more unfortunate than others, and he speaks with enthusiasm about projects with friends. One of these focuses on the idea of perpetual motion – a dream of "free energy" that many have grappled with but no one has yet realised. He shows us drawings for a mechanism powered by pushbike, part of the grand experiment. 14th October 2014 We spoke to Stuart, who makes custom knives for a range of clients. The requests can vary from traditional knives to swords and even sword plates. Stuart has been at Portland Works since 1985, with his parents initially starting at Stag Works here in 1980. He started in an apprenticeship at Portland Works with his father. His family was in the cutlery business, but he moved in his own direction toward custom-making knives. Stuart showed us one of his recent commissions for a client in Ireland. The knife itself is made out of 15 layers of Japanese steel with a hard core. The handle is even more interesting, as it comes from the 10,000-yearold tusk of an excavated woolly mammoth. It is fascinating to see the skill required to work with such a range of materials. Stuart told us he feels a very strong connection to the place, particularly with his family connection. He has used pretty much the same tools since starting at Portland Works, and has even carried on using tools from his parents' time at Stag Works. It was particularly relevant that he told us he has "seen more changes in Portland Works in the last 18 months than in the last 18 years," since there was the threat of turning the building into student accommodation. To save it, the inhabitants had to own it, and they managed to achieve this. Now, he says, he just wants to see the building "dry and warm." A crucial part of the site visit was speaking to Mark and hearing about his rocket stove – a type of stove of very simple design, but of extremely high efficiency. Mark has put a lot of effort into creating a comfortable space to work

through the use of secondary glazing, as well as partitioning off an insulated office space. He uses the rocket stove for heating during the colder months. Rocket stoves are dual-purpose, having always been used for cooking as well as heating, which makes them more energyefficient. Mark's rocket stove is made from an old air receiver, part of a massive compressor. He told us it needs a good flue to get a strong enough draft, and that he fuels it with spare wood from around the site. He has even used sawdust on site as it is coarse and burns well (interesting to learn, as we'd heard it burns too quickly). His initial plan was to have a bank of smaller burners along one wall, but after looking into rocket stoves he decided to take a few weeks to get his up and running. We look forward to seeing it in action in the coming weeks. 17th October 2014 We have been enjoying getting to know the tenants at Portland Works and hearing more about their stories and connection with the building. This, in turn, is developing our own story as we progress in our Live Project and learn more about the role of energy on site. Today we paid another visit to Andy, the blacksmith at Portland Works. The main water pipes on site run above Andy's forge, so that the water is warmed before being transferred to the rest of the building. Transporting energy – as heat, or in other forms – is a major engineering challenge, as is the minimisation of energy waste, so this scheme was of great interest to us. Andy's forge is a great source of heat on site and he told us that other tenants come to socialise in his workshop during the winter months to keep warm. In the One Great Workshop Live Project, students, tenant-makers, building managers, and researchers together probed questions energy, manufacturing, and the city past, present and future. These encounters made possible the coproduction of new stories, not only about Portland Works but also about a city's response to a carbon-constrained future.

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Live Projects | Portland Works | One Great Workshop | A lightbulb moment

A lightbulb moment One Great Workshop Live Project, Charlotte Eley

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Studio Future Works | Little Mesters

Little Mesters

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Sam Austin Studio Future Works

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Studio Future Works | Little Mesters

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The project proposes a Sheffield Trading Point for 2025, inspired by the 'little mesters' tradition of Sheffield. In this scenario the future makers of Sheffield are based in 'toolbox' units within a prefabricated workshop space that can be customised, adapted, and distributed according to their requirements. The workshops are powered by a community energy scheme for the city of Sheffield, based on renewable sources. The whole site can be reconfigured from a makers' factory to an exhibition market at different times of the week or year. Sheffield Trading Point thus creates a series of spaces and connections in which making is revealed as integral to the city's future. At the same time it promotes Sheffield's manufacturing trade as an economic alternative to modern retail incentives.

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Live Projects | Made North and Mesters Works | Future Factories and Mester Makers

Future Factories and Mester Makers Live Projects

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The Future Factories and Mester Makers Live Project in 2016 explored the potential for collaborative making in the city of Sheffield, in the context of the emergence of new technologies and modes of work in the arts, crafts, and manufacturing. Working with clients Patrick Murphy of Made North and Sarah Hill of Mesters Works and makers across the city, the students developed proposals for activating collaboration between different makers. The students developed prototypes to test how a 'Mester Makers' App, along with reconfigurable furniture modules, could be used to refit a series of factory sites (Gripple Ltd; Mesters Works; Portland Works) and shared their proposals in public workshops during Sheffield Design Week 2016.

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Gripple Ltd | A big green tick

Gripple Ltd: A big green tick Interview with Hugh Facey

I'm Hugh Facey, I'm Chairman of Gripple and Loadhog Ltd. We started in 1989 and we moved into this factory, which is an old gun factory, in 1994. It's a fabulous piece of engineering, as only the Victorians did, and it makes you realise how much things have moved on, particularly on the energy front. As I said, the history of the company and where we came from is that we had a fencing business, and we needed to join fences – or farmers did – so we developed the Gripple joining and tensioning device, and last year, we made our 500 millionth. When one looks back it's a bit of a surprise in 25 years to have made that many Gripples, but we sell them worldwide, 86% being exported to parts of the world that have a lot of vineyards. We have obviously been a big user of energy over the years, particularly in the die-casting operation, where you have to heat the zinc up to melting temperature. We've developed a procedure whereby we put the sprues [the scrap pieces around a die-cast object, which must be removed after casting] back into the melting pot as soon as the item's made, so we don't use as much energy from that point of view. That's just a little example of how you can save it. Another thing we did, three years ago, was we got a company to help us explore how we could reduce our energy use. Just by talking to all the staff about how they use energy and where they use it, we reckon we've 136

saved about 7% of our energy cost, just by people being more careful – putting lights off, not putting them on when they don't need them, those sorts of ideas. We're an employee-owned business, as you know, and that means that we're all in it together. Obviously energy is a big cost, so any savings we can make in energy, everybody saves. You'll notice we've not got many lights on at the moment, 'cause the sun's been shining and it's nice when it's shining like that. In terms of innovation, with the Gripple Hangfast system we have replaced the old threaded rod – steel rod with wire around it – with wire rope. That simple change is something like a 90% carbon saving. So in terms of the products that we're selling, it's a massive green tick, because you don't have to use anything like the energy to make the piece of wire rope as you would to make the threaded rod. We are in the process of developing a wind turbine, which isn't like these horrible things that you see when you're driving down the M1, but is much more like a jet engine that you can put on the top of a factory, or distribution centre, or office block, which will operate at a much wider range of speeds. So it will start at about five or six mile-anhour winds, but it doesn't close down when it gets

The Old West Gun Works, Gripple Ltd. Photo: Renata Tyszczuk.

to 40, which is what these other wind turbines do. Ours will go on up to about 70 miles an hour. It's still very early days; we've got a prototype being built and by the end of June, it will give us some indicative numbers on how much energy it will generate. We're doing all the work here because we want to create jobs in Sheffield. We started this business here in Sheffield. People who say that they can get things made in China cheaper haven't invested as we've invested. Will Gripple relate to energy going forward? It would be nice to think so. One big question right now is whether we should be putting photovoltaic panels on the factories. The trouble is that if we were in the South of France or in Spain it probably would work pretty well, but maybe not here. If the Whoosh [wind turbine] turns out to work well and generate electricity economically, then certainly we will be putting those on top of the factories. Where is energy going to go? I don't know. I think we'll have a lot more wind energy, which is why we're investing in the Whoosh business. It seems to be when one goes to Germany, for example, you just see wind turbine after wind turbine after wind turbine. You go to Spain, it is very similar there actually as well. So will we move that way? I think we've got a problem with our politicians, they are pretty clueless so I don't think we're going to get much direction from them.

What's the biggest challenge in running the business? I don't think there are a lot of challenges; it's great fun, we've got great people. People are always the most important thing, but the fact that they're all shareholders, and involved in the business and committed to it, means we don't have the problems that many businesses have with keeping employees motivated. The biggest challenge, I suppose, is just developing the new products for the next 20, 40, 50 years. We get a lot of ideas from our customers. They'll say, "Oh this is a problem," and we'll try and find a solution. It's pretty simple, it's not rocket science. We have no job descriptions. The only job description is that if you see the ball dropping and it's near you, you catch it. And it's amazing, if you don't have job descriptions people can actually get on and do something – job descriptions stop people doing things. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Hugh Facey, the founder and chairman of employee-owned company Gripple Ltd. 30th April 2015, Gripple Ltd, The Old West Gun Works, Sheffield.

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Gripple Ltd | Impact beyond the factory walls

Impact beyond the factory walls Interview with Gordon Macrae

Energy is a really interesting subject for Gripple. We didn't start out being swampies, but actually the environment and sustainability have become really key issues. I think the first issue to probably mention is that we love manufacturing in old buildings and the challenge that you have is that they're built with an 18th-century, 19th-century infrastructure, which means that in terms of energy they're quite challenging. But I think what we've basically tried to do is to put very much a modern take on all of our buildings, to invest in them and to make sure that we optimise their environmental energy performance. What we've got is a combination of history and technology coming together to create some very interesting and innovative spaces. One of the things we're very proud of is that we've grown our turnover significantly more than our consumption of energy. There's a constant rolling programme every year of getting energy reductions. We've done probably every sort of thing that we can sensibly do within the infrastructure that we've got. LED lights is one example. The real challenge is in heating. We have a huge barn here of a building that's really challenging to heat, we have staff that have a range of temperature requirements from freezing to boiling, and to try and accommodate that, we've actually set up different temperature zones. I guess ultimately for the person that still complains it's too cold, we're probably going to have issue Gripple duffle coats or sleeping bags. One of the things that we recognised, probably about seven or eight years ago, was that we have an environmental impact. It started from having the Carbon Trust come in and actually do an energy audit. They said, "Your carbon footprint is great, you're only using 500 tons of carbon." And I thought about that and said, "That's rubbish!" because if you look at the amount of carbon 138

that we're using, up and down the supply chain, it's significantly more than that. So we got a university student and we did an exercise into carbon mapping up and down the supply chain. That was very much ahead of its time and it was really interesting – we were not using 500 tons of carbon, actually. The total was close on 6,500. 4,500 tons comes from the manufacturing process, but 4,000 tons of that comes from upstream manufacturing – zinc and polymers. So that was a real eye opener for us. And then in terms of energy, if you take a broader view, there's probably 2,000 tons of carbon that's being used either transporting raw materials into the business or transporting goods out to our customers. We've learnt we need to focus on transport – because it costs money, and because it uses carbon. We've started to choose suppliers we know to be focused on doing on environmental best practice. It turns out sustainability and cost-effectiveness can work together. But it doesn't simply stop there, because the thing that's really important to us is a process of continuous improvement and innovation. With our agricultural Gripple, for example, we're onto the fifth iteration of the product. The latest iteration uses 25% less material. Using computer-aided design you can optimise the strength in the product, and that results in a product that uses less energy to manufacture. We're looking at improving the capabilities and the performance of all of our machines. We never build the same machine twice. The next iteration has always got to be 15 or 20% better – and part of that is the environmental performance. What's really important for us is that we have long-term sustainability in our supply chain. We're always looking for best practice, and whatever

we learn, we share. What's really encouraging is – and I'm not saying we completely control this, but as an indicator of where we may be having some influence – we consume 1,200 tons of zinc every year, purchased from a UK supplier. And he knows we're always chasing greater efficiency in the system. From working with us, he's recognised that the way for him to be competitive is to invest in state-of-the-art furnaces and efficient energy, because that's his biggest cost. I think what you're seeing there is an alignment of the requirements of upstream and downstream in the manufacturing process that benefits everybody and is more sustainable. Our long-term objective is to have an energy source that we derive ourselves, so it will be completely renewable. Now where will that come from? It will come from possibly using some micro-hydro at the riverside factory. We're also working on a project called Whoosh: a wind turbine system designed for manufacturing units, to make them sustainable. In time we hope that by investing in technology we will have a free source of energy that is not dependent on the grid. We're just embarking on metal injection moulding, which is a new process. Very few companies do it in the UK, but we believe that it's potentially a product of the future. Composites again are something that may well come through. Now I think in the end at least some of these individual products will require less energy. But as you go through the learning curve and the early implementation, there is a chance that you'll go back to the drawing board a lot, and consume more energy than you'd like. And that's not something that we're particularly comfortable doing, but you've got to actually grow and you've got to develop.

effectively be generated through base stations and then beamed to the next router or to the next light. I think the thing that perhaps disappoints me on the climate change debate is that we're still arguing about whether it has an impact or not. I think the really important thing is that we get out there and educate people that excessive use of energy is a problem and it's using scarce resources. We really need an education programme to get the facts out there and develop a value system around energy use. Now one of our interesting hobby horses is feed-in tariffs. We don't believe they should exist, because they've stalled the market. You see it with things like solar, where the government makes an announcement and everybody piles into solar while the feed-in tariffs are there, and then as they fade out, it dies. What's really important is that innovative companies develop solutions that people can invest in on a normal payback basis. Traditionally, environmental energy projects have had up to 10- or 15-year payback rates, which is fundamentally unacceptable. With the Whoosh project, we're saying this thing has to pay back in 18 months to 36 months, without feed-in tariffs. By focussing on creating technological solutions, I think you can then demonstrate to people that there is a better way, and that we can go a long way to – I'm not saying reverse the decline in the climate, but certainly to mitigate the impact of a growing global economy. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Gordon Macrae, Special Projects Manager, Gripple Ltd. 19th February 2015, Gripple Ltd, The Old West Gun Works, Sheffield.

For example, if you look at some of the really interesting stuff that's going on in lighting, we did a KTP with Sheffield two years ago, developing a prototype for the wireless transmission of power. If you think of a house or a building today, a large chunk of it is tied up in wiring. In 10 or 20 years' time, no it won't be – all of the power in it will 139

Gripple Ltd | A virtual prototype

A virtual prototype

Gordon Macrae

So often today, when faced with a complex problem, we seek a single discrete action or solution which we hope will last into the long term. This may sometimes work out, but the reality is that, usually, to create something that is sustainable in the long term, we have to continually observe, learn, and adapt. Prototyping is a way to try out new ideas without risking mega failure. As such, it is an excellent way to learn. It is possible to build prototyping into the very heart of your business model, so that everything you do is an ongoing virtual prototype â&#x20AC;&#x201C; full of challenges and blind alleys, but also great fun. I have found that this ultimately results in greater success and longevity, because you are constantly adapting to circumstances in a fast-moving world. Let's create a new business! You come up with a great new idea. The idea is prototyped and prototyped, and hopefully you can do it in fewer than the 5127 prototypes that James Dyson is said to have tried before bringing the cyclone vacuum to market. You launch the product to an audience that is both complimentary and critical. You listen to your customers, who are clamouring for improved capabilities and the fixes to the problems you know you should have dealt with before you launched. Again you prototype, and launch the 'mark two' version. This gives you traction, but with success comes further challenges. You are struggling to keep up with demand. Guess what? You need to prototype solutions to eliminate the bottlenecks â&#x20AC;&#x201C; temporary fixes that will buy you time to find the long-term staffing, systems, and capacity solutions you need. And once you get all of these things, if you want to make life easy (or easier) for yourself, it is back to prototyping. Before long you have international reach and customers are asking for specific international versions. As much as you would like to stay homogenised, you can't turn down the global opportunity and you are back prototyping the international version. However, these additional sales make you less and less efficient, and you need to be 140

Loadhog Ltd. Photo: Renata Tyszczuk.

aware of the biggest impediment to corporate success, the big bang initiative. Filling offices around the world with dread, horror, and fear, they inevitably fail because they have not been prototyped. But we are smart, we try solutions quietly without fuss, in key departments, with people who are clever and want to make things easy. They become advocates for new solutions which can then be cascaded through the organisation. On the way to becoming a global success, our business has had its fair share of problems, but it has depended on prototyping to respond with agility and creativity to problems as they arose. Without doubt, this has got Gripple to where it is today with fewer staff grey hairs, more cash, and a team we hope have so far enjoyed the journey. â&#x2013;ˇâ&#x2013;ˇGordon Macrae is Special Projects Manager at Gripple Ltd Sheffield. Gripple Ltd operates with the 'Glide Ethos.' GLIDE is an employee-owned company that represents all the shareholder members who work in its partner companies. The letters of GLIDE are an acronym of: Growth Led Innovation Driven Employee Company Limited.

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Studio Future Works | Energy Map

Energy Map Studio Future Works

A collaborative 'Energy Map' that reimagines a factory for Gripple Ltd by Studio Future Works. The students were taken on a tour of Gripple's factories, the Old West Gun Works, and the Loadhog building and innovation centre. Gordon Macrae highlighted the key energy challenges, the varied processes of manufacturing, and the social infrastructure of the employee-owned company. The workshop that followed, the Energy Lab, was a challenge to rethink and redraw energy and consider how innovation might take place in a future Gripple factory. The resulting Energy Map, made in discussion with Gordon, students, and researchers, reconsiders energy and industrial production in and around Gripple's Loadhog factory. It takes account 142

of key machinery, potential energy generation, UK energy systems change, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience, and emergency responses, along with changes to the workplace and working week. Connections were made on the map on a range of scales: machines on the factory floor were powered by local sources, wind and water power fed back into the grid and linked up with wider energy systems. The dynamic and responsive Energy Map traces all the ways in which energy is 'working' in the factory of the future.

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Studio Future Works | Let's make energy noisy!

Let's make energy noisy! Studio Future Works

The majority of energy in the UK is currently provided by non-renewable sources. 30% is sourced from coal and 30% from gas. A further 19% is produced from nuclear energy power plants, with a further four additional plants planned for completion in the near future. At present 19% is supplied by renewable sources. By 2050 we would love to see this ratio flipped on its head with 60% of energy coming from renewable sources. However we appreciate that the phasing of energy takes a long time. In order to better understand this, we have explored how energy has been produced over time, but on a much smaller scale, in and around Sheffield. One of the first methods of generating power in Sheffield was the watermill. Shepherd Wheel is one of the earliest examples, dating back to 1584. Waterwheels were used to power machinery for mechanical processes such as milling, rolling, or hammering, using the natural source of the river to make factories energy-self-sufficient. In 1818 the first gasworks was opened in Sheffield, marking the beginning of non-renewable sources being used to generate energy. The gasworks operated on a local scale, powering street lamps and nearby industry. In 1886, a pioneering engineer created his own small power station in his repair shop in the centre of the city. He not only powered his own premises, but used excess energy to power the jeweller's display window next door. By 1904 the city's first power station had opened, located

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in Neepsend and supplying the local area. It was located next to the river for cooling and the railway line for access. In 1934, Sheffield was connected to what is now known as the National Grid. For the first time, the city's energy could be sourced from anywhere within the UK. Power was now being operated on a national scale. 1956 saw Margaret Thatcher open the UK's first Nuclear Power Plant. The '90s saw a development in technology that meant renewable sources were now efficient enough to start supplying the UK with energy. The first renewable source in the region was the hydroelectric system used to power the Masson Mills site in Matlock Bath. Any surplus energy from this is fed into the National Grid but there is no guarantee that it supplies Sheffield. By 2050 we envision a complete return to a more localised power supply in Sheffield. We could have a more personal, collaborative relationship with energy just like the engineer and the nextdoor jewellers shop had. Energy used to be noisy and in your face. Workers used to return from the coalmines covered in soot, factories were loud, and smoke used to bellow from the chimneys. We do not anticipate a return to this polluted, non-renewable scenario, but we think that energy should return to being vibrant and present to increase our awareness of supply and consumption. In other words, "How can we make energy more 'noisy'?"

In our future scenario, Energy Strategy 2050, all energy usage is monitored and controlled by the community. Energy use in the built environment is made more visible and society is more conscious about energy usage. On the way to 2050, awareness of renewable energy sources is raised throughout the community via 'Energy Installations' within the city and Education Programmes for local schools and communities. Sheffield's Energy Strategy 2050 becomes an exemplar for the rest of the UK. This is a strategy at city scale. The existing National Grid system is divided into a network of connected microgrids. Each city region can produce their own energy and share energy between different areas. This strategy allows greater flexibility, efficiency, and resilience to the energy supply. Energy Strategy 2050: ◉◉ Is managed by a not-for-profit co-operative energy bank – the 'Battery.' ◉◉ Incorporates a mixture of energy sources, which utilise the abundant natural resources specific to the region, for example water power.

◉◉ Existing neighbourhoods are retrofitted to improve their environmental performance. ◉◉ Transport Systems are improved with electric drive technologies. ◉◉ Microgrids are supported by a few select power stations using cleaner energy sources . ◉◉ Energy is shared within the microgrid to improve efficiency; energy is stored for later use for low demand activities such as charging car batteries and water heating can be done during off peak periods. ◉◉ Cross-connections are made a national level to other city region microgrid. This also allows for resource availability and seasonal fluctuations between UK regions to be mitigated. Let's make energy noisy! ▷▷An extract from a presentation by Studio Future Works: Energy Strategy 2050 at Sheffield School of Architecture, December 2015.

◉◉ Community Energy Schemes supply local neighbourhoods with clean energy. ◉◉ Invests in research for developments in technology.

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Studio Future Works | Towards Voltopia

Towards Voltopia 146

Jack Baker Studio Future Works

Towards Voltopia imagines a transformed energy distribution system for Sheffield and the region. In this scenario the city relies on various forms of 'vernacular' energy, generated across its unique landscape: solar, hydro, wind, and geothermal. Brightside in the Upper Don Valley has become a test bed for ways of working with renewable energy in the city. At its heart is an innovation facility, located next to the river, that tests substation equipment and the most effective ways of storing, distributing, and repurposing Sheffield's energy. 147

Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust | Power Island

Power Island

John Hamshere

Kelham Island Museum tells the industrial story of Sheffield, but the island itself has always been about POWER. It is a man-made island created in the 12th century when a weir was built to divert water into a millrace, or 'goit,' to drive the waterwheel of a corn mill. In the 1600s it became home to the water-powered grinding hull of the town armourer, Kellam Homer. The goit continued to provide power to waterwheels that drove a cotton mill, a short-lived silk mill, and other metal industries.

first nuclear power station at Calder Hall; and finishing its working life rolling plate for the North Sea Oil industry. The project has several elements. In the 'Power House' visitors will experience steam power, seeing the new boiler in action with interpretation telling the story of 'Power Island.' The 'PowerLab' interactives will inspire young scientists, while the '1916 House' explores home life and Sheffield's 1916 Zeppelin raid. A community programme is collecting memories of the Engine and creating a new volunteer team.

The Museum building was originally a power station, built in 1897 to generate electricity for Sheffield's new tram system. It housed large steam-powered generating engines in what is now the main gallery. The boiler house, which had a rank of Lancashire Boilers, is now the Museum's Engineering Workshops.

The Museum is undergoing other changes driven by the need to generate more of its own income in the wake of cuts to local authority funding. In the last four years, earned income has been increased by over 700%, and admissions by 400%. The Museum is now a prime wedding venue and sits in an up-and-coming residential area of Sheffield with lots of new blocks of flats and restored factory buildings. Thanks to its number of new micro-breweries and great real ale pubs, the area has acquired the nickname 'valley of beer.'

The Museum was created following the rescue in the 1970s of the mighty 12,000 hp River Don Engine, which needed a building of sufficient size to house it. It was moved into a building added in 1912 to house a rotary converter, changing mains AC into DC as the trams needed more power. This Engine, one of the world's most powerful steam engines still in operation, provided the inspiration for Kelham's latest Heritage Lottery-funded project, 'Sheffield 1916: Steel, Steam & Power.' Built to roll armour plate for First World War dreadnoughts, the Engine is representative of Sheffield's major role in shipbuilding as the largest centre for steel for battleship ordnance, propulsion machinery, and hulls. Two manuscript accounts books discovered in Kelham's archives reveal that the Engine rolled armour plate for most of the capital ships that fought at Jutland in 1916. As part of 'Sheffield 1916' we ensured the continued running of the Engine through installing a new boiler. We also installed exhibits on the Engine's role in producing armour plate for ships and tanks; rolling the thermal shields for the world's 148

John Hamshere continues the conversation about energy challenges at Kelham Island Museum with Alex Pettifer: Alex Pettifer: I think the biggest change, for me, is how much patience people have. When I was a kid and lived at home and we wanted a bath, my mum and dad had to put a boiler on to boil the water to fill the bath. Now everything is instant, everybody expects everything in an instant, so we've moved to condensing boilers that heat water very quickly, for instance. And part of the consequence of that timing issue, everybody expects to get hold of a light switch and a light to come on. I don't think energy can keep up with that to be quite honest, because what we're actually saying is the winds need to blow harder, so that the wind power gets stronger, and therefore it can be faster. There is, I think, a connection to psychology, to people's attitudes.

Kelam Island Museum. Photo: Renata Tyszczuk. There's less patience now to wait for the boiler to boil, to have a bath in front of the fire, like I did many, many years ago. John Hamshere: I'll bring it back down to the domestic level again. The reason the infrared heater is switching on and off in the background is because of the move from trying to heat space to trying to heat people. So that is a working illustration of how, on the micro level, an organisation like ours is moving to a more energyconscious environment. In a massive industrial space like this, it would be mad to try and heat (using old-fashioned heaters) the entire space. We do have some radiators in here. but they are just attached to a general system that provides background heat. AP: And we can't afford to have the heating on all the time. JH: No. So the focus, when you have a space like this, an old industrial space with a roof – it's all been insulated and so on but the walls are old-

fashioned walls – the only thing you can do is to heat the people who use it, and that's what these heaters do. We've introduced that in all sorts of places in the museum. But I think there's a bit of a dichotomy between what the government expects people to do on an individual level, and yet not putting in place legislation to deal with actually increasing consumption of electricity by all sorts of devices in this electronic age. I can't remember the figures, but it seems that the actual energy consumption from all these gadgets we get is actually huge, and yet you can't switch them off, you know? Yet on the other hand we have all these dreadful energy-efficient bulbs I have at home, which you have to wait 10 minutes before you get any decent light out of them. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Alex Pettifer, Chair, and John Hamshere, Chief Executive, of Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust. 14th Jan 2015, Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield. 149

Studio Future Works | The House Factory

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The House Factory

Maria Henshall, Studio Future Works

The House Factory proposes a factory for prefabricated homes, combined with an apprenticeship college for advanced manufacturing technology, to be located in the residential area of Kelham Island, Sheffield's former 'Power Island.' The project draws on the UK government report 'The factory of the future' and research by the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, which anticipates increased innovation in manufacturing, smaller-scale factories, and distributed systems. The design has explored what reconfiguration and adaptability might mean in the future factory, and how factories might be situated in â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and furthermore 'make' â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the residential areas of the city. The House Factory brings together stakeholders from industry, education, creative making, and construction with Kelham Island's residents for collaborative house-making.

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Derby Silk Mill | The world's first factory

The world's first factory It seems fitting that the Future Works strand of the Stories of Change project, which explores how energy has shaped culture, society, and landscape, should be launched at the site of the world's first factory â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Silk Mill in Derby. Here, in 1719, in the spirit of scientific discovery and the belief that humanity could subdue nature, the river Derwent was harnessed to drive the huge water wheel which powered Derby's Silk Mill. Nearly 100 years earlier, Francis Bacon had anticipated the Enlightenment view of a completely knowable and controllable Earth. He wrote in 1623, "For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings." Derby Museums' collections are an apt frame for this intellectual current. Our collection of work by Derby painter Joseph Wright is the finest in the world. Wright is recognised as the visual artist of the Enlightenment. Works like The alchymist (1771) and A blacksmith's shop (1771) revealed how science and experimentation stimulated new industry. Wright also painted key figures of the period, such as the polymath Erasmus Darwin and the clockmaker and amateur geologist John Whitehurst â&#x20AC;&#x201C; proponents of experimentation, iconoclasm, and faith in the perfectibility of humanity. Wright's famous Orrery (1776), in which a man of learning explains the workings of the universe to curious minds young and old, is evidence of the optimism of this Enlightened world. Wright also painted the new captains of industry. In Derby Museum and Art Gallery hangs a huge painting of Richard Arkwright, the founder of Cromford Mill. The potbellied Arkwright sits comfortably, a man growing rich on the new industrial society in which people and machines were becoming part of the same system. Derby Silk Mill predates both Wright and Arkwright. Opened in 1719, it was a wonder of its age. It was lauded by Daniel Defoe, who described it as an "engine," as if its component parts of machines and people were one and the 152

Tony Butler

same. So while our friends in Ironbridge might disagree, we think that, for better or worse, industrial society was born here. The waters of the Derwent were also the confluence of nature tamed and Enlightenment values of science and commerce. By the 19th century, coal had replaced water power at the Silk Mill, having proved a more efficient and powerful source of energy. A reliance on the rhythms of nature was diminished, replaced by dependency on extracted fossil fuel. As industrial society transformed the landscape of the entire United Kingdom, Derby, centrally located and home to the Midland Railway Works, became a key transport hub. Fossil fuel powered the engines that moved people and goods, creating supply chains, growing trades, and encouraging new products to be developed and consumed throughout the world. Andrew Handyside's Derby iron foundry made the bridge across Bassein Creek in Bombay. It also manufactured most post boxes during Queen Victoria's reign. The Butterley ironworks company manufactured the enormous wrought iron frame of the roof of St Pancras station. Rolls Royce, pioneers of aeronautics, was set up in Derby. The Silk Mill currently houses three engines of great significance: the Eagle, which in 1919 powered the first Transatlantic flight by Alcock and Brown; the Wittle jet engine; and the RB211, Rolls Royce's jet engine, which would set the standard for large aircraft engines in the 1970s. But Derby's legacy as a city of makers is one that is indelibly marked by the consumption of fossil fuels. Our museums of industry were, until recently, shrines to engineering and the power to overcome nature. We have forgotten that we live within the finite limits of nature and its resources, and it is time to remember. At the same time, mass manufacturing is likely to decline, replaced by new products and services based on opensource technology and the exchange of nonmarket goods like care, ideas, and creativity.

Photo: Tim Mitchell. The challenges of our age will not be solved just by making and consuming differently, but by engaging the public with the question of how to live together better on our crowded planet. Museums enable individuals and communities to learn together. Museum learning is all of the things much orthodox learning is not: curiositydriven, non-judgemental, non-compulsory, engaging, and fun. The people of the future will need to be resourceful, creative systems thinkers – exactly the kind of capacities museum learning can support. The future for Derby's Museums lies in collaboration. The Silk Mill's workshop is full of equipment that stimulates creativity. The public can learn new skills and make things using a Raspberry Pi, CNC router, 3D printer, and laser cutter, as well as more traditional tools and techniques. Volunteers have made museum display cases, designed a mobile kitchen, and told new stories about Derby's cultural heritage. Volunteering at the Museum of Making is a collective enterprise between staff and the public, on an informal give/get basis. Volunteers give time to hack fixtures and fittings and solve problems for the museum; in return they use the equipment and develop skills for their own endeavours.

It's not just the making of the museum that is open-sourced; there is also a knowledge exchange. We advocate the crowd-sourcing of knowledge and experience around collections. This, curated by the museum, stimulates further dialogue with audiences and enhances understanding of objects, narratives, and place. Curation becomes the assemblage of the public's contributions, not just the interpretation of knowledge by the institution. This is real public history. This level of participation should help stimulate a new kind of civic institution, at a time when many of our political institutions are discredited. Most museums' relationships with their visitors are transaction-based. Customers pay an admission fee for an experience, which is primarily didactic. If, as Jon Alexander from the New Citizenship Project contends, we see visitors not as consumers but citizens, then the museums of the future will need to build mutual relationships with the public, be non-hierarchical, and be a platform for the free exchange of knowledge, creativity, and ideas. ▷▷Tony Butler is Executive Director of Derby Museums Trust.

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Derby Silk Mill | Objects of Desire

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Objects of Desire

Daniel Martin Photos: Gorm Ashurst

When we engage with an object in a museum environment we see and feel lots of different things. We might be struck by its beauty; its workmanship; its historical significance; or by some eccentric, entirely personal association. What we rarely engage with are the energy stories inherent in every object. Isolating an object for particular study â&#x20AC;&#x201C; say, by pulling it out of an archaeological dig, or putting it in a glass case in a museum â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is supposed to help us think more deeply about its story. Where it came from, how it was made, what its value was while it was circulating in the world. Sometimes, the glass case becomes the story, and the object floats free of its context, a mere curio. But sometimes, if a museum is doing its job well, the opposite happens â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and even the most seemingly ordinary, unstoried object speaks to us of much bigger processes, decisions, values. Take the friendly little polar bear on this page, who last year arrived at my desk at the Derby Silk Mill Museum, where I work as a curator. About 500 bears were shipped out to offices across our local authority, with a simple mission: to remind us all to turn the lights off. The slogan printed on his side reads, "Saving energy; helping the environment." So far, so noble. Unfortunately, this bear travelled over 5,000 miles from China to pass on the message. He saw the insides of several shipping containers and at least one long-haul truck. He was made out of non-recyclable polyurethane foam in an energy-intensive manufacturing processes, and shipped in an individual, non-recyclable polyethylene bag. That's a lot of energy and resources, quite apart from the human time investment in the creation, transit, marketing, and delivery of the bear. All of which served to remind us to turn the lights off. In a roundabout, unintentional way, the bear's story reinforces its original message. It is a poignant reminder of the untenable position we find ourselves in with regard to sustainability.

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Derby Silk Mill | Objects of Desire

Within the Silk Mill Museum's collections are objects whose energy stories might be less immediately apparent. The scale model of a horse pulling a coal wagon has an obvious link to the earliest years of fossil fuel exploitation, but its significance stretches well into the future, beyond the technology it depicts. In fact, this model represents one of the world's earliest examples of containerisation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the transport of goods in containers of standardised dimensions, which can be moved easily between different modes of transport â&#x20AC;&#x201C; practised on the Little Eaton Gangway from 1795 to 1908. The civil engineer for the project, Benjamin Outram, recognised that containerisation would be key to the efficient carrying of coal from the Derbyshire coalfields at Denby to the Derby Canal at Little Eaton. Initially, an environmentally damaging and inefficient broad canal had been proposed. Instead, containerisation allowed for the coal to be loose-loaded into the wagons only once, at the mines. The wagons were transported by wagon-way to the canal wharf at Little Eaton, and transferred directly onto the waiting barges for delivery to Derby and beyond. This ingenious solution was the forerunner to today's archetypal distribution solution, the shipping container. Occasionally the collection deals with latent energy. Take for example the lead powder, the car battery, or the pep pills. These humble objects say a great deal 156

about our desire to exploit energy on our own terms. The pep pills, made and sold in Derby in the 19th century to help its citizens through their busy days and prop up nervous dispositions, contain a number of chemicals and materials that we consider completely unacceptable today. We're amused by the recklessness of prescribing cocaine as a stimulant to children and adults alike in times past, yet don't blink at the way the contemporary workplace runs on glucose and caffeine. Our descendants may not be so kind about our own attempts to manipulate our human energy with processed substances. The idea that energy can be controlled and harnessed, only to be released when we need it, finds parallels with man's approach to exploiting nature, best summed up by Francis Bacon in 1623: "For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings." From bicycles to signal box bells, every object in a museum's collection has an energy story to tell. Recognising and interpreting these stories is key to unlocking a genuinely transformative experience for audiences, the museum, and society at large, by using collections to empower us all to question our own approach to energy use. â&#x2013;ˇâ&#x2013;ˇDaniel Martin is the Curator of Making at Derby Museums. 157

Live Projects | Derby Silk Mill | Archive and the Machine

Archive and the Machine 158

The Archive and the Machine Live Project of 2015 produced prototypes for a visible storage system for the Silk Mill's vast collection of industrial objects. Working with curator Daniel Martin, the students considered the ways in which the museum's visitors could interact with the objects, and the conditions needed to protect each item. They developed a no-fixings, no-glue plywood display system inspired by Japanese joinery and puzzle boxes. It had low environmental impact, and could be easily made in the Silk Mill's workshops and assembled by anyone. The project linked to the Silk Mill's wider co-production initiative with volunteers from the city of Derby, the Museum of Making. 159

Stories of Change | Future Works photo booth

Future Works photo booth

Photos: Tim Mitchell

The Future Works photo booth was rolled out on a number of occasions and in different settings: the Future Works launch and the Utopia Works events at the Silk Mill Derby, and the workshop with UTC students at Bloc Projects Sheffield. Photographer Tim Mitchell engaged in discussion with individuals and groups of people to elicit an energy question to include in their portrait. The idea is that these questions are shared and potentially answered. But at the very least they circulate in a new dynamic and plural conversation about energy. 160

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Stories of Change | Future Works photo booth

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Cromford Mills | Water power at Cromford Mills

Water power at Cromford Mills David Romaine

In 1769 Richard Arkwright obtained a patent for his 'water frame,' a machine for spinning cotton yarn, and in 1770, with the financial support of some wealthy Nottingham hosiery manufacturers, he took a lease on the site at Cromford which is now occupied by the mill complex. One of the main things that attracted Arkwright to the site was the availability of a supply of water that could power his mills. The key watercourse was the Bonsall Brook, which flows down from Bonsall village, northwest of Cromford, to join the river Derwent near Cromford Bridge. The Brook was joined, in what is now Cromford Market Place, by the Cromford Sough, which had been constructed in the 1660s to drain a number of lead mines on Cromford Moor to the southwest of Cromford. Before Arkwright came to Cromford, the combined flow of the Brook and the Sough, a total of around 75 tons/minute, was already being used to power a corn mill and some mills associated with the preparation and smelting of lead ore.

had also patented the carding engine and the ancillary machinery needed to mechanically produce the cotton roving that was the feedstock for the water frames. In 1776, to capitalise on these achievements, he built his second mill on a site about 100 metres to the east of the original mill. The second mill was significantly larger than the first and all its processes were fully mechanised, making it the first all-mechanical cotton mill in the world. To drive all the machinery in this mill Arkwright needed more power, and his engineers utilised the combined flow of the Brook and the Sough to drive a 50-horsepower breastshot wheel, installed in a deep wheel pit located within the mill building. The depth of the wheel pit necessitated the construction of an outflow tunnel and an open channel, which have a combined length of around one kilometre and which extend from the east face of the wheel pit to a point on the river Derwent that is lower than the bottom of the wheel pit.

Arkwright started building his first mill in 1771. The major axis of the mill building was aligned north-south to make full use of daylight, and the building was positioned between Mill Lane to the south and Bonsall Brook to the north. To power this mill, Arkwright's engineers diverted part of the Sough flow into a purpose-built channel, which ran along the southern edge of the Bonsall Brook valley. This water was carried over Mill Lane in a wooden aqueduct and turned a large overshot waterwheel that was located midway along the eastern side of the mill building. The tail race of the mill stream joined the Bonsall Brook near the northeast corner of the mill. In its original form, the first mill waterwheel would have developed around 12 horsepower.

In around 1785 Arkwright embarked on a scheme to further increase the production capacity of the Cromford site. He did this mainly by extending the first mill building. The extension of the first mill, alongside other developments in production capacity made at this time, meant that Arkwright needed even more power for his machinery. He obtained this extra power in two ways. First he increased the height of the supply channel and the aqueduct, and replaced the original waterwheel at the first mill with a larger one. These modifications would have given him a power increase of about 20%. To magnify this even further, Arkwright installed another waterwheel on the northern gable wall of the first mill extension.

By 1775 Arkwright had proved the commercial and mechanical viability of his water frames. He 164

Detail of map of Cromford watercourses c. 1790 by Charlotte Eley.

In order to power the wheel on the first mill extension, Arkwright embarked on an extensive upgrade of the Cromford watercourses. The most important changes were the construction of the Greyhound Pond and the Sough Dam (the 'Bearpit'). These two structures, together with the culvert linking the Sough to the Pond and the leat which connected the outflow of the Pond to the new waterwheel on the first mill extension, enabled the effective distribution and control of the water supply to the mill complex. As the Greyhound Pond does not hold sufficient water to sustain the extended operation of the water wheel on the first mill extension, it seems likely that part of the Sough water was permanently diverted to the Pond and that this, combined with the water from the Brook, was then used to power the first mill extension. Such an arrangement could have given about 15 horsepower to run the machinery in the extension, while the upgraded aqueduct and bigger waterwheel would have provided about 15 horsepower for the original first mill. The system of culverts and sluices

that were constructed during this phase of the development of the mill complex enabled the effective utilisation of the available water power, and provided a means of controlling and directing the water flow to each of the three waterwheels. â&#x2013;ˇâ&#x2013;ˇDavid Romaine is a volunteer tour guide at Cromford Mills, a site looked after by the Arkwright Society. Cromford Mills is the home of Sir Richard Arkwright's first mill complex, birthplace of the modern factory system and internationally recognised UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Stories of Change team and Studio Future Works were given a tour of the site by Michael Ledger, the Education Officer at Cromford Mills.

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Cromford Mills | Revolution, Arkwright and me

Revolution, Arkwright and me

Kate Fletcher

The Derwent valley is widely acknowledged to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It was there in 1771 that Richard Arkwright established Cromford Mill and mechanised the spinning of cotton yarn. Up to this point, hand spinning was the chief bottleneck in the production of cloth. But Arkwright's 'spinning jenny' changed all of this. Crafted by watchmakers, the device utilised a sequence of rollers turning at progressively faster speeds to first elongate and then apply twist to a loose strand of cotton fibres. It sped up the production process exponentially. The challenge for Arkwright quickly shifted from cotton spinning to the economics of industrialisation and scale: how to convert raw fibre into fabric at volume, and then how to sell this idea to the world. The significance of the processes of industrialisation set in train at Cromford Mill means that I've visited it a good few times. It feels important. I recommend going. On each occasion I've lingered in front of the various portraits of Arkwright that hang there. Nose-to-nose with his likeness I try to figure out what sort of man he was and whether he had any inkling about the change that was about to come. I've heard stories of his brusque manner and his poor personal relationships; I can see his wig, his paunch, his swagger; but I think Arkwright also understood something of the holistic, interconnected nature of the challenges he faced. Doing stuff â&#x20AC;&#x201C; whether that be sparking an industrial revolution (!) or (and here I declare my interest) fostering a sustainability one â&#x20AC;&#x201C; requires that we see things in the round. We have to model the system in its entirety, look at how the parts interact, consider the delights and discomforts therein. We have to put the brakes on that tendency, so characteristic of Western ways of thinking, to reduce the whole to a single part, a tiny piece of the puzzle, and work on it in isolation, hoping that when it is all stuck back together, everything will somehow work out (it doesn't). For his part, Arkwright knew that the task before him was way bigger than the spinning jenny â&#x20AC;&#x201C; innovation had to be total. He harnessed the flow of water through soughs from iron mines to power his machinery; accessed newly available finance (which, before then, was inaccessible for non-aristocrats like him); drew on inventions and patents; provided well-designed accommodation for workers and a local weekly market; offered employment to women; and avoided the backlash of hand workers by building his mechanised 'manufactory' in a part of the country that didn't already have a textile heritage. He tangled with the whole, in more and less savoury ways. Today's whole is no less involved. Nor is it a whole lot more savoury. Today, as in Arkwright's 166

time, we are faced with the issue of resources. It is just that now the chief challenges are the overconsumption of resources by the fashion industry, and the problem of how to imagine doing things differently. By many criteria, the Cromford Mill model was a success. But it has also had multiple – and devastating – unforeseen consequences. Today it is estimated that clothing represents 5-10% of the environmental impact of industry across the European Union. Further, it is thought that 25% of chemicals produced worldwide are used for textiles, and 20% of global industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing and finishing. About 4% of every UK citizen's annual water consumption is considered to result from the use of cotton fabric alone. An estimated 60 billion kilograms of textiles and footwear are burned or sent to landfill every year worldwide. At the same time, worker abuses in supply chains continue – as was recently and horrifically underlined by the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, where more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives. As a culture, fashion is bound up with an economic system that demands growth at all costs, contributing to high – and ever-increasing – levels of individualised consumption. Fashion is readily characterised as the poster industry for consumerist materialism; as frivolous, superficial, and evanescent; as a sector that delivers change without development; and as promoting an obsession with image, status, competition, and individualised success. Yet fashion also provides livelihoods, contributes significantly to culture, and meets fundamental human needs for creative expression and personal pleasure. And over the last two and a half decades there have been many attempts to increase the resource efficiency of the fashion sector. These have resulted in a range of products that make use of lower-impact materials and processes; more streamlined and transparent production chains; home laundering practices which use less energy and water; and new and more varied opportunities to donate and reuse garments at the end of a first life. But – and here we trip up – the effort to make the present system more efficient can never, on its own, be enough. New ideas that emerge from existing systems, without proposing fundamental change to those systems, will always look like the outcomes of those selfsame systems. They will be incremental and predictable in their action, and they will ultimately cause more of the same sorts of problems we are already mired in. We have something to learn from Arkwright's revolutionary approach: what we need to do is break free from existing ways of thinking. We must address at a structural level those things that currently stymie the fashion sector's potential to work for us, rather than exploiting employees and consumers alike. This is the story of change I want to take part in. This is the energetic transformation of our heads, our hearts, and our wardrobes. ▷▷Kate Fletcher is Professor of Sustainability, Fashion and Design at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, a University of the Arts Research Centre based at London College of Fashion. 167

Studio Future Works | Cromford Brewery

Cromford Brewery

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Olivia Smith, Studio Future Works

What is the future of energy, manufacturing, and industrial heritage in the Derwent valley? This project proposes to take Arkwright's first mill at Cromford back to its roots in manufacturing, in a way that might make use of the natural resources of water and minerals that exist on the site. The project recognises the growing ethical reaction against global brands and the trend toward supporting distinctive local and craft-based approaches, along with the energy that comes with a culture of creative thrift. Cromford Mills is reimagined and repurposed as a brewery that also incorporates a social hub and flexible work spaces for a future of increasingly freelance and localised industries. The brewery occupies the existing volume of one fire-damaged block, next to the rock outcrop, and its structure both supports and repairs the collapsing mill. Cromford Mills is again a site of production powered by water. 169

John Smedley Ltd | Carbon decisions

Carbon decisions My name is Ian Maclean and I'm the Managing Director of John Smedley Ltd. We're a familyowned business. I am also a member of the family that owns the business, a privately held knitwear manufacturer based in Derbyshire. Our business has been going for a very, very long time – this year actually it's 230 years old. It started as one of the first-generation Arkwright Mills back in 1784. When the Mill was first built, it was powered by water from the local brook that ran under the Mill and the water wheel. The pit that housed the original wheel is still there today. Of course many things have changed since then, and many different energy sources have been used to power the Mill. At one time in the mid-1800s, for example, the company made its own gas from coal; it had its own gasworks attached to the Mill. Between then and the present day, the Mill has also been powered by oil, gas, and electricity. That's what we do – we make jumpers, we make shirts, still in Britain, one of the few remaining companies that does so, and we employ 400 people. We sell them in the UK and in many foreign countries. In doing so, we consume a lot of energy in various forms. I wouldn't say that energy use and climate change are top of my agenda every day of the week as I walk into the factory. There are many competing issues that I have to deal with – getting the jumpers from the beginning of the manufacturing process to the end is probably number one on my list. But the amount of energy consumed, in its various forms, by the factory and by the people who work in it, is a very important aspect of our cost base as a business. It's a growing cost year on year; it relentlessly goes up. Part of our power comes from electricity, but one of the things that concerns me most, from an 170

Ian Maclean

energy use and climate change perspective, is that we burn a lot of heavy fuel oil in our business. It is used to generate steam, which is required in the manufacturing process. It's a technology that we've been using since probably the 1950s, and we haven't yet been able to change or evolve or progress since then. I would dearly love to do so. I would like to be able to make the investments required to change to a more efficient and a less noisy, smelly, and carbon-producing type of activity, but it's one of those investments that the business is yet to make. There are many other drivers behind our interest in climate and sustainability. But the first thing you have to realise is that a private company is an entity in itself. There are people that work in it, there are shareholders, there are people that run it, there are many people who supply it and are customers of it, but apart from all these, the company is an entity in its own right. I always think about this when I think that the company's main goal is its own survival. The company is concerned with taking decisions to prolong its longevity, but within a framework of law, of established practice, of a competitive environment – not just nationally competitive, but also globally. We're competing against similar companies in other nations that have different cost bases and different regulations and different controls over them. But no matter what the climate asks of us, we have to survive within this kind of environment, this kind of bubble. If there are things which prevent the company from changing, from taking what one might call the right decisions in relation to climate change and energy use, then the company does that. So in a sense the climate itself and the regulations and things surrounding it have to change themselves, whether that's because of government or because of the influence of other authorities, or

Photo: Tim Mitchell.

the competitive nature of other businesses, other economies. If those things change, then we can change what we do, but sometimes only at the rate that that can happen. That's of great concern to me, because there are things that I'd like to do as an individual and as a manager of the business but that the company cannot afford to do because it has another interest. If I was able to ask somebody a question about what can they do with this issue, the environment and climate change, I would want to speak to politicians. Before I started to run the company that I run today, John Smedley, in a position as Managing Director and representing the company not just internally but outside, I had very little engagement with politicians and politics at any

scale, whether it was the very local scale or the regional scale or even the national scale. But in the position that I find myself in now, I am of interest and my business is of interest to politicians at all levels. I would ask the politicians, what are you going to do about the regulatory and investment environment for my business, that will allow me to make the change towards lower-carbon energy more quickly than I am able to do today?

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John Smedley Ltd | An energy story since 1784

An energy story since 1784

Photos: Tim Mitchell

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John Smedley Ltd, founded in 1784, has good claim to being the oldest continuously working factory on the same site in the world, producing knitwear for global markets and crowned heads. At the core of their Derwent valley factory lies the original housing for the water wheel that powered the first mill, and the company is currently working to retrofit their site to slash carbon emissions and energy bills. This was a powerful setting to explore stories of energy system change. The Smedley's team have been enthusiastic and generous partners, agreeing to be recorded to provide the script for an animated film; helping make sets for the animation; providing studio space at the factory; hosting student projects; and researching and advising on archive content; and serving as the subjects for a body of portraits.

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John Smedley Ltd | An energy story since 1784

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John Smedley Ltd | Energy at Lea Mills

Energy at Lea Mills Jane Middleton-Smith

The John Smedley Archive has been in existence since 2009. It began as a project to catalogue the heritage assets of this historic Derbyshire clothing company, but its role has since expanded to provide a public interface for business visitors, the local community, and, increasingly, academic and informal researchers. Most requests for factory or archive visits have come from scholars of industrial and fashion history, but we have been approached with a number of innovative initiatives from other disciplines as well, and we are always keen to expand our repertoire of public engagement. The Stories of Change project resonated with me from the outset. I have a longstanding interest in ecological issues and, having worked at John Smedley Ltd for over five years, I am conscious of the huge amount of energy required to run our Lea Mills factory. This awareness was sharpened by a drive by management in 2003 to make practical changes, like replacing our boilers, that would establish the green credentials of the company. We had just started looking into alternative sources of power when the Stories of Change team came on the scene. The project offered Ian Maclean, MD of John Smedley, access to impartial academic expertise. Meanwhile, the researchers, students, and artists on the project had the chance to work in a genuine industrial context and see their ideas make a difference. The Stories project investigated the use of energy in the past, which has in turn inspired innovation in the present. We are presently conducting an investigation into the potential for using the brook that runs past the factory â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the reason for the mill's location here when it was founded in 1784. We have also commissioned reports on biomass boilers and solar panels. I have very much enjoyed working with the groups of Masters students from the Stories of Change project's Future Works Studio at the 176

School of Architecture University of Sheffield, who have visited during each year of the project. Their enthusiasm and fresh ideas have been invigorating, and have sometimes pushed the limits of radical architectural concepts for the future of the site. All of the ideas, discussions and drawings have also been informative groundwork for the future Museum project at Lea Mills. The study week they spent in the area was an example of university teaching at its best: highlevel, challenging, focused project work, grounded in fieldwork in a real industrial setting â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all led by dedicated and highly motivated staff. It has been a pleasure to be involved in the evening discussion sessions, the tours and study visits, and being invited to the end-of-year student shows. In addition, the Future Works workshops at the Silk Mill, Derby, which engaged students, industry partners, and academics in debate, were for me refreshing and lively days of coming together to exchange ideas and push forward the crucial public discussion about the future of energy. I have been intimately involved with one of the artistic outputs of the project: the production of an animation by Bexie Bush, an artist-filmmaker in the Stories of Change team. Bexie spent a couple of weeks in the Derwent valley as part of the Future Works residency, and it was during this time that I discovered she was keen to focus her film on Lea Mills. We had many discussions before Bexie's ideas firmed up into a project to gather the views of my colleagues at John Smedley Ltd, Lea Mills â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a rich variety of real people's ideas about the past, present and above all, the future of energy. She planned to record their thoughts in audio interviews, and animate the subsequent recordings. I was immediately taken with the concept and encouraged people across the business to take part. Initially, this was a bit of a hard sell, as people were reluctant to record their ideas on what was perceived to

Photo: Tim Mitchell.

be a technical or specialist topic. But Bexie's engaging and reassuring presence, assisted by time out with coffee and cake, relaxed everyone enough to enable her to record several hours of tape. To have been able to watch her craft these conversations into a story, and then see it come to life in her drawings, gave me absolute confidence that the film would prompt a lively debate about energy. It was natural for John Smedley to offer Bexie free workshop space on site at the factory, to enable the animation sets to be made. It has been inspiring for all of us at Lea Mills to see the work in progress. Bexie has had an open studio, where any and every interested person on the John Smedley staff has been able to drop in and see what she is doing. Furthermore, she has encouraged people to volunteer time to paint, draw, and build the complicated sets. Several

colleagues have been regular helpers, becoming key members of the volunteer team and honing their artistic skills, or learning new ones. The project has also served as a link with the local community, with several regular volunteers from the village coming into the mill together with student helpers from the local universities. For many of us this will likely be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be involved in the making of an animated film. This, together with the decision to use real people from the mill as the figures in the drama, has affirmed the commitment of the whole John Smedley team to the film, now known as The Rumour Mill. We are excited to see the energyÂ stories of people working at John Smedley Ltd brought to life in Bexie's wonderful animation. â&#x2013;ˇâ&#x2013;ˇJane Middleton-Smith is the archivist at John Smedley Ltd, Lea Mills, Derbyshire. 177

John Smedley Ltd | The Rumour Mill

The Rumour Mill Whispers about the future of energy along the Derwent valley. Animation has its own unique and powerful way of revealing the soul of a subject. In my film animations I'm most interested in real stories told by real people, and in The Rumour Mill I'm applying my skills to make space for a wider range of views, times and places on the big topic of climate change and energy. I want this film to be engaging, funny, a little bit worrying, quite mystical, beautiful, and kind of hopeful. Above all I really want people to leave the film feeling compelled to talk about the future of energy. In March 2015 I was delighted to be invited to travel to the Derwent valley along with other artists and academic researchers to explore how we could contribute our skills to this task. Our time there was jam packed with visits to mills and museums and long picturesque walks. I was inspired by Smedley's Mill because they are looking into ways of using renewable energy to power the mill in the near future, but they are also an icon of British manufacturing, and one of the longest-running factories still working on their original site anywhere in the world. Smedley's are a leading UK clothing brand and have even kept the Royal Family warm with their beautifully manufactured jumpers. The whole building looked like a Wes Anderson set and I fell in love with the aesthetic of the place, but more importantly the whole mill was populated with positive, charismatic, bubbly people â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perfect stars for a new film: The Rumour Mill. With my films I take snapshots of people and places at a certain moment in time. I like to use artefacts and mundane everyday objects from a period to personify people and their culture in 178

Bexie Bush

playful ways, drawing on symbolic associations to draw out new ideas. I develop a narrative that forms the foundation for the film, and then add layers of visual metaphors and sound. I like to direct a film as an art installation and love to include humour. Normally I choose to work with specific objects to express deeper associations within a story, and I often need to adapt my techniques to make this possible. We arranged to interview over 30 of the factory workers to record what they think about the future of energy. They have diverse views about how energy is used now and how they would like to see this change. The discussions were endearing, fun, friendly and full of heart and passion. The next step was to choose the quotes that would best combine to make a film. This was then edited together and presented as an animatic (a moving storyboard). The moving storyboard allowed us to plan and cost the film, including how long each shot would take to create, what equipment was needed, what assistance was needed, and how long the entire process would take. We are now in the process of making the film. The final work will be a captivating three to six minutes long, using stop frame object animation to bring these discussions about energy transformation to life. The film will have a splash of humour mixed with visual illusion. It aims to provoke wonder and encourage people to perceive and value energy. But this film is not just about energy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is also about community, living life to the full, British manufacturing, and most of all coming together to imagine change and bring it about. The aim is that these ingredients combine to help create the conditions for a much more vibrant and engaged public and political conversation about energy futures.

The Rumour Mill sets. Photos: Bexie Bush.

To create layers of ideas, I make objects morph into other things. I use symbolism to gesture toward underlying themes. For example, we have a washing machine, and where the dialogue involves discussion about population issues, the washing machine water starts to freeze and form a beautiful landscape which is still for a moment… but the ice then causes the machine to stop working, and it has to be fixed with a hammer, which causes the water to flood all over the washroom. In this instance, the emotional truth comes from the consequences of the energy system failing. It's about the consequences of misusing resources, including energy. Stamina is needed for reading and absorbing written material, but if you want to access something quickly, a five-minute animation can engage you emotionally while delivering a lot of information.

energy and environment boffin, so conversations with them throughout the project about 'the issues' were a vital foundation. The wider design of the Stories of Change project they had devised, with its co-production approach, was a very natural fit with the way I work. It has allowed me to amplify the voices of workers in the factory, and also to give a voice to things, people, and places related to the energy of the mill, and indeed to the whole industrial system past, present and future. ▷▷Bexie Bush is an animation director and a graduate of the National Film and Television School. Her award-winning films include climate change-themed Ever Hear a Postman Whistle and Mend and Make Do. Her film The Rumour Mill, made at John Smedley Ltd in collaboration with the Stories of Change project, will be launched in 2018.

An animation is necessarily a team project. In this case, the starting point was the collaboration with the academic team – Renata, Joe, and Julia. I'm no 179

John Smedley Ltd | The Rumour Mill

The Rumour Mill sets. Photos: Bexie Bush. 180

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Energy ballads

Nicola Whyte

How does the history of ballad literature and song feed into our thinking about energy consumption and environmental and climate change today? When we stayed in Cromford during the Future Works residency, with other contributors to the Stories of Change project, Lucy Ward and I set about exploring the possibilities of song as an important medium for disseminating news in our times. We sat around the kitchen table and found inspiration in the historical ballads held in the Bodleian Library and Vaughan Williams archive. The group walked and talked in the landscape, and Lucy sang the old ballads. Many of them were rooted in the experience of industrialisation and energy system change in the 19th century, and when Lucy sang them their relevance as a way of spreading information and engaging people to listen â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perhaps to join in â&#x20AC;&#x201C; became clear. In the 16th and 17th centuries, professional minstrels were one of the most effective conduits of news. Singers brought people together, and while many ballads were meant to be amusing, others called upon a shared political and social purpose to make changes for the common good. Today of course there are much more immediate ways to communicate information through social media and the Web. But, as Lucy's work shows, the power of music and song remains a creative social and political force for inviting alternative ways of thinking about the present and imagining a different future. For centuries songs and ballads have been an important part of popular culture and a familiar sound of everyday life. The new technology of print in the early 16th century led to the mass production and wide circulation of printed texts, including prayer books, the Bible, do-it-yourself manuals, chapbooks, cookbooks and herbals, broadsides, and ballads. The printed ballads were cheap to buy and were enjoyed by literate and illiterate people alike, for they were meant to be sung in public places, on street corners, in taverns and in coffee houses. They were pasted up on 182

walls and were sung in 17th-century 'pop-up' performances that often attracted large crowds. They were immensely popular. Contemporary writers like Samuel Pepys commented on the favourite ballads of the people, which could be heard in alehouses and by firesides around the country, as well as in fields and workshops where they kept the rhythm of daily labour. Writers of the 19th century and earlier described the sound of song in the fields and factories of Britain. One such account by Thomas Pennant, chosen by Humphrey Jennings for his anthology of the Industrial Revolution, describes women at work fulling cloth, and harvesting crops in the fields. First Pennant describes the traditionally female labour of 'walking the cloth,' a practice that had been for the most part superseded by the water mill by the late 18th century. In a fascinating description of the centrality of song in the women's work, Pennant writes: [T]welve or fourteen women, divided into two equal numbers, sit down on each side of a long board, ribbed lengthways, placing the cloth on it: first they begin to work it backwards and forwards with their hands, singing at the same time as at the Quern: when they have tired their hands, every female uses her feet for the same purpose, and six or seven pairs of naked feet are in the most violent agitation working against another: as by this time they grow very earnest in their labour, the fury of the song risesâ&#x20AC;Ś For Jennings, who is interested in capturing the human experience and imagination of industrial change in the 18th and 19h centuries, Pennant's observations form a powerful contrast with the very different soundscape that was then emerging in Europe: the clang and drum of mechanised machines and roaring coal-fired furnaces. The Stories of Change project took a particular interest in 19th-century ballads about the loss of

the energy landscapes of wind and water power. In the view of these ballad writers, the age of fossil fuels had violently cut the threads holding nature and society together. Lucy and I found 'The old mill stream'â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a pastoral mourning of the loss of an old way of life, held in the Jenny Lind collection in the Vaughn Williams archive â&#x20AC;&#x201C; particularly interesting. At first glance this ballad may seem rather sentimental, and certainly not very radical. But it speaks of the passage of time and the sense of loss that comes with change, and also, to evoke Humphrey Jennings, of the diminishment of a musical soundscape. It also invites us to think about earlier energy system change, the decline of water power and rise of fossil fuels, which was accompanied by changing social and economic relationships with severe environmental consequences. Lucy and I thought about the interconnections between energy and society evoked in the image of the old mill positioned at the heart of the community, the miller's door open to all including the poor, and the suggestive power of the water mill as a symbol of continuity and renewal of society and nature. In contrast, other printed songs of the time recorded the coming of the age of the machine, and the unrelenting and inescapable sound of the call to work, which drowned the songs of the workers. Ballads weren't just about romantic tales and heroic deeds of the past. They often carried strongly moral messages about community, protested against social injustice and hardship, and criticised the inadequacies, if not outright negligence, of those in power. When we studied these popular songs looking for references to energy and work, we discovered an important thread running through them: a lament for the passing of an old harmonious social order, based upon ideals of social cohesion, whereby rich and poor all had their respected roles to play. People imagined the past was a better place, and that by evoking it in the present they might even change the future for the better. By the 19th century, the age of industry and coal, some ballads evoked a vanished way of life, the evidence of which could still be seen in the now-degraded physical landscape. In the melancholy pastoral of these ballads, an old decayed mill stood not only for the

ravages of time, but for the rupture of society from nature.

THE OLD MILL STREAM And is this the old mill stream that ten years ago, Was so fast in its current so pure in its flow, Whose musical waters would ripple and shine, With the glorious dash of a miniature Rhine, Can this be its bed? I remember it well, When it sparkles like silver through meadow and dell. And is this, &c. And where was the miller's house, peaceful abode? Where the flower-turn'd porch drew all eyes from the road; Where roses and jasmine embower'd a door, That never was closed to the wayworn or poor, Where the miller, God bless him! Oh gave us a dance, And led off his hall with his soul in a glance. And is this, &c. The mill is in ruins, no welcoming sound In the mastiff's quick bark and the wheel's dashing round; The house too forgotten and left to decay. And the miller long dead, all I lov'd pass'd away. This plain place of childhood was graved on my heart, In rare paradise colours that now must depart: The old water mill's gone, the fair vision is fled, And I wept o'er its wreck, as I do for the dead.

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Song cycle

Lucy Ward

As a singer-songwriter who made their way up through the folk tradition, I'm always looking for stories â&#x20AC;&#x201C; little nuggets of history, be that personal, social, or political. A good yarn intrigues me and people are always fascinating. In addition to this, I write a lot of stuff about social justice. Protest songs seem to roll out of me when I write. My journey with Stories of Change ticked the boxes for both these songwriting approaches. I enjoyed connecting with the myriad wise folks that shared their knowledge and thoughts on the climate, the history of the Derwent valley, and the industry that was once there, along with their hopes for a greener future. Countless conversations covering countless topics were had, from mining, pamphlets and wild garlic to jumpers and child labour. My notebook was alive with phrases, drawings, snatches of songs, and bits of tunes. I tried to document my time spent with the

The view

project in a stream of consciousness, with the aim that the songs would then spring from looking back at the pages. They did. I have tried to create a sense of past, present and future in the song cycle. Here in the book I have chosen to share the songs that I feel best cover the entire breadth of the project, but I have also really enjoyed capturing more personal stories, such as imagining one young woman's giddy excitement on seeing the lit-up shop frontage of HL Brown the jeweller's â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the first shop in Sheffield to light its windows with electricity. If there was one phrase that informed my writing most, and that will stay with me always from my time with Stories of Change, it is this: "Business as usual is not an option." The people I talked to agreed: our current approach to energy has to change.

Lucy Ward

The working title of this song was 'Bird's eye view' and was inspired by pulling together several moments and conversations that had prompted doodles in my notebook during my time spent in Cromford and with the other collaborators. The idea of flying above the Earth looking down from a cable car designed by a Sheffield University student; the imprints and scars on the land seen from atop Black Rocks; and being able to see the literal history of the use of the surrounding land. Talk of Gripple and visits to Akwright's Mill representing industry and innovation past and present; seeing Masson Mill's waterwheel replaced by efficient hydroelectric turbines, showing us "the future's in motion" as industry and power evolve through the years.

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I look down A patchwork below me Feathered wings in a cornflower sky Dry stone stitches hold green and gold in harmony It stretches in front of me for miles and miles The land tells a story The greatest of tapestries The imprint of history And where we have been I look to my right And I see the cities Towering concrete and baked red clay Sprawling structures erupt from the landscape Hives of initiative claiming their stake I look closer And I see the factories Foundries glowing, mills of industry Scars on the land from the mines we once worked there Our footprint forever pressed into the ground The land tells a storyâ&#x20AC;Ś I look to the sky And I see the chimneys Billowing smoke and rising steam But the sun is setting on these clouds of convenience We no longer need to burden the breeze I look to the left The future's in motion Oceans, rivers, glistening streams Great windmills and wheels, gears all a-turning The sun beaming down on the changes she sees

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Song cycle

The quickening clock This song was inspired by sitting in on tutorials for architecture students at Sheffield University. Niki Sole had designed a 'carbon clock' that stood sentinel in the middle of her eco factory design. This clock was not ruled by time but by the carbon footprint of the factory and would tick faster or slower in line with the energy being used there. I was struck by the idea that the clock might even go backwards if the works became carbon-neutral or, better still, carbon-negative! I know the reason this fabulous design struck me so intensely was that years previously I had written the line "The quickening clock beats out the time, the beat won't stop, won't fall in line," and it had sat in a notebook destined (I thought) never to be expanded upon. I felt as though Niki had pulled that tiny seed of an idea out of my brain and expanded it into something so much better and bigger than I ever would have imagined. By the end of the evening, I had written the first two verses. By the next day I had finished the song. This song is one of the most direct in message that Stories Of Change has inspired me to write. It is a protest song against apathy, but I hope it also has a sense of hopefulness and of looking forward.

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Lucy Ward

The quickening clock beats out the time The beat won't stop, won't fall in line The ticking tock and tolling chime Of a future set to drink us dry The quivering hands move into place Echoes of a past we can't erase But it's what we do next that seals our fate We have to face the change We can't go back, we can't rewind But must stand against the rising tide Of energy that drains us all There's another way if you heed the call We can't go back, we can't give in this time The blackened waves that stain our skin Could be washed away, could be clean again For the sun can fade our fossil sins To be blown away by the wandering wind We can't go backâ&#x20AC;Ś A future not so far away If we decide it's ours to take

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Strutt's North Mill | A tour of Strutt's North Mill

A tour of Strutt's North Mill Brian Deer

Strutt's North Mill was rebuilt in 1804 after a fire. Fires used to be very common in mills due to the combustive material of oil and grease that was used with the machinery, and obviously the earliest lighting was candlelight. This was a very remote place in the late 1800s. In 1750 there were about 500 people in Belper and most of those didn't live down here near the river, they lived up in the higher part of the town near the market square. But in order to encourage people to come and work at his mill, Strutt built housing for his workers. If you give a woman a decent house to live in and tell her that she can work at the Mill for a 13 hour day, believe it or not, she'll grab that house and stay there for many generations. We have the rent books and we can see that the same families stayed here for a long time, and that they had a regular income. Up until then all of our manufacturing was done at home, in cottage industries, or in very small workshops where you'd have three or four framework knitting machines or looms. And when the factories came there was a big change, not only in the way people worked, but also in how they lived. The Strutts built a little community around the Mill here for their workers. They built it very close to the Mill so that they could get here for six in the morning and remain here until seven at night. He also built schools and a little hospital – the low red brick building just across the river here. Needless to say, inside the Mill people were getting injured – you'll probably realise why when you go in there this afternoon. Strutt had farms in the area so he was able to feed his workers, and he was able to make sure that they were well looked after. Just look at the amount of water coming through here – and more than that, actually, is being used to feed the turbine. At one end of the little hospital were the living quarters of the person who was in charge of the sluice gates. As you can imagine, that's a pretty important job, to make sure that behind this weir there was sufficient water to 188

power the Mill for the next day. If there was no water, or not enough, the wheels wouldn't be working, and Mr Strutt wouldn't be making any money. The area behind you is a little area that was created by the Strutts. They were benevolent and they were quite keen to make sure that their workers were happy. In a lot of the mills down the valley here, a lot of the workforce were apprentices – orphans, in fact – that were brought in from London and trained for seven years as very, very cheap labour. The Arkwrights and the Strutts in the Derwent valley here didn't use orphans at all. They wanted families to come here. We're actually going to be walking through the little community that they created for their workers. But apart from that, they also wanted to give the workers somewhere to walk on their only day off, which was Sunday. So in 1905 they created the river gardens here – there was a bandstand in there. Originally it was an area where they used to grow willows, the branches of which they'd use to make baskets for use in the earlier mills on the site here. OK, we're going to turn right here, we won't go into the river gardens otherwise you'll never get inside my house and into the Unitarian Chapel or the museum. To power the first mill, which was the South Mill – now demolished – they built this cut through here. They built a weir before this Horseshoe Weir, a lot nearer this cut here. This cut would've been flowing – we would be standing on top of the flowing water right now – which powered the first mill on the site. It's worth remembering the bed of all of these watercourses is stone. They actually hewed stone blocks and laid down a stone bed. And beyond the weir, for about 50 or so meters, the bed of the river is stone as well. There's a little weir just beyond the bridge and it's stone up to that point. And when they actually drain this part to clean out

Brian sitting in his home, an 18th-century cottage built by Jedediah Strutt for his mill workers. Photo: Tim Mitchell.

the turbines, you can see a stone bed beautifully cut, magnificently created by the civil engineers. An amazing task, considering it was done 230 or so years ago. And would've cost actually a lot of money – they reckon that it probably cost nearly as much to create the water ways and so on as it did to create the first mills that were here. We're standing here because Strutt was very interested in educating his workers. The mill building we've just come out of, in the top storey of it, in 1804, Strutt had a classroom for his workers. He was very keen that they would learn to read and write, just for a couple of hours a day. Then when he built the other mills here there were too many children, and so he had to build

the school that we're looking at here. He built it in 1818, so it's a very early school. Children weren't being educated en masse then, but if you came to work at a Strutt mill you got an education. At first it was just, as I say, for two hours a day – until we had the Factory Acts in 1833, and then you would actually have half-timers. The children would work in the Mill for half of the day and be educated for the other half. ▷▷An extract from a recorded tour of Strutt's North Mill and Belper by Brian Deer for Studio Future Works on 25th November 2014. Brian Deer is a former surveyor with the Geological Survey and a volunteer at Strutt's North Mill. 189

Strutt's North Mill | The low-carbon revolution

The low-carbon revolution

Interview with Ian Jackson

Ian Jackson: My name is Ian Jackson, I am an independent local business consultant based in Belper, a Lead Assessor for the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme. But most of my time, or a lot of my time, is involved in other work to do with the community. I'm Chair of Transition Belper. I'm also Director of Amber and Derwent Valley Community Energy. We're hoping to build a hydropower plant on the river Derwent in Ambergate. Julia Udall: I'd be really interested if you could talk a bit about where we are right now, Strutt's North Mill, in Belper. From the stories you have told over the course of the Future Works project, it seems like there are real echoes in what you are trying to do now, in the history of this site as a low-carbon landscape. IJ: Yeah, the Belper Mills, the Belper site are fascinating, and I'm guilty, as are many of the 26,000 people who live here, of knowing very little about the Mills. I lived here and I never visited them, but when I joined the Transition group in 2010, I asked for the first time, "Do we make water power anywhere on the river?" Nobody knew, and that was the start of a project that goes on and on in terms of learning. So we do have water power, electricity being generated on site now in the original old wheel pits, and not many people in the area know that. The actual story of the Strutts in Belper is absolutely fabulous from a low-carbon point of view. We know the factory automation system started here, that's why it's got its World Heritage Designation. What we've come to realise is that it was a low-carbon Industrial Revolution; Belper and the area was unique. It all started in the 1780s, 1790s, with the water wheels, and the site developed and grew. As it grew, Strutt built additional weirs, raised the weirs, developed the water wheel, developed controls and engineering systems. So for 70 years the whole site was 190

low-carbon. Jedediah Strutt had five local farms producing food for his workers. People could walk to work; the town developed purely to keep the cotton mill going. There is just so much we can and should learn from how Belper ran for 70 years, competing against the Lancashire mills, which were fossil fuel-fired â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and it did compete. It innovated, and it used the resources that it had locally. We are convinced there's a lot still to learn about Belper from the past that we can use going forward into the future. JU: I'd like it if you could talk a little bit about your research process, how you uncovered these stories? What I remember very strongly when we first met was you, and Strutt's manager Mary Smedley, and fellow volunteer Brian Deer were talking about how the collaborative historical research has really informed the future of the town. You told us how you, and many others with a passion for Strutt's North Mill, were going off to the archive, using public libraries, all those kinds of services, to build this picture? IJ: Yes, one of the most interesting challenges about the work that we've been doing with Transition, hydropower and the heritage of the Mill is that I started with nothing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a blank piece of paper. Everything that we've learnt over the last four or five years has been about going and talking to other people, starting off with the volunteers here at the North Mill, but then spreading it out. I did talks two or three years ago that had some information about how the site developed, but on every single talk I've done there's been somebody in the audience, either as an individual or from another group, who's been able to give me some more information, whether it's from the Derbyshire Records Office or from family records, from photographs. We know there's an original weir somewhere on this

river and every time we've dropped the river level, Adrian Farmer [The Heritage Co-ordinator at the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site] and I run up and down the side of the river looking for the original weir. We've never found it. But we'll go into people's back gardens to have a look, and they come out and they tell us where the weir was, and we just continue to keep gathering information. People know that we're looking for it now, as well, so if they find information they'll let us know, and it's just been fascinating. JU: What a rich way of building useful knowledge, and being really embedded in a place, and understanding how it changes.

I can get involved in more community energy projects. It feels very difficult at the moment, with our current Government in place, but I've got to believe that in the future that will change. And once it does, I think there's a world just waiting for us to get on and become a low-carbon community, a low-carbon area. I really do believe that. ▷▷An interview with Ian Jackson, Director of Amber and Derwent Valley Community Energy (ADVyCE). 8th April 2016, Strutt's North Mill, Belper.

How do you envisage your own working interests changing in the next five, 10, 20 years? What will be different, and how? IJ: In terms of the future, it is very, very difficult. Since I've become aware of the challenges we face with climate change, almost every personal and business decision now focuses around that. Some days it's a good day [laughs] and some days it's not so good, and the challenges we face, so that's where I see… that's what's going to govern what I do in the future – both from a work point of view and from a volunteering, community point of view. The question I ask myself is, what do we need to do to tackle climate change? And so I will adjust and adapt accordingly. I hope I can continue doing the sort of work I've just been doing, particularly in factories. I have a fascination with manufacturing. We need things to be produced, I would love to see more things being produced in the UK, rather than being manufactured abroad and carried on ships, considering what that's doing for the carbon footprint of the world. I would love to see more reskilling back into the UK. So that's what I would like to do from a passion point of view, and I hope 191

Studio Future Works | Hydro:generation

Hydro:generation Armand Agraviador and Alexander Schofield Studio Future Works

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The Hydro:generation project responds to a real-world community-initiated hydropower scheme. It is run by IPS BenCom ADVyCE in Ambergate, Derbyshire, and a future technologies research body, the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, near Sheffield. The project identifies a hypothetical consortium between these two, as client, funder, and benefactor for the Hydro:generation project. The scheme expands the scope of the Ambergate hydropower initiative to incorporate a hydrogen production plant and a distribution centre that utilises emerging technologies of sustainable energy storage. This not only benefits the local community but provides an important precedent and training resource for other decentralised energy schemes in the UK. 193

Strutt's North Mill | This is a magical time

This is a magical time

Interview with Mary Smedley

Jedediah Strutt was one of those very early industrialists, like the members of Birmingham discussion club the Lunar Society, who were non-conformists because they were barred from university. And therefore they formed these amazing independent groups and developed ideas through informal sharing. Jedediah wasn't actually a member of the Lunar Society, but he was good friends with many of the members, like Erasmus Darwin, and Joseph Priestley, and endless names that you know. He had a mechanical turn of mind, he just needed a problem to solve. The great thing about the Strutts was each generation added to what the previous generation had done. For five generations they developed Belper and Milford and even Derby, and they connect all the way down to what is now the World Heritage Site. Belper North Mill is a really prominent building within the World Heritage Site. But what I hadn't realised in all my years of living at Belper was that we had hydroelectricity in place. I was amazed to find that out. And it was using the watercourse that Jedediah Strutt had created in 1776 – how amazing is that? So modern, and yet it was ordered in 1776. As for future developments, I can tell you that they are looking to put a hydroelectric plant in at Masson Mill, and at all the mills down the Derwent valley, which is quite exciting. It ticks all the boxes when we have school groups visit, because they love the idea of sustainable energy. I often think that the money that Jedediah spent on creating that watercourse – and it must have been a lot, because he altered the riverbed quite a lot – has certainly paid for itself over the years. It's just wonderful.

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I didn't even realise that it was all working, because it looks old – well, it is old – and it sits by the water and the water affects it over the years and you think, "Oh, yeah, that's just from the days when they had water power." But one day I had the most magical experience. I think we'd been open about four years and I'd got a class of eightyear-olds, and when we have schools in, because we think it's important that they understand how the mill was powered, we always take them on a walk round the watercourse and see how it fed into the mill. And so there I was, explaining this to them, not really knowing what I was talking about, but I did know that it was all controlled by a green box that's out there. I was pointing out this green box and, at that very moment, it all went into action – I was so excited! Of course the eightyear-olds thought I was loopy-loo, but I was so excited! All these wheels started to turn and the gates lifted and it was just magical. Of course, I've seen it often since, but it still stirs me every time. It doesn't happen that often, and periodically they also drain it out to clean it, which is a big thing, so we always go out with our cameras then and take pictures of the channels that the water's fed through. But it's wonderful to see it all working. There used to be a man employed by the Strutts who lived in a little cottage on the other side of the river and it was his job to watch the water. When it was in flood he had to go round with his crank handle and crank the gates open, so the water could flow by and not flood the mill. And when the water was low he'd got to lower the gates, so it all came this way. And Strutt's guarded their water rights above all else. There were many court cases where people were trying to interrupt the flow of the water, but he was using it here, and he was using the same water again two miles downstream at Milford, so it had to be really efficient. Incidentally, it takes four days for the water passing the mill here to reach the sea. And I would get a call periodically from a water

Photo: Tim Mitchell. scheme that used to exist, saying, it was one of those automated voices, "In four hours your premises will flood." And I used to hold the phone and think, "What am I supposed to do?" However, it did give you a chance to get the projectors out of the basement. But this man across the river had to control it manually. Well today, of course, it's all controlled by a computer about 40 miles away, and somebody presses a button and it all goes into action. So you don't get any of that warning, it just happens and it's the most magical thing. I really don't understand any of this hydroelectricity. Ian [Jackson]'s the man with the accumulated knowledge. We think we invent things today; we don't. We're building on what previous generations have done. They've done the most incredible things, and particularly during the Industrial Revolution, I think that must have been the most amazing time, but they wouldn't realise it at the time. It's only with hindsight that we've seen how great this is. We are a World Heritage Site and sometimes the locals scoff at the idea and they say, "Oh yeah, it compares with the

Pyramids and the Taj Mahal." Well, yes, it does, and in my book it's more important than either of those! Because we didn't build something just to make it look amazing – although I think these mills are beautiful. Instead, a handful of men actually changed the working life of every person in the world. How great is that? Nobody in the world who did not have their life altered by this handful of people making these astounding developments. And they did it by sharing ideas and developing innovations, and their achievement was beyond measure. We're now going back to those early days where they were developing the water system. For us, now, the challenge is hydroelectricity – we're looking for sustainable energy. This is a magical time, but we're only building on what they did 200 or more years ago. It was incredible and I'm full of admiration for those people. ▷▷An extract from an interview with Mary Smedley, former manager of, and long-term volunteer at, Strutt's North Mill Museum. 11th March 2015, Strutt's North Mill, Belper. 195

The Alchemical Theatre

Tim Mitchell

Otherworldy pinks run through the water, rock, and skies of the Derwent valley and a full moon hangs above us as we go in search of the cosmological, meteorological, and geological drama that so fascinated Joseph Wright, The Lunar Society, and local industrialists, inspiring the region's enlightenment and giving birth to Britain's Industrial Revolution. A steady stream of tourists and leisure seekers were to follow in the industrialists' footsteps, finding sublime beauty where the earlier visitors had seen commercial opportunity. This 'little Switzerland' of the British Grand Tour helped consolidate the English Landscape Tradition, its spa resort and rail connections making it an early hub for mass tourism. Thomas Cook's first package holidays took place here in 1841. 196

The valley's geological formations still have a cult status among climbers, who know the local gritstone as 'God's own rock.' This new leisure landscape cohabits with the older industrial one. Highly visible wind turbines surround former and current quarries and mines, and invisible water turbines in the Derwent river carry on a long energy tradition, the first mass industry in the region having been powered by the Derwent river. And before that, windmills dotted the landscape, their gritstone mills grinding corn for the local villages in the days before their occupants were drawn to the cotton mills of the Valleys. Are we just going round in eddies in the crucible of the alchemical theatre as we mingle with the elements of the energetic landscape that surrounds us? 197

The Alchemical Theatre

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A short history of energy

A short history of energy Nicola Whyte

Many of us don't think much about energy use â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perhaps because it is such an ordinary part of life we take it for granted. But it hasn't always been so. History's examples can help us to reflect critically on our present-day relationship with energy. Look closer and history is full of stories about energy. This is hardly surprising given the centrality of energy to human life and comfort â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and yet the story of this very familiar aspect of our lives has been slow to emerge in history writing. We all know something of the Industrial Revolution and the coming of the age of fossil fuels. But outside this broad historical narrative, there are other stories to tell about energy in the past that are relevant to our efforts today, as we try to imagine what a low-carbon future might look like. The historical lens invites us to think about our technological and economic priorities in energy-making. But it can also tell us something about the role of the collective social imagination in figuring our relationship with the natural world as makers and consumers of energy. Just as history shows how the production and consumption of energy has changed over time, it also reveals threads of continuity, given that humans have always been dependent on Earth's resources to generate and sustain power. In medieval times, the use of wind and water mills spread across Europe, creating changes of a pace and scale comparable to the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. Historian John Langdon notes that in England 6,000 watermills were recorded in Doomsday Book. Then wind power was widely introduced, and by the 14th century this number had increased to 10,000 to 15,000 mills powered by wind or water. Langdon estimates that one mill provided power for 400 to 600 people. Early maps of towns and villages show windmills and watermills as commonplace and entirely necessary features of the English landscape. Symbols of mills are everywhere in medieval churches, featuring on memorials to the dead, on pew ends, and sometimes as graffiti. In current debates about the place of wind turbines in landscape, the past is useful in revealing the ubiquity of mills in the medieval landscape and imagination alike. They were, and remain, a vital technological achievement. They symbolise renewal, self-sufficiency, and future continuance. Mills as also appear in needlework samplers, which were made by young girls from the middle and upper classes to hone their skills at needle craft and instil religious and moral values. The colourful embroidery depicts stylised birds, flowers, trees, and animals â&#x20AC;&#x201C; sometimes alongside more human features of the landscape, such as houses, gardens, poultry runs, orchards fruits, and windmills. These everyday handicrafts open a window onto the worlds of the girls who stitched them. The assemblages of images suggest a great deal about what was visible from the rooms in which the children sat sewing, but they also reveal what was important to their family's household economy. The imagery in the samplers reflects contemporary ideals of household productivity and sufficiency. Women played a particularly 200

important role in cultivating gardens and orchards, and taking grain to the local mill. As historians have shown, mills were also places for socialising, where women would meet with friends and neighbours. The energy provided by wind and water was essential to all members of these communities. There was a shared responsibility to ensure the free flow of water and wind to the mills. Early maps of British towns and cities reveal the importance of water and wind power. To give an example, the prospect of the City of Exeter, published in 1617 in the sixth volume of Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, depicts a network of watermills beyond the city walls bringing power and sustenance to the early modern city. The residents of Exeter were reliant on the watermills for grinding their grain into flour and malt, and for industrial processes. Such was the mills' importance in sustaining everyday life, the occasions when the mills stopped turning became part of the collective memory of the city. In 1633 Robert Sherwood, an 86-year-old Exeter merchant, recalled a time some decades previously when the mills stopped grinding for four days after a great flood "broke the banks and destroyed the weirs across the river." He noted that this breach in the city's mill banks had happened during the last great plague in Exeter. It is not hard to imagine the spectre of flood, plague, and hunger (without mills, the residents could not grind grain to make bread) summoned a collective sense of apocalyptic foreboding. Other sources tell us local people responded quickly and worked together to mend the weirs and mill banks in order to harness the power of the water once more. The silencing of the mills, even for just a few days, caused a serious disruption to everyday life. Yet it was also a time of community solidarity and collective action. If we take the long view of energy production and use in Britain, we find that our modern dependency on fossil fuels has been relatively brief, but that the story is by no means straightforwardly linear or sequential. For at least 200 years before the 'Industrial Revolution' of the 19th century, London was heavily reliant on coal. Evidence in the form of printed pamphlets, petitions and government proclamations from the 1600s reveal how the city authorities attempted to deal with the supply and demand for fuel. When the capital was faced with what we would recognise today as issues of 'fuel security' and 'fuel poverty,' a number of measures were suggested. Coal (often referred to as 'sea-coal') was shipped from Newcastle in vessels known as Colliers. But the inefficiencies of transport by sea, with ships being hindered by 'contrary winds' and the threat of capture by privateers, had serious consequences, not only for the poor, but for industries like salt and glass making and iron working. Once the city's coal stores were reduced, prices went up. Legislation was made against coalmongers, who were accused of engrossment, and a fair price was set for a standard weight or chaldron of coal. Added to which, the authorities stipulated a fixed price of fuel for the poor and took steps to ensure adequate supplies in winter. They stockpiled coal over the summer months in order to build what was described as a 'public bank' from which the city dwellers could draw when the 'cruel enemy' of cold and frost visited the city. A proposal of 1690 argued the store of "chaldron coles" provided "a security to all others as well as the poor." The consequences of London's growing dependency on coal was certainly recognised at the time. In a pamphlet published during the civil wars the author notes that people used to complain about the odious smell of sea-coal, but with recent shortages (as a result of war), "they say would to God we had sea-cole, O the want of 201

A short history of energy

fire undoes us!" Coal's noisome smell and its danger to health were both subjects of complaint. Less than 20 years later John Evelyn wrote of the polluted city: And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismal Cloud of SEA-COALE? Which is not only perpetual imminent over her headâ&#x20AC;Ś but so universally mixed with the otherwise wholesome and excellent Air that her [London's] Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist accompanied by a fulginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their Bodies; so that Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs and Consumptions, rage more in this one City, than the whole Earth besides. (Fumifugium, 1661). Other pamphlets related the unfortunate consequences of what we now know to be carbon monoxide poisoning as London dwellers barricaded themselves in against the cold with coal fires set burning in the hearth. It was not that people thought coal was the only source of fuel, but rather that no alternative, more secure, sustainable solution to London's fuel crisis could be found. Scarcity compelled various ingenious methods to be devised. People made experiments aimed at scaling up small local practices to make coal go further, and circulated the results in print. Printed pamphlets from as early as the Tudor period celebrate inventiveness and urge the development of a knowledge economy that might relieve fuel poverty. These pamphlets argued that coal, an expensive and precious commodity, could be made to go further. One, published in 1644 but drawing on earlier printed works, was titled 'Artificial Fire or coale for rich and poore.' Another from 1603, discusses a "new, cheape and delicate fire of cole-balls wherein seacole is by the mixture of other combustible bodies both sweetened and multiplied." Rather than throwing away the waste products of industry and trade, such as carpentry and butchery, writers argued for thriftiness and what we would today call recycling. Indeed, waste was a valuable commodity, and recipes for making fuel included all manner of waste materials â&#x20AC;&#x201C; straw, saw dust, manure, turf, peat, coal dust â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that could be re-formed and manufactured as 'artificial fire.' For centuries people have relied upon mixed energy regimes, the management of which encompassed a number of factors, including the availability of resources, transport efficiencies, and local governance. In the pre-modern epoch, decisions were localised, though made according to wider customs and laws that set out best practice. Wind and water, wood, furze, peat and turf, charcoal, and coal provided power for homes and for industry. History shows us that this mixed energy regime was always changing, and that this change was driven by the need to respond quickly to external crises. In order to ensure the self-sufficiency of their families, households and communities had to take action to put things right. Often new rules and regulations were negotiated as a collective response to a reduction in energy supplies. Privation was rife. But in times of crisis, a moral imperative to preserve, to avoid waste, to recycle, created a society and culture committed to the ideals of thriftiness and resourcefulness. Perhaps we can learn a great deal from early modern peoples' ability to contemplate scarcity, to disparage excess, to accept the reality of change, and to face the possibility of crisis in time to avert it. 202

Photo: Tim Mitchell.

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Utopia Works

Renata Tyszczuk, Joe Smith and Julia Udall

"In Utopia they have a six-hour working day – three hours in the morning, then lunch – then a two-hour break – then three more hours in the afternoon, followed by supper. They go to bed at 8 p.m., and sleep for eight hours. All the rest of the twenty-four they're free to do what they like – not to waste their time in idleness or self-indulgence, but to make good use of it in some congenial activity." – Thomas More, Utopia, 1516 Utopia Works took place at the site of the world's first factory, the Silk Mill Museum in Derby, on 20th May 2016. For one day we created a factory, a 'works' of utopian thinking and making. The arc of the day was guided by More's account of a worker's well-balanced experience of productive labour and "congenial activity." Our 'utopian workers' were a mix of makers, designers, museum professionals, academics, students, volunteers, energy experts, and employees from the region's industries. The 'workers' – all with different histories, skills, and insights – were organised into groups of about six people. Across the day the groups attended a sequence of workstations devised by the Future Works project team, with Silk Mill curators and Bullet Creative. The tasks at the workstations were oriented towards the generation of alternative accounts of how society might live with energy. They included exploring the stories held by energy-related objects in the Silk Mill's stores with curator Daniel Martin; Tim Mitchell's photo booth, which elicited concise energy questions against the backdrop of the museum's exhibit of a Rolls Royce jet engine; a pamphleteering workshop led by historian Nicola Whyte and environmental campaigner Andrew Simms; a letterpress printing workshop with the Smallprint Company, where phrases and slogans from the drafted pamphlets were printed in bold physical form; and an 'energy prototype' challenge in the museum's maker space. The Utopia Works prototypes were not intended to be understood as the conclusion or destination of the day's 204

work. Nor were they designs for the future. Rather they were a mode of experimenting with, and questioning assumptions about, energy narratives, usage, resources, and future trends. They were thus proposals, which were at the same time rehearsals, for possible and alternative future ways of living with energy systems. Among other things, this helped to loosen the grip of one very dominant account of humanity's past relationship with energy – that is, one based upon fossil fuels. The invitation to Utopia Works had noted that "Thomas More was the first to give a name and form to the idea that… by imagining a better world is possible, we are empowered to create it." Our aim with the day had been to create a space to help provoke thinking about new and alternative energy futures. We had gathered an improbable cast to bring different skills and insights to transform, disrupt, or revise the long-dominant energy story of a fossil fuel-based industrial system. We thought of this as prototyping. A prototype is a sample or model that is built to test and develop a concept or process, and as such can also serve as a tool for learning. Utopia Works was designed around the idea that humanity needs prototypes that support transformations in thinking, making, and innovating around energy production and consumption. In this process, the notions of both making and storytelling were viewed as integral to this utopian energy prototyping. The printed pamphlets told the story in the most condensed form, and the scratch presentations of prototypes at the close of the day allowed us to collectively imagine transformed energy futures. ▷▷The Utopia Works event was organised as part of the AHRC Connected Communities Festival 2016. A pamphleteering workshop and a film of the day by Lucie Sheppard, along with other Stories of Change project contributions, were brought to the Utopia Fair, a showcase of Connected Communities projects at Somerset House, June 2016.

Photos: Gorm Ashurst. 205

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Empowering an energy landscape

Mel Rohse, Karen Lewis, Rosie Day and David Llewellyn

The Everyday Lives Project used the motif of the journey from fossil-based fuel towards renewables in south Wales to co-create stories with and from a diverse mix of communities. Everyone who participated have been, or will be, affected by this shift. We aimed to open up dynamic narrative conversations and connect communities around theproduction and use of energy in the past, present and future. Our ambition was to give temporal depth to issues of landscape change, energy consumption, and flows of people and materials across time and space. But to achieve this, we had to go on a journey ourselves, as researchers, and take project partners and community members on that journey with us, as co-producers. We had an idea of the methods we could be using â&#x20AC;&#x201C; archival research combined with oral history interviews, creative writing, and performance â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and of the places where we would like to work. However, we also had to be flexible enough to adapt to the priorities and interests of the people we would meet, admittedly always within the broad remit of energy. Working collaboratively, we sought new ways to engage communities with the social and cultural history of their everyday landscapes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the places they dwell in, imagine, and draw meaning from. We hoped to connect with history, allowing the voices of the past (distant and recent) to percolate through to present 'from below.' There were challenges along the way and we had to wrestle with contested concepts such as 'co-creation' and 'community research.' As the name of our umbrella project, Stories of Change, implies, we were working broadly with 'the stories.' But we had to come to an understanding of what that meant for us and for the people on the Everyday Lives journey with us. There was also a lot of effort, a bit of luck, and a great deal of support from creative and community partners which resulted in the innovative and engaging work which we have done our best to represent in these pages. The four sections that follow correspond to the locations where we worked. First, we showcase our work in Ynysybwl, which focused on memories of energy production and consumption. Ynysybwl is a small village in the small Clydach Valley, about 15 miles north of Cardiff. We started off with 16 oral history interviews, which were used in many ways. These were professionally edited and shared among the groups that had taken part in the interviews, they were used to inspire artists, and they were available to be listened to at a community event we ran towards the end of the engagement element of the project. The second section provides an overview of the work undertaken in Tairgwaith in the Amman Valley where writer and poet Emily Hinshelwood, who lives in the village, ran a series of creative writing workshops. The resulting work was published as a book, Windywhirly things. Here you'll find among other things a poem, written by Emily and dedicated to the participants, about the sustained conversations that people had in the workshops. 214

Tairgwaith

Treherbert Ynysybwl

Butetown

Locations of the communities involved in Everyday Lives.

The third section turns to our activities in Treherbert in Rhondda Fawr, further from Cardiff than Ynysybwl, but connected to the capital city by train. Meetings and conversations with community organisations and with our creative partners, Storyworks UK, resulted in perhaps our most innovative activity. For two weeks, we took over a disused former library and transformed it into what we called a Story Studio, which is described from various viewpoints in this section of the book. Fourth, we cover some of the work we commissioned and carried out in Butetown with the help of the National Theatre Wales team. We were interested in working with the Somali community, who settled initially in Cardiff around the turn of the 20th century to work in the docks loading coal that had come down from places like Treherbert and Ynysybwl onto ships bound for faraway destinations worldwide. Our partners carried out interviews with various groups within the community about their experiences in Cardiff and also Somaliland, with the material inspiring poetry by one of our partners Ali Goolyad, who lives in Butetown. The work culminated in a sharing event where participants and community members were invited to come and listen to the poetry and share traditional food. Finally, our concluding section offers four reflections on the Everyday Lives project, considering the ways it differs from other research that has been carried out in the South Wales Valleys, as well as the possible uses and meanings of the stories that emerged â&#x20AC;&#x201C; for energy researchers, for policy makers, and for the communities who call these Valleys home. 215

Lessons for action?

Lessons for action? In June 2007 I sat in my car outside Barnsley council offices in the north of England. The rain beat down on the roof and the windows fogged up as I jotted down my post-interview research reflections. "It's strange – hearing Dick's story just now – I feel somehow reassured. I'm relaxing into a place I don't often find myself in with regard to climate change – a place of certainty. His sure-footedness was so refreshing." Dick was one of a number of local government sustainability pioneers I met in 2007, when I crisscrossed the UK to gather their stories together for a large action research project at the University of Bath. These were stories of energy innovation in all its forms. Dick's achievement was to convert large parts of the council's estate from fossil fuel energy to biomass sourced from local woodlands. He was an impressive man with a compelling vision, backed up by what he'd already managed to achieve. "By 2015, our emissions will be cut by 85%. By 2040, we'll be carbon-neutral. It's a no-brainer." Everything he described seemed obvious; straightforward; eminently achievable. Not just in Barnsley, but everywhere. This was a clear-cut story of how change should and would come about. In the car, as I wrote my notes, I allowed myself a moment to enjoy this sense of certainty. I knew it wouldn't last. My research, both in the field and in the library, suggested that change and action towards a sustainable future was usually more elusive. I was seeking an understanding of why it is so hard for industry to switch over to efficient, low-carbon forms of energy, even when those alternatives already exist. My search led me to 'sociotechnical transition theory' (Rip & Kemp 1998; Geels 2004). Its proponents argue we live in a 'regime' of 'active non-change' – a set of interlocking technical, consumer, scientific, political, and industrial routines that structure all of our activities. Together they create a kind of dynamic stability, or 'lock-in' (Unruh 2000). I imagine a complex of 216

Margaret Gearty

habitual activities that holds everything in place, while being held in place itself – a structure along which our old, familiar practices can run, like cars on a Scalextric track. With this understanding, 'business as usual' is not so much a conspiracy as a tragic inevitability. Human and technical systems always tend toward stability, whether that stability is helpful or harmful. I note here, as an aside, that I am not a detached observer. My cool, calm search for understanding sits alongside a more passionate and 'hotter' personal concern for the future, and the fundamental human desire to make a difference. This is what attracts me to what Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury (2008) call 'Action Research' – the attempt to create knowledge that has a practical use and serves human flourishing. In this research, I was interested in places where the 'regime' had been broken through. What was special about these people, these situations? Dick's local government in Barnsley hailed him as a 'sustainability champion' for his successful biomass conversion. Over in Kirklees, Jim and Richard were fitting solar panels to social housing and care homes long before there had been any government incentives to do so. In Southampton, Bill and Mike pumped geothermal water from an aquifer deep below the Solent into a complex network of pipes that heated and cooled the city cleanly and efficiently. These people saw themselves as doers, but not as heroes. Some, like Dick, were more brash, outspoken; others told stories of quiet tenacity and collaboration over many years that finally led to success. But for all their differences, what they had in common was that each saw a way to make something better, and had the boldness to take action. These were often well-documented projects technically. What was less well-known, and what I was trying to find out, was the human story behind the innovation. I brought to my work

the methodology of the 'Learning History' – a written record of an event or project that is also a participative, reflective process. This approach was first developed by MIT Management scholars George Roth and Art Kleiner in 1998, but has since been used in many other fields (Roth & Kleiner 2000; Gearty 2014; Gearty et al 2015). The idea is to find out 'what it was really like' for people involved in an initiative or programme, seeking out the vivid particulars and the larger trends, to allow the participants – and others – to reflect on what has been learned. My approach was particularly story-focused because I believe stories are how we learn. After all, a good story gets told twice. And a good story can help us pick out, from the general noise of the 'lock-in,' those rare patterns of action that lead to real change. So, as we examined equipment, charts, and statistics, I also listened for other kinds of information. I heard about the chance moments, the risks, the doubts, the good intentions, and the sleepless nights. I tried to understand the innovators' motives alongside what they had achieved. In other words, I sought a story – something that might inspire as well as inform. And as I brought all the learning histories together a picture started to emerge; something that allowed for uniqueness of personality and local situation, while also building a more united picture of what makes an effective 'leader for change.'

The characters I met were not all the same, but each achieved something amazing – because they were willing to make a move. They took action from the centre of their beings and it was meaningful. And their sentences started with 'I.' So what do these stories say about the practice of change? This question matters to me as a researcher and as an activist. What does it take for me – for anyone – to be part of innovating for change? Can I, or we, safely leave it to extraordinary heroes like Dick? Yes and no. The world needs people like these – visionaries who can loan us their certainty. And yet the stories I heard helped me recognise that innovation is messy, and participation in it may not always feel great. Innovators are just fallible humans – they pitch their tenacity and vision against shifting agendas and changing fortunes, and sometimes they break through. This, to me, is empowering. Big innovations don't materialise perfectly formed. They arise out of well-timed smaller moves – micro-actions – that might just create another moment of certainty that yes, this is the right thing to do for now. ▷▷Margaret Gearty is Director of New Histories, an action research consultancy, and Director of the Masters in Sustainability and Responsibility at Ashridge Executive Education.

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Ynysybwl | Memories of energy

Ynysybwl: Memories of energy production and consumption This section delves into the oral history work we carried out in the village of Ynysybwl, situated 15 miles inland from Wales' capital city Cardiff, in the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf. The 'Bwl, as many locals call it, has around 4,600 inhabitants. It was transformed from a small agricultural village with the opening of the Lady Windsor deep mine in 1886. Though the mine was modernised in the 1960s, mining was already contracting and exerting less influence on local employment. In 1988, the colliery closed, its former site remaining undeveloped today. In keeping with the project's commitment to co-production, we worked with community organisations in Ynysybwl for several months before engaging in research activities. Through regular visits and meetings, we increasingly developed with them a joint understanding of the project and its aims, and explored how best to work together for mutual benefit. As a result, we conducted oral history interviews with 16 community members aged 60 and above. These interviews aimed to gather people's recollection of what the village was like when the mine was still functioning, but also how it had changed through the years of the mine's operation and after its closure. We specifically asked people to think about the role of energy both in the village and in their lives. We present some of what people shared with us in this section, under four different themes:

Smell, sights and sounds of the 'Bwl Keeping Warm Entertainment Changing Landscapes These themes reflect the process of coding for qualitative data analysis through the specialist software NVivo. In our analysis, many more themes emerged from the interviews, ranging from cooking practices to outdoor childhood games and past village amenities. The four we present give a flavour of what life was like in a community of energy production and they highlight some of the ways that energy or lack of it impacted on people's daily lives. For each theme, we have selected an excerpt from the transcripts of the interviews. Each of our interviewees is represented and each excerpt is from a different person. In addition to these recollections, there are three more pieces in this section. The first one, Pea soup, power cuts, pedal bikes and pumps, is by Barbara Castle, from the Ynysybwl Regeneration Partnership. Although Barbara didn't grow up in Ynysybwl, she has lived there for many years and has an acute sense of the importance 218

Ynysybwl, from the southeast. Photo: David Llewellyn.

of energy in her life. She draws on her own experience to discuss the issue of community energy in the village. The second one is a set of two poems by Tom Cadwallader, Ynysybwl resident and also a participant in the oral history project. Tom writes poetry about the village that draws on his memories of growing up in a mining community. When we arrived at his home to interview him, he explained to us that our visit to talk about energy had prompted him to write poems inspired by the increase in the number of local wind farms. They take two different viewpoints and can be found on page 229. The final article is a short account of an artists' workshop which was commissioned by the Stories of Change team and held in July 2015. Samples of the oral history interviews were played as part of the workshop and offered as an invitation to reflect on energy changes through time. One of the pieces to come out of the workshop is a song written by singer-songwriter Frankie Armstrong, the lyrics of which are included here.

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Ynysybwl | The 'Bwl

Smell, sights and sounds of the 'Bwl Jill Price, born in Ynysybwl in 1952, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed at Daerwynno Outdoor Centre where she volunteers, 19th May 2015 The pit hooter ruled our days and at ten to one, lunch time, the pit hooter would go and we would have to go back to school, because school started at one o'clock, so when the pit hooter went to call the men to the pit we knew we had to go back to school. I can't remember what time the pit hooter went in the night, but we were always in bed, that's why. It was ten to ten was it? Could have been about ten to ten. And I can remember the pit hooter going… oh yeah! I can remember the pit hooter going out of sync and even as children we realised that there was something wrong, that there'd been an accident. We would know if the pit hooter'd gone and I suppose if you… you know, in my childhood I was… 1966 I was in grammar school then, I can remember the room I was in when the Aberfan Disaster happened. The noises, the noises changed, because you'd hear the pit rail, you'd hear the clanging of the big trucks going down and trundling down, so yeah, the noises of the village have changed really. You might hear motorbikes on the tip now. Tom Cadwallader, born in Ynysybwl 1952, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in his home, 20th May 2015 You always smelt fire, because everyone had a coal fire. And especially when the damp coal was put on the fire, you could… and that is quite often… the small coal that would be put on, and the drift of smoke, the smoke through the village. And I get the same feeling and same scent now on bonfire night. Not that you get many bonfires, but it's that time of year, it's dusk and 220

you feel the atmosphere and it takes you back to your childhood and the idea that coal fires are everywhere. Strangely enough now it's reversing again, and I've got a multi-fuel stove. And we've gone back to… I use the wood, I burn wood now. Only once a week possibly I'll put on my oil burner and my oil fire. We have gone back and there are lots and lots of people who have wood-burning stoves or are burning wood as a source, just possibly not as main fuel, but they have gone back to it. Because I suppose it's environmentally friendly because you're only burning what's been taken out. The sight… up until the pit closed, the only knowledge we ever had from this house that the village was there was the light of the pit. And it was as if the light was put out, not only when the pit closed but actually, we couldn't see anything of the village. From my front garden, you can't see the village. But we always could see the village because of the light of the pit. But that's gone. Tony Burnell, born 1954 in Ynysybwl, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in his home, 20th May 2015 I would say I was fortunate really in that I grew up in a mining community that was, because as a youngster I remember… I could still hear the coal being dropped off, knowing that it shoots all the way down the street, around the back alleys, and as youngsters we always got told off 'cause with clean clothes on I'd climb over the coal, and literally black from head to toe, and it's the type of thing you've got the smell, you've got the feel, and I remember from an early age the miners coming home with bundles of sticks… Miners worked hard and some of them played hard, it wasn't a romantic life for some of them. It was

Reconstruction work at Lady Windsor Colliery, 1964. Photo: courtesy of RCT Archives.

dusty, bad chests a lot of them, but I look on it… I can still hear the hooter. We didn't have to have watches, you heard the hooter, I can still hear the sound of the washeries, the sound of the engines … quiet now, but it was part of village life. It's like somebody when they live on a main road they

say, "Oh, we can hear the traffic." If you live on a main road, after a couple of months you get used to it. It was the same in the community, you took it for granted that you'd hear the hooter and that was the sound of the community. 221

Ynysybwl | Pea soup

Pea soup, power cuts, pedal bikes, and pumps

Barbara Castle

Pea soup, power cuts, pedal bikes, and pumps â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these were the themes that accompanied my childhood in London in the '50s. I hurt my head walking into a lamp post on my way to school because the fog was so thick; London was regularly covered in green smog. When the electric power failed, as it did for days on end in winter, we read by candlelight and I felt scared to go upstairs alone. And everyone I knew had a bicycle. That was how we went to school; how we went to the shops; how we enjoyed our days out of the city. My Dad was an engineer and co-ran a pump design, repair, and servicing company. The factory off the Old Kent Road had filthy sumps and lathes, and everywhere we went in the city Dad would point out the places their pumps were keeping things running â&#x20AC;&#x201C; heating pumps, sewage pumps, and water pumps, even the pumps running the fountains in Trafalgar Square. I came to Cardiff aged 23 in 1973 to follow a postgraduate course at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology. For the first time I came up into the Valleys and was amazed. I caught a bus up into the Rhondda Fach on August Bank Holiday Monday, through the caverns of dark grey housing and narrow roads, past the pit heads and the grimy yards, the drama of the pitheads and wheels and coal heaps. Here, simultaneously, was the source of the London 'peasoupers' and the power cuts: Coal. That same day we walked through Ferndale, past Blaenllechau, up the mountain side, over the top, into the Llanwonno forest, through farmland and moor and then down again into the Cynon Valley and mountain ash. The contrasting beauty of the mountain struck me as hard as the valleys had in their darkness and harshness. Years later I chaired a Union branch that organised support for the '84 strike and later still I came to live in this place, outside Ynysybwl, in an old farmhouse on the edge of the same forest. Through my work, I got to know the men at Tower Colliery and through living here much more of the lives of the Valleys communities. The Tower story inspired me and the cleverness of the way they ran the whole mine using power converted from the underground methane was fascinating. Most of all I was gripped by the politics of them taking ownership and control of the pit. In my own village, Ynysybwl, we have now looked at a 20-acre empty pit site for more than 20 years. We have seen the entire history of coal and mining in this community disappearing into the metaphorical 'pea soup' fog of forgotten places and sadly disappearing lifetimes. We are still surrounded by the flattened tops and terraces of the old slag heaps, although the forest and fridd are gradually hiding it all from sight. 222

Meanwhile, people face an ever-increasing fear of the future with zero oil, energy price hikes, and the threat of stop-start electricity supply. People no longer get free coal and many are faced with poor and cold housing. Having given lives and lifetimes to the fuel that was the engine of the Industrial Revolution across much of the world, they live in fuel poverty. At the same time, we have a wind power investor setting up turbines up the hillside on one of our farms, and a foreign company has built a large solar farm on the high moorland to the north. It is beginning to drive me mad that we as a community are not already prepared and able to determine whether this ought to be happening at all; and I ask myself what we can do about it. Whether we could even begin to contemplate who ought to 'own' the wind and the sun? Even, could we own energy-generating capital investment? And, as a community, could we bring the profits into the community to benefit us all? I lie awake at night thinking how we might revolutionise the way we in Wales produce our power and energy. I imagine a future time when we in Ynysybwl own a large part of the old pit site – The Lady Windsor – and we build and own our own turbines, or our own solar farm. I read articles these days about locally-owned energy in Scandinavia and Germany and how it is becoming a normal part of life elsewhere to ensure this sort of strength and resilience in communities; I understand that across the Western world, people are beginning to address the whole issue of dependence on foreign sources of power and investment; and profit of course. Just as it seems to me to be crazy that a French company runs the Valleys' train lines, so I think it's bonkers that a completely Germanowned company will take all the profit from the moorland solar farm that I and my kids are going to be looking at every day for a generation to come, with none of the benefit returning to my community. We need to take stewardship of our landscapes and our energy, and do it fast. We need to be smart in reimagining our energy futures. ▷▷Barbara Castle OBE is a director at Ynysybwl Regeneration Partnership.

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Ynysybwl | Keeping warm

Keeping warm Anne Jenkins, born 1934 in Clydach Vale, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed at her home, 2nd June 2015Â The coalman used to come to the back door then with the coal, and my father chopped a pile of sticks, and the fire would be burning, a lovely fire. I used to like the toast then on the fire. I didn't use to like it on the gas stove. I used to like it on the fire. My granny used to make our bread and bara brith. And of course, there were no fridges. We had a pantry with a cold slab to keep everything cool in there, and at Christmas my father used to send an empty case, well, a portmanteau he used to call it, up to north Wales and we'd have a turkey for us, turkey for my granny, and a turkey for my mother's sister sent down by rail for Christmas, and when they used to deliver

Collecting coal at Cwmcynon tip, Penrhiwceiber during the Miner's Strike, 1984-1985. Photo: courtesy of RCT Archives. 224

it, perhaps the foot or something would be hanging out through the portmanteau. <Laughs> Oh, it was funny! And of course, in the winter, the windows would be all steamed up with the cold like. There was no central heating, you could write your name on the frost… so frosty. And I remember… oh, was it 1947 we had a big fall of snow. We were upstairs and we couldn't go out, it was terrible, and our glasshouse, it was right on top and of course the bedroom windows then – not like they are now, sash like. And oh, it was terrible. Couldn't go down the toilet. It was awful. Terrible! And there was my mother boiling the kettle for to get the frost off the windows. Terrible. We had a lot of clothes, hot water bottles. The rubber hot water bottles and my mother had the thick jumpers, put them on the bed, thick, and the warm dressing gown, thick jumpers and you'd wear… I used to have like gaiters over my shoes to keep warm.

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Ynysybwl | Keeping warm

Eleanor Jones, born 1939 in Abercynon, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in a private room at her retirement accommodation, 16th June 2015 We had coal, but then you couldn't afford to keep it burning all the time. Otherwise you'd be out of coal before your other load of coal would be due. In the back kitchen, that was a small grate, and there was a pantry and a toilet out the back, but you'd have to… I've seen us be four or five in a bed to keep warm, and big coats on the top of it to keep warm – not sheets and pillowcases like we've all got now and thick duvets. We had no carpets. Straw mats. My mother used to like a straw mat and cutting up bits of material and threading them through so you had … what did they used to call them? Anyway, they used to pull these bits of rag … rag mats, that's right, rag mats, through and they'd have them then. She'd have to sand around the outside, we had the big mat down, she'd have a table and this window and then there was about that much stuff like sand, so she'd sand that all down and clean all that up and… hard work it was, but you weren't allowed to go into the front room, because that was if you were dead or ill. If you were dead, it was worse! <Laughs> Idris Acock, born 1946 in Ynysybwl, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in a private room at his retirement accommodation, 18th June 2015 I can remember when I was a kid in High Street where I was born. I was born in High Street, and the old coal fires had a little oven on the side and coal halfway up the chimney and it was nice and warm, but smelly. You had the old coal then and it was really stinky old stuff. But it was the way, you had to put up with it in them days, you didn't

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have the smokeless fuels then. There was just a fire in the lounge and we had a little fire in the front room, just open fires, but you had the heat there but the smell when you were little… wicked it was. You didn't have a lot of warmth then, coats and everything on the bed, but you just had to go through it, you get better as you get older! <Laughs> I think, anyway. I moved up to Heol-y-Plwyf – up there, newer houses, different versions of everything, so it was a lot nicer. The coal was the same, but of course, everything was different, new chimneys, everything was different then and you had a bit more heat, a bit more insulation I would say, to give you that little bit. We still had coal fire in the front room and the what's name, but of course, it was more insulated than the other houses, so the heat went through it a little bit more, but you had the front room and the living room then. And nothing was shut so you had the doors open, so the heat was then just penetrating through the house, which isn't so bad then. It was a lot better than that one down High Street. Your windows were better then, they'd got a bit better, not double glazing or anything, but they'd got a bit better, you had the old metal framed ones, but the other ones, the old wooden ones, you had a bit of wind and they're rattling and the wind is blowing in and the curtains are all over the place! So, it wasn't sort of nice, but then that's your childhood, you've got to grin and bear it and grow up as you are. Marianne Jones, born 1947 in Pontypridd, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed at Ynysybwl Community Centre, 2nd June 2015 I can remember coal deliveries because they used to be delivered onto the side of the road, and you'd see dads coming out, you'd see grandmas

coming out, and mams and us kids filling the buckets. We had little buckets and that was our contribution, taking the coal in. Because very often you had a hallway, you had to travel through the hall, through the kitchen, out to the back to the coal house. But some of our neighbours were very lucky, because they were in three-storey houses, not many, but just a few and they had a grating outside which went down into a coal cellar, so when the coal lorry would come along, you'd count the bags in, and you'd just tip them down the coal cellar. So consequently, they were the ones that they didn't sweep the pavement. We had to clean up the road. But we had some fun, because all the kids would come out. I can see us now, when the coal was delivered and we'd take our little buckets out, you know the little buckets you take to Barry Island, little plastic buckets, and daddy would be there and you'd have your shovel and he'd be telling you to fill the small coal and take it in. But everybody joined in, it was a community thing: "Mrs Jones has had her coal, go and ask her if she needs help." "Yes." "Come on then, everybody out, let's all go!" And everybody would tramp out, all clothes on, and we'd get Mrs Jones's coal in. And you wasn't allowed to leave until the last shovelful was swept up from the gutter, because that was your responsibility, because in those days you could tip on the highway, couldn't tip on the pavement, because it was a walkway, but you could tip on the highway but you were only given so long to take it from there. Say for instance, you couldn't leave it overnight, it had to go that day, otherwise if the inspector came round, he could fine you, so it was everybody in and everybody do it. I've seen them go through the whole street like that, it started one end, because everyone had had coal delivered that day you see, and work through the whole street and within an hour, two

hours, you wouldn't dream that they'd been up, other than the black stains on the road. Marilyn Jenkins, born 1937 in Graig, Treharris, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in a private room at her retirement accommodation, 16th June 2015 My father always worked underground from the time he was 12 until he retired. And I can remember once he had an accident in work, and they… it wasn't like it is now where… off to hospital. Somebody saw him and they sent him home, and I came home from school and he was lying in bed with a white pillow. But his face wasn't clean… he had his cheek cut like that, and he wanted a cigarette. He never smoked upstairs, but he was ill and I can remember him smoking a cigarette and a bit of smoke coming out through his cheek, I'll always remember it, I can see it now. I was only little. I mean he was alright after, but he had to have stitches, but I can always remember seeing that little wisp of smoke coming out of the side of his cheek. There were grates in every room, but no, no heating upstairs. No, never. I can remember the windows in the winter. You could get up and write your name on the inside. If it was cold, we used to have the shelf out of the oven by the side of the fire wrapped in something and that put in the bed, never any hot water bottles or anything. And what you had on there, the bedclothes would be about 18 inches high and you could hardly lift it to get in, but that's the only way you could stay warm.

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Ynysybwl | Tom Cadwallader

Our modern Titans Listen and you'll hear them creep

Tom Cadwallader

Photo: Tim Mitchell. 228

OUR MODERN TITANS

LISTEN AND YOU'LL HEAR THEM CREEP

Modern Titans, on our hill, Their single feet, so strong, so still Majestic blades, that reach the sky, Turning, spinning, round they fly.

The blackened coal tips are all gone, Their legacy has ended. Now rolling hills are in their stead, This view must be defended.

Heroic sentinels, they stand and stare. Through day and night, they have no care. Glorious in the sun and rain Catching wind, not one complains.

But listen, listen, and you'll hear them creep You'll see them on the hillside, They are the coming of the wind, Advancing as a new tide.

From up on high, they look below, Heather, bracken, drifting snow. Rabbits, hares and bleating sheep, Live their lives, around their feet.

Each day their numbers ever change, The Martian engines growing They creep upon our rolling hills Across our valleys flowing.

Converting wind for our gain, Hating them we must refrain. They are the future of mankind Renewable energies we must find!

They multiply and spread their threat The war of worlds is coming The spinning, gruesome engines stride, Their giant arms are humming.

â&#x20AC;&#x192;

We must prevent their ghastly spread! A stop to this infection! They will become a rusting mess, A lasting aggravation.

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Ynysybwl | Entertainment

Entertainment Ann Morgan, born 1934 in Gelli, Rhondda, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed at Ynysybwl Community Centre, 2nd June 2015 I can't tell you much about television because we never had one. We used to go to the pictures. When we were kids, we used to take Sugar Puffs in a plastic bag, munch them in the pictures and we'd come out. My mother knew what time the pictures came out – now, the pictures are down there and the farm's up there – and she'd be shouting my name and I'd be too ashamed to shout up and say I was coming until I got up at the back street and said, "I'm coming, Mam!" And then she'd be on the gate waiting for me to get up there. We had better times then than they are today. Kathy Price, born 1948 in Church Village, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in her home, 16th June 2015 The cinema was great, Saturday mornings in the Lady Windsor… Not the Lady Windsor at all… In the <pause> I can't remember what it was called now! The 'Bwl Hall to us, it probably was the Lady Windsor (but) the 'Bwl Hall to us. And Saturday morning, you'd get your ticket and in you'd go and you'd save your tickets if you had so many tickets … That was great, always on. And there were shows running in the evenings as well, so that was a place of entertainment. Of course, there was the Roberttown Hotel, the Windsor Hotel, there were plenty of pubs that the men could go to for a start, not that we ever frequented those places, you understand. <Laughs> Youth club was brilliant, Tony Burnell's dad ran the youth club, and that was a brilliant place because it got us off the streets and there were all sorts of activities going on there, which we didn't want to go with at all, but unless you went to the activities you couldn't do it afterwards; 230

drama lessons and sewing lessons and painting lessons and all sort of artistries. And then later on, a fantastic place, they were so encouraging to us all as we got older and some of us went on to further education and so on, we ended up taking classes down there <laughs> guitar classes and what have you. I think that was a hub, that old youth club was a wonderful place, and the friends I made there are still my friends now and a lot of them are part of this group. So, there was something always going on. There was plenty to do. Mabel Kerton, born before WWII in Ynysybwl, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in a private room at her retirement accommodation, 25th June 2015 We had a happy life. My father used to tell us a lot of ghost stories. We used to sit around the fireplace in the winter nights and he would start these stories about his youth and how coming home from Ponty there was what they call Grover's that they always reckoned was haunted. So, he used to tell us all these stories and we knew what was coming but he would give a drastic end and we'd all jump! And then if it wasn't that, because we'd no television and we had to wait so long for the batteries in the wireless to warm up, we all entertained ourselves. We were all laughing in our place because the fires were back to back, the big lead grates were back to back, and Mr and Mrs Hughes next door, they would knock the wall with a broomstick and they'd come in and he would fetch his ukulele and we'd all have comb and paper and we'd all be singing and what-you-calling in our house. So, our kitchen would be crowded. When I was 11 year old I took up the accordion, I started playing the accordion, that was one luxury… my parents tried to – if we wanted something, really wanted something – they would try to make the effort to do it for you. So anyway I

Cast of a pantomime produced by the Young Wives Group from Christ Church, Ynysybwl, 1950s. Photo: courtesy of RCT Archives.

took up the accordion, and my sister, who slept in the middle, if I was stuck with a tune, I'd be doing these notes on her back and she'd complain and she'd say, "I'm not sleeping in the middle." She was younger than me. "I'm not sleeping in the middle," she'd say. "Mam, she's getting on my nerves! I'm sleeping and that's all I can feel is these fingers going up and down my back!" <Laughs> So I had to keep turning over then and I had to try and do it on the side of the bed. Maureen Gadd, born in 1940 Llwynypia, Rhondda, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in her home, 12th June 2015 We didn't have television, we had the radio and a gramophone… we had music that way. But for our other entertainment, there was a cinema right opposite us. Now I'm talking about going to the cinema for sixpence and then there was a little shop on the corner, Mrs Philips's, and they would

sell penny chews and things like that. We'd have a little bag of chews if we could afford it – not all the time – and then we'd go to the cinema, which was right across the road. And it was fantastic because we'd come home, we'd have a cup of tea then or a sandwich and it was time for bed, to start the day all over again. Ynysybwl has changed in a lot of ways because some of the buildings, the old, cherished buildings, they've been pulled down, brought down. The 'Bwl Hall, that I said was a cinema-cum-games room-cum-library-cum-something else, it was fantastic. Actually, we spent a lot of time in there in 1984, '85 during the Miners' Strike… because we were doing food parcels for Ynysybwl people. And that was a godsend, because we could do everything in that building. But of course, one day all of a sudden, somebody said it was on fire and we lost it. 231

Ynysybwl | An artists' workshop

An artists' workshop The Everyday Lives strand of the Stories of Change project was made up of a number of collaborations between artists and communities, to explore those communities' relationships with energy. However, we also commissioned a small workshop to explore artists' own relationships with energy, along with their responses to some of the stories recorded in Ynysybwl. The event was facilitated by community musician and performer Pauline Down and theatre maker Gilly Adams. They brought together seven artists based in Wales with interests in different creative practices, such as songwriting, storytelling or film making. The two central questions for the one-day gathering were as follows: What questions should we ask for the future about living with environmental change? How can we empower and connect communities? The Everyday Lives team simply introduced the wider Stories of Change project and, more specifically, our work in the Valleys at the workshop. We provided audio recordings of oral history interviews in Ynysybwl which, at that time (July 2015), we had just finished carrying out. These were used as prompts for conversations and discussions at the workshop. For example, Gilly and Pauline opened the workshop by singing a mining song. Participants took part in a mapping exercise to explore on paper their relationships with energy across the decades and how they had changed. They were asked to reflect on the dilemmas they may have faced, and how energy may have affected their work. Most of the day was spent working creatively. Allan Shepherd (storyteller) and Ariana Jordao

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(bio-artist) started work on a political cartoon on the notion of a mythology for green energy and the energy that you can acquire from it. Frankie Armstrong (singer-songwriter) and Laura Bradshaw (community musician) worked on separate songs, both on the theme of mining and the end of community, while Sian Cornelius (storyteller) made a sound collage. Amanda Rackstraw (writer and performer) wrote a haiku, which was read to the group. One of the creations from the day was Frankie Armstrong's song 'Now that the mining's done.' You can find the text of the song below and a recording of it on the Stories of Change website. Below, Frankie reflects on her workshop experience and developing the song: I found all the discussions and shared thoughts very interesting but was particularly engaged by the recordings of people talking about the impact of the pit closures on the communities in south Wales. I've been part of the Folk Revival since the early 1960s, and many of the songs we sang were from mining communities, past and present. The BBC Radio Ballad 'The Big Hewer' had a big impact on all of us who heard it (and several of my friends were singers in the programme) – it was over romanticised and somewhat macho but the women's contributions were very moving and powerful. Ewan MacColl wrote a short but lovely piece for a miner's wife. I used the tune as it's very beautiful and strong and was the catalyst as I sat in a corridor at Chapter singing into my recorder – thinking of the pride and sense of community expressed in The Big Hewer and the sense of loss as well as relief in the recordings we heard that afternoon.

NOW THAT THE MINING'S DONE Many's the time I've sat by the fire And thought how the coal was won With fear in my heart, in hopes he'd come home But now those days are done. Gone now the dread, gone now the waiting but gone now the closeness with friends Gone all the dust but gone with it the trust Now that the mining ends. All those years I sat by the fire And thought how the coal was won thinking of family miles under the ground Father, husband and son but where once was the slag, the hooter, the cages Now there's wild flowers and grass Where pit ponies can graze till the end of their days But the love and the warmth too have passed. Now there's no hearth, no flickering flames where often I sat and cried There was dust in the lungs and blood on the sheets when so many young miners died. But now there's no work, we're thrown on the scrap heap Depression and drinking are rife I can only pray there'll be work soon someday To weave back our communities' life. Words â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Frankie Armstrong Tune â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ewan MacColl from 'The Big Hewer' Radio Ballad

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Ynysybwl | Changing landscapes

Changing landscapes

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Lady Windsor Pit, Ynysybwl, circa 1970s. Photo: Glyn Davies, courtesy of RCT Archives. 235

Ynysybwl | Changing landscapes

Barbara Castle, born 1950 in southeast London, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in her home, 19th May 2015 And I suppose the other thing that is remarkable about the landscape is what you see now with the forest wasn't here… this forest was entirely created at the end of the Second World War with the Forestry Acts. So this farm then had something like 600 acres, it was a big sheep farm and it had been a sheep farm going back hundreds of years and there were other farms which have now disappeared which were bought up in '48 by the new Forestry Commission, so the landscape changed hugely at that point. If you go up into the forest you can still find the remnants of the old walls and the pens and the farm houses – there's a farmhouse not far from here, it's just the foundations now, so that's… obviously, there were broadleaf woods right across the valleys before sheep. For example, we now… we've taken all animals apart from a couple of friends' ponies off our land and the bluebells are coming, and that means there was a wood, so there's bluebells everywhere when you let it grow. So, lots of hints about what the landscape was like, which is absolutely stunning. I mean I have friends come down and stay a lot, we have quite a lot of friends come from other bits of Britain, and they get here and they go, "Oh my god! The Valleys are stunning!" And I say, "Well I have been telling you this for 30 years!" Kathleen Stobbart, born 1937, Chester-leStreet, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in her home, 13th July 2015 Well you had the mountain, they'd tipped on the mountain there, pit heaps as they call them. Now over there, there was a wood, what we'd call the bluebell wood, we'd walk, lovely bluebells and everything, but then they took the tip further across and further across until that was all tip by the time the pit closed, but they did say then they'd landscape it and I've got to be honest, they've done a good job, it looks beautiful now. But <laughs> first going off, all you looked at was 236

the pit heaps, the slag, especially the kids… The kids growing up used to go up there and play and slide down on tin trays and god knows what and come in filthy dirty, oh god! They've done one of these, what they call a Taff Trail… comes up here and you go all the way round over Abercynon, I think it goes on to Merthyr, I'm not sure, so that runs down by the river down there. So, I think there's quite a few people use that and there are steps go up in the middle. I haven't been up there for a long time, it's about eight years since I last went up there, I couldn't climb up there now, but you get a lot of youngsters on bikes, they go up over the top and they ride around over the top. When it was still tip, you could see the runs they used to have up and down the side, but now the trees have grown up you can't see. Whether they're still running up and down into the trees, I don't know, but you used to be able to watch them one time. Lionel Gadd, born 1938 in Ynysybwl, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in his home, 5th June 2015 You went out on the street, looked down there, you'd see the colliery, two shapes, you'd see it from there. And then, that part there you'd come to the mountain, well what used to be there, then was the tips. The coal waste tips… it was a tip there going up and there were drams going up every day, back and forward, taking the waste up, coming down and all that, and gradually that extended so they had to start a new tip. Then down opposite Robert Street there was the washery… used to wash the coal and separate it, different sizes, coal, and it used to be all washed and cleaned and then they'd get it all in the back of the trucks and take it away. But they had a tip down there then, so that mountain there is virtually, almost all, coal waste, but it's been landscaped. It's grown over, you know. Put grass seeds down and everything. And the colliery itself, Lady Windsor, [its] surface has completely flattened out and it's beautiful, isn't it? It's one huge big field now, and there's

always talk about building houses and that on there you know, they're always saying it, but you would never think it was a colliery there at all, there's no sign at all. They've landscaped the whole area and they've done a very, very good job of it… times I've walked with the dog, cross the bridge and down the line, the old line, and walked past the washery what's there and you just can't see absolutely nothing that was from before, nothing at all. There's no indication that it was a colliery, is there? Wynford Price, born 1948 in hospital in Cardiff, family residing in Ynysybwl, current resident of Ynysybwl Interviewed in his home, 3rd June 2015 That side of the valley, the River Clydach runs down… which would be the eastern side was black and the western side was green, the reason being because the pit was sunk on that side of the mountain, the other side of the river and there's no houses that side of the river, it was just the pit. And naturally the pit is a dirty, black place and above the pit were the coal tips and they're still there today. But of course, in their heyday they had the pit drams going up the pit every day, up the mountain every day to dump the slag and the waste. And so there was probably a haze of black dust around and I don't think it did any washing any good on the line, because I think it was in the air really.

On the other hand, that side of the mountain, the tip is… you can recognise it as a coal tip, a waste tip, but they've planted gorse on there, there's trees on there, there's even woodpeckers on it and I think that's lovely, to look out of my window and say, "Wow, that's a nice green area to look at." And wildlife is growing there, is breeding there, and it's turned around in the 20 years since the pit has shut, probably 30 I would think, late-'80s, so it has greened up. If you go up the top of the mountain and you look at the south Wales valleys, they're all the same now, they're green, they're lush, they're beautiful places, I must be honest, it should be a national park I think. But that's only happened in the last 20 years, because before that they were black and they were dirty, but they gave employment. So, I think it's nice to see that the industrial past, although we must remember it, I think it is a thing of the past and I think it's nice for our children now to breathe fresh air, not coal dust, and have a nice environment and I'm looking forward to the grandchildren seeing that. I take them for a walk up the mountain or down a river and I know it's pretty clean now, the environment is a lot cleaner and it's beautiful as well, because you look out, you see the sights, you see nice trees, particularly this time of year now in June, it's beautiful and sunny, the bluebells and it is nice. Because I'm a big fan of the environment and I do like to see it looking nice!

But funnily, this side of the mountain is agricultural, it always has been and there's a number of farms… just over the top of this mountain here where we live now, that's a farm and that's been going for perhaps centuries, I don't know. And all the farm area there I think that area's been like that since the year dot, it's been farming and that's all it's been. And it's quite a contrast really, because this side was the industrial side of it that side of the river, and this side was farming country. But of course, today that hasn't changed in the west, because it's still farming country, but this side has certainly greened up.

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Tairgwaith: Old and new energies

David Llewellyn

On the first day of October 2015, with the sun beating down from a cloudless sky and the thermometer nudging its way into the 70s in old money, I made my way to the project's first creative writing workshop in Tairgwaith, a small village on the fringes of the upper Amman Valley in the western reaches of the Valleys. On my journey, I had headed up the Tawe Valley and reached the town of Pontardawe, where the tall narrow steeple of St Peter's Church was prominent against an azure background. There, I branched north-northwest, without any drama, past Rhyd-y-Fro and into verdant countryside. Eventually, high on the common to my left, the recently erected turbines of Mynydd y Betws Wind Farm emerged. Here, as increasingly elsewhere in parts of the Valleys, the old and new faces of energy production sit juxtaposed. This is anthracite country, an area developed rather late in south Wales's quest for coal. But not just any old coal; as inhabitants of these parts are proud to say, 'west is best.' The quality of the flameless, smokeless hard coal mined in this area was high – the highest carbon content, the fewest impurities, and the greatest calorific content. The road ran into Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen over the rail track, where I turned right and right again along the long road towards Tairgwaith at the railway terminus. Passing the service road to one of the UK's few purpose-built harness racing tracks, founded on the site of a former mine, and close to the entrance to the huge East Pit opencast mine, I reached my destination: Canolfan Maerdy, the community centre located in the mine's former offices. There, Gill and her staff and volunteers had worked hard to support our project partner Emily Hinshelwood, who was due to run a series of five weekly workshops. As I entered the building, there was a display of local maps, photos, and written memories. Emily was already deeply engrossed in chat with the early comers. By the time the workshop started 15 people were in attendance, all eager to get underway. The round table introductions revealed a fascinating group, each person armed with their own object connected to the area as a catalyst for opening discussions. Our day of talk generated a multitude of stories. Late afternoon, and 'llawn dop' (full to the brim) with cake, I made my way back home, energised by Emily and the workshop and the warming sun that had shone on us all day. Seven months later and, again, the sun was beaming down gloriously on Tairgwaith. At Canolfan Maerdy an expectant full house was hushed and ready to hear some of the wonderfully evocative poems and stories created by the workshop attendees, which had been beautifully put together by Emily Hinshelwood to create the book Windywhirly Things. There was humour and pathos aplenty as the writers held the audience rapt with their tales of their energy encounters – battles with ovens and 238

Change of shift, East Pit, Tairgwaith, 2015. Photo: Emily Hinshelwood.

coal fires, VHS recorders having minds of their own, and fancy underwear wrecking washing machines â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as well as the changing landscapes of this area and the hardships and struggles endured over the years in the quest for energy.Â For this book, we have picked three poems to illustrate the creative work produced at the workshops. Two, by Liz Webb and Fay Rees, follow immediately below, while the third, by Martin Locock, is showcased in Hamish Fyfe's reflection on how research in the Stories of Change project sought to "put people at its centre" and tried to "honour the experience of the participants by inviting open and broad participation." Also included here is Emily Hinshelwood's own poem 'The old coal office,' based on a number of contributions, which captures beautifully the essence of the workshops. Here, too, are two of the images; one of East Pit, Tairgwaith that she took for the book, and a new image of the Awel Co-op community windfarm in the area, which contrast what might be considered old and new energy.

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GREY GHOSTS Liz Webb

A march of steel structures dwarfs the surrounding landscape. They drift across the hills and valleys, then disappear over the horizon. Their grey wires hold hands; their intricate latticework reflects the grace of modernity.

OPEN CAST Fay Rees

Dormant land, black diamonds. Man's treasure hunt for energy. Birthing energy from land Caesarean op: Open cast. Giant open cast surgery extracts energy for our comfort. Man's open heart surgery extracts from our land Energy.

Tairgwaith | The old coal office

The old coal office In this carpeted room, in the old coal office in a far-off village that was once just farms with chickens and pigs and water from the spring – that was before Coal became King: when the pits were sunk to the black in the rock and families flocked to hack at the seam underground, and terraces sprung up all down the valley, while railways steamed in with signals and stations: out chugged the coal and in came migration – aspiration, innovation – blasting out energy to power the nation. Here, where underground tunnels warrened and sprawled the streets up above were paved with black gold – milliners, haberdashers, grocery stores and grand halls for lectures and concerts and operas and balls, and schools for the children with cold lino floors and great lumps of coal dumped at the door. And people walked – they walked over mountains to carry out chores: to pick up some washing for mother-in-law to recharge a battery or run to the neighbour to "come over quickly, mam's gone into labour" and "if you see sorrel pick me a bunch" and "take this to dad – he's forgotten his lunch."

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Emily Hinshelwood

Here, while the rivers ran black and the slag heaps grew high, the washing was pegged in the sunshine to dry. You'd shiver on the seat of the outside lavatory and Bronwen the pig would be hanging in the pantry with bottles of pickles and honeysweet mead the kettle is whistling – it's time for our tea the return of the miners, the Kings of Coal where machines were cutting faster, more precision, more control and opencast was taking it by digging wider holes and energy was wired direct into our homes: Refrigerators, tellies, electrical gadgets that popped up your toast with invisible magic that switched off your kettles and wound up your clocks and gave you a rest while it washed all your socks and the digging got deeper, the cutters got faster in spite of the chance of horrific disaster and lungs full of dust and chapels of mourners and Thatcher's henchmen just around the corner. Here, where the pits were closed and the miners felt trampled the shops boarded up and the railways dismantled the footpaths and rails gave way to the brambles and coal fires ripped out in ominous preamble to a new dawn – a world away from the donkey in the garden mowing the lawn.

Here, where energy is cheap, just a plug in a socket we surf the whole world from the phone in our pocket We curl and we straighten, we slice up with ease we shred and we spread and we boil and we freeze we pump and we grill and we whirl and we whizz and we peel and we pulp and we dice and we fizz and we strim and we grind and we glow and we spray and we twinkle and dazzle all night and all day There's toys for the baby that gurgle and bleep that will rock it and feed it and sing it to sleep. Those that hate dirt can spend a few quid on a bin with an electronic, automatic, selfopening lid and teeny weeny table hoovers suck up minute specks; How long will it be till we plug in for sex? Here, where the hills are getting greener but the climate's going crazy – a hailstorm in the summer; in the winter a fresh daisy – and with knotted trailing cables are we all becoming lazy? or depressed, or stressed? as the world is spinning faster and we're looking for an answer from some god-given energy enhancer we've got solar on the houses and turbines on the mountains and everyone is counting how much carbon you're emitting in your cars and are you quitting retrofitting, Are you switching to the correct lightbulb in the kitchen?

Here in this carpeted room in the old coal office in a far-off village that was once just farms we talk, reminisce, share stories and we laugh and somehow in the room there's a buzz, a thrill, a charge of energy renewable, sustainable, organic, friendly, free and chocolate cake at break time with a nice warm cup of tea. We question our appliances and how much of this stuff do we need to fill our houses with before we've got enough? Because what really seems to matter, what we strive for, what survives is the warmth of other people, those connections in our lives. ▷▷Emily Hinshelwood is a freelance writer, performer, community arts facilitator, and project manager.

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Treherbert | The Story Studio

A creative experiment: The Treherbert Story Studio From Monday 27th July 2015 until Friday 7th August 2015 we took over the closed down library of Treherbert, once a Methodist chapel, and reopened it as a 'pop-up' Story Studio – a space designed to make people think about their relationships with energy in the past, the present, and perhaps also the future. Our team involved academics working on the Everyday Lives project, our creative partners Lisa and Iain from Storyworks, as well as Nancy Evans (Artis Community), Ian Thomas (Welcome to our Woods), and other members of local community organisations. Beyond the team, we received a lot of support from various partners, who helped for example with furnishing the library or with providing archive material to be shared with residents. First I will describe how the studio came about and what it was like for the two weeks it ran. I will go on to reflect on why such a creative approach may be useful for exploring energy with members of the public. The making of the Story Studio In the making of the Story Studio, we tried to follow Stories of Change's ethos of interdisciplinarity and co-production. Before the idea of a Story Studio was formed, we had several meetings in Treherbert with various community members and groups to scope their activities and see how we might be able to combine what they were interested in with what Everyday Lives was about. It was important to negotiate goals for the research activity in Trehebert that would work equally well for the academic participants and the community partners. While we were committed to values of co-production and community research, we were very aware that this was not straightforward. On one hand, our work in Treherbert had the potential to connect 244

Mel Rohse

with a range of communities in south Wales that might help us to shape the project. On the other, we were conscious that we were bringing an academic project to those communities, which could seem at odds with the ethics of participation and co-production. With that in mind, our creative partner Lisa Heledd Jones proposed the idea of a Story Studio and, together with the community partners, we decided to go ahead with it. We were to take over empty premises in Treherbert for two weeks in the summer, which symbolically coincided with 'miners' fortnight,' the miners' annual holiday. The space would be completely free to access and would exhibit objects from various times in the past that might prompt the visitors' memory of how they related to energy. To try and capture those memories, we also devised a set of questions to be posted throughout the space. Visitors would have the opportunity to answer those on post-it notes or on card, which they could either display or leave with us for collection. We had audio recorders ready in case visitors were willing to be informally interviewed. The idea was that the space would be interactive – comfy chairs were turned into 'listening stations' with iPods and headphones; still pictures of the area, provided by the Local Authority's archives service, played on a loop at the back of the studio; and archive footage, supplied by BBC Cymru/Wales among others, played in the 'lounge' area. Indeed, the entire space was organised roughly around various rooms in a house: a kitchen, a bedroom, and a lounge. However, we also set aside a dedicated space for commenting on local maps with images of the area's landscape, and on past ways of travelling. We also worked closely with our local partners and other contacts to host activities in the space.

The Story Studio. Photo: Lisa Heledd Jones. For example, we hosted an evening debate on the future of energy in Treherbert. We invited a PhD student from Cardiff University to run a workshop on community energy with community members, and members of the local churches and chapels ran a discussion group on the relationship between them and the mining communities. As the Story Studio came to life, a small group of local children started to attend it regularly, and baking and sewing from scratch became popular pastimes. Exploring energy creatively Why use stories to engage the public with the topic of energy? In my view, there is something specific about 'energy' that makes this type of approach – bringing together the arts and social sciences with local partners – particularly successful. Stories can make the everyday notable again. Energy is ever present in our daily lives but its very ubiquity has made it invisible. This isn't true across the world of course, and may not even be true within a country like the UK, where people

suffering from fuel poverty have an acute sense of how indispensable energy is for getting on with daily life. But, a majority of people in the UK and in similarly developed countries have no tangible relationship with energy. As a participant on another project on energy reported: "I think I worked out that through gas and electricity every year, the average house gets the equivalent of a bit over three tons of coal delivered completely silently and without any mess. And go back a hundred years ago, and everyone would have a really good quantitative understanding of how much energy they used because they had to physically shovel the stuff. So, that made me stop and think'' (see the Drawing Energy ebook by Flora Bowden, Dan Lockton, Rama Gheerawo and Clare Brass, page 18. The book is produced by the Royal College of Art and available free online). The invisibility of energy is compounded by our routine and mundane use of it, which makes it altogether a complex issue to engage with. 245

Treherbert | The Story Studio

This is where the story studio was particularly successful. It gave a concrete and physical presence to something that we take for granted. It did so by providing a wide range of prompts that allow individuals that came in to make their own, often emotional, connections with the topic. Once this was established, we found a public that was keen to share its experiences and reflections on the idea of 'energy' and what it meant in daily life. By taking over a familiar space and transforming it into something unusual based on a theme, we extended to the local community an open invitation to reflect on and share their views on a seemingly mundane topic and found that there was much to be said. It also enabled us to engage with a range of people â&#x20AC;&#x201C; certainly a more diverse group than if we had used more traditional methods of recruitment in research.Â

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Overall, the Story Studio required a great amount of work from both researchers and partners. But this paid off, and it was a great success. Many people came to visit, with a number of people coming back several times over the two weeks we were opened. I also think that it served different groups' purposes without its message being diluted. From the research point of view, it allowed us to engage in conversation with people who we may not have reached if we had used more traditional techniques of qualitative research and recruitment. I cannot speak on behalf of our community partners, but from conversations with them (see also Ian Thomas' piece in this section), I believe the same was true for them. They appreciated an opportunity to meet people who hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t previously got involved with their activities. In addition, although we were interested in the particular theme of energy, we engaged with people on their own terms. There was enough flexibility built into the studio that people could connect with different themes in their own ways and discuss with us countless aspects of their

The transformed space. Photos: Lisa Heledd Jones. relationships with energy. However, it was by no means easy to put together, to run, and then to bring it to a close. It required a lot of preparation and a great deal of facilitation. Though the experience seems to have been positive for our community partners, we don't know what the many individuals who crossed the Story Studio's doors took away from the experience. Did they take the conversations from the studio back into their homes? Does it matter? Perhaps the process of making the Story Studio happen collaboratively, and simply opening its door to anyone in the local community who might want to engage in conversation, was our most important achievement. Â

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Treherbert | Treherbert stories

Treherbert stories

The Beryl family at a street party.

"I was born in 163 and we now live in 154. When I was growing up my mother lived in 40, my aunt lived in 33 with my great grandfather, my grandmother lived in 63, my other aunt lived in 155, across the road was her first cousin in 44, and her daughter lived in 45." – Beryl "When I came home I cried my eyes out, this fella died in my arms you see as I was trying to save him, you know? You was a bit afraid, there was some times when I was bloody afraid, you just didn't know what you were going into." – Dorian Beryl and Dorian have both lived their whole lives in Treherbert. Their houses are a few streets from each other. They always have been. I don't know if they know each other, but they probably do. What I do know is that they both spent time in the Story Studio that we set up in Treherbert's old library in July and August 2015. I'm a digital storyteller. It's not something I knew existed when aged 14 I went to see my careers advisor, Mr Thomas, who was also the PE teacher. You might not know that digital storytelling exists as a job now. But it does. Here I am! I work with people's personal stories, I often record people talking about their lives and then from those recordings I make films, podcasts and art 248

Lisa Heledd Jones

Dorian in Treherbert.

installations. Not quite what Mr Thomas had in mind in 1995 when he suggested I become a dental nurse, and I'm very glad about that – I'm definitely better with stories than teeth… I worked with the Stories of Change project in a few different ways. We worked together to transform the old library in Treherbert into a Story Studio – a space to share and provoke memories and stories related to energy – and I put together digital stories from audio that was collected during those two weeks. Stories from people like Beryl and Dorian. I recorded Beryl on a day when the studio was full of people and goings on – bread baking; people watching village archives; knitting; drawing; and a lot of chatting. The background noise is so loud when I listen back to the recording, but that's not what I remember – I remember the passion in her voice and her opening line, "I know the true cost of energy." Dorian was recorded by Rosie, but the conversation they had stood out to me as I listened back – a lot of jokes and teasing softening the horrors Dorian experienced underground.

Beryl's husband and their baby daughter.

"I paid a very high price for energy in this valley because my first husband was killed in the colliery. So I know the true price of coal. I know the inhumanity of the coal board." – Beryl "The worst of all, in my opinion, was the Cambrian explosion [of 1965]. The policeman stopped us and said you can't go up there and we said 'We're in the rescue team, mun!'" – Dorian I work with lots of different projects about all sorts of different subjects, but I have to tell you that I was quite nervous about this one. I'm not a scientist or an academic and so the nerves came when I knew I'd be working with 'university people' and the theme would be energy. I wasn't sure what that would mean, and was worried I might be out of my depth if people started talking about photovoltaic tiles or the power of wind over water. However, my nerves were misplaced as this project is all about stories. People's stories of energy. It's all in the name I suppose! And where there are stories, there are people, and where there are people there's laughter and sadness and joy and anger and, of course, love. And those are things I do understand. They're the things we all understand.

View from top of Rhigos. Photo: David Llewellyn. "I wouldn't want anyone to go through the experiences I went through. My baby was 10 weeks old, so she's paid a high price as well." – Beryl "We've got to get energy haven't we, you know? It's no use saying we can buy coal from Czechoslovakia or somewhere, because these people will be in the same position as we were in the Rhondda, they'll be taking risks as well." – Dorian Treherbert is at the head of the Rhondda Fawr valley. For many, it's the end of the valley. It's the last stop on the train line from Cardiff. Long rows of terraced houses built on either side of the A4061 and flanked by mountains. Mountains now green that had once been black. Like so many in this part of Wales. Some people said to me they felt they were a forgotten place. I remember one man asking me as looked around the Story Studio, "Why did you choose Treherbert? Was there nowhere available in Treorchy?" "We're seen as easy prey. That's how we feel. To anyone's energy wants except ours. Our wants are unimportant. Is it fair? Is it fair?" – Beryl "People have got to work, this is the top and bottom of it. If they hadn't taken the pits away, we'd still be working in them." – Dorian 249

Treherbert | Treherbert stories

A visitor enjoying archive footage in the Story Studio. My drive into Treherbert was over the Rhigos mountain. It's an incredible journey. The view from the top is stunning. If you've never been, you should go. The view tells its own story – fields, water, trees, pit heads, and wind turbines. The impact of energy carved into the landscape in visible and invisible ways. Not that I noticed all that the first time. I was just wowed by the miles and miles that stretched out ahead, and preoccupied by a cheese bap, sweaty in its cling film, that was my lunch that day. The mountains around Treherbert are in the process of another transformation – the Pen y Cymoedd wind energy project. This means 76 turbines dotted above the valley that will turn wind into power for over 200,000 homes and will be the largest of its kind in the UK mainland. As I drove over the Rhigos mountain and saw where trees had been felled and roads built for the delivery and erection of turbines, I tried to imagine what it would be like to live beneath this mountain. As I looked through archive photographs of the village I saw cinemas and dance halls and carnivals – all in black and white and bathed in sunshine (most of our photographed past is either sunshine or snow)! I started to wonder what this community might want to share with us, what stories might be told 250

Visitors to the Story Studio chatting with Nancy Evans, Arts Community partner. about the past and the imagined futures and how energy has played and still plays a part. It took about a day in Treherbert for me to be reminded of something that is too easy to forget – communities don't have one story. Communities are made from imagined lines we all draw around each other for myriad perfectly good reasons – but communities are actually made up of individual people with different experiences and backgrounds that inform their opinions and stories, regardless of their postcode or street name or ethnicity or favourite rugby team or what fish and chip shop they frequent. To really imagine what a community in Treherbert might or might not feel about 76 turbines, I would need all the hours left in my life and then some. "I would love to see this valley restored to its beauty before we had coal. I would love to see the windfarms taken – I really feel we're being raped a second time. You feel helpless, there's nothing you can do because big money has the right to come in and dig up and rape the mountain and destroy centuries, millennia of habitat. The only almost perfect glacier cwm around here – that's destroyed. The moss, all the natural habitat of the mountain, what effect is that going to have on us and will they care?" – Beryl

Welcome to the Story Studio. "Up in Cambrian (colliery), that explosion there, they broke the rules and they'll do the same with the nuclear power station, in my opinion. I've got nothing against the fans or the turbines they're putting on the mountains, because it's safer than nuclear and it's a lot safer than the pits really." – Dorian What made me remember this forgettable, obvious fact was listening and talking to the people that came into the studio. People like Beryl and Dorian. People born in the same year, who live yards from each other, who both get the same paper from the same shop, feeling and thinking very differently about their shared past and future. This was true across the many recordings we gathered. All of which have informed the 'university people' in their research and will continue to have an impact on the way we think about stories and energy in the future. Of those recordings, we made six digital stories in Treherbert – three-minute films made up of people's voices and their own photographs. They include Beryl and Dorian's stories and can be viewed online at the Stories of Change website.

Questions to inspire reflection. Working with the storytellers has changed me, as all the stories I hear do. I now unwrap my presents carefully and reuse the wrapping paper thanks to David's grandfather and I think about all the gadgets in my house differently thanks to Nancy's experience of living life in a van and I finally understand what a photovoltaic tile is… I think! I hope you enjoy the stories as much as I have enjoyed being involved in the making of them. Once we'd dismantled the exhibition at the old library and packed up my car as tightly as my mum's 'raffle drawer,' I took off down the A4061, past my favourite fish and chip shop, and up onto the Rhigos mountain. Two weeks and the place was a different village to me. The houses didn't all look the same anymore. I looked at the river and could imagine it black. I looked at the shop which used to be the cinema and the street where the Second World War bomb had been waiting for its time. The streets and landscape now full of voices and colour and history and laughter and tears, and of course, love. ▷▷Lisa Heledd Jones is the Director of Storyworks UK.

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Treherbert | As warm as toast

As warm as toast

Irene M. Price

I lay cocooned in my warm bed, unwilling to leave the safe haven it provided. If I had risen and pulled aside the thin curtains, I would have seen an intricate pattern of frost, engraved into a winter picture on the inside of my bedroom window. I allowed only my eyes and nose to escape the confines of my heavy bedding. When I breathed out a small vapour cloud escaped into the chilly air. I strained my ears, listening for any sign of movement anywhere in the house. The silence was heavy and oppressive and I felt its lonely presence keenly. There was no one awake in the house except me. Time seemed to stop still, punctuated only by my quick breathing. Unknown to me, snow had fallen throughout the night. It fell on mounds of coal outside the houses, making them into miniature replicas of the hills surrounding the village. Snowflakes danced playfully amid the forgotten, stiff clothing hanging from clothes lines and settled on the sharp outlines of the slate roofs of the houses, softening their contours. It covered the tin baths hanging on the outside walls, making them look like great dumps of snow suspended in the air, defying gravity. All the ugliness and poverty of the houses in the little mining village were transformed into a wonderful world of white. Towards dawn it stopped and allowed the relentless cold to spread its icy mantle over all. Safe in my bed, away from the harshness outside, my eyes grew heavy and sleep once more beckoned. Then I heard it. A footfall sounded on the landing outside my room. Sleep fled as my ears traced the movements down the stairs, through the house. From the kitchen came the unmistakable sound of last night's ashes being raked out. I waited patiently. Next, I heard the rustle of newspapers, the snap of sticks and the rasp of a match being struck. I smiled to myself in the half light. Not long now. I imagined the fire catching; the flames roaring up the chimney, and then settling as dad carefully placed small pieces of coal on the burning embers. I waited just a little longer then I was out of my bed, my feet finding my slippers and racing through the house in my nightie, outrunning the fingers of cold which chased my flying feet downstairs and all the way to the back of the house. In the kitchen the air was already noticeably warmer. I slipped onto my stool, which sat at my place by the hearth, paying homage to the heat of the flames in the open grate. Dad looked up from the table, where he was slicing up a big loaf of bread.

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"Morning love," he said with a smile. "Shall we make a start?" He handed me the toasting fork and carefully I speared the first piece of bread, toasting it and my chilled body in the heat of the fire. As soon as it was done, I put it on the plate dad had placed on the hearth and as the pile grew, he took them to the table for buttering. As the toast browned, so my face became red and I got hotter and hotter, until the cold upstairs seemed like a distant memory. "Watch you don't burn yourself," my father murmured, while his fingers skilfully wielded the buttery knife over the toasted bread. I basked blissfully in the warmth of the fire and the affection of my dad. He brought two plates over to the fire grate and we munched the hot buttered toast and sipped our hot drinks, warm and contented. We spoke little, each enjoying the company of the other. Then with our stomachs full we continued our work. We made an efficient team, and in no time the kitchen table was full of plates of golden brown toast. Soon the aroma wafted through the house, acting as a more efficient wake-up call than any alarm clock. The rest of the family, seduced by the smell of food, tramped down the stairs to the kitchen, bickering and exclaiming loudly over the snowfall and the prospect of snowball fights after breakfast. The plates of toast which my dad and I had worked laboriously to create, were devoured quickly and carelessly, washed down by cups of strong tea. While they ate, dad quickly laid the fire in the main living area. Mam would only need to put a match to it later. Amidst the noise and bustle I noticed dad quietly putting on his boots and coat, swinging his rucksack over his shoulder as he got ready to leave for work. "I'm off now," he said, making for the door. I gave him a little wave, already regretting his absence, but the others seemed unaware of his leaving. He paused at the doorway, looking back at me. I sat still on my stool, my elder siblings towering over me. He caught my eye, winked and gave me a slow smile.

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Treherbert | The Story Studio: A community viewpoint

The Story Studio: A community viewpoint

Ian Thomas

The Welcome to our Woods project is based at Treherbert and brings together a wide range of community partners as well as statutory sector organisations such as the local authority, Natural Resources Wales, and South Wales Fire and Police services. Our vision includes sustainable co-management with local people of the area's natural resources and assets, making them more relevant to people and businesses and producing environmental benefits. For example, we have been developing a small micro-hydro power system at one of our community woodland sites, while we are working with the Welsh Government and a group of business people to create an affordable, local fuel supply from the woodlands. As part of our activities, we encourage and support volunteers to be fully involved in everything we do, from woodland management work and community clean-ups to running events, being part of the project steering group, or acting as directors in our not-for-profit limited company. In keeping with that, and our aim to engage more widely in our local communities, we were delighted to get involved in working with the Stories of Change project. The Story Studio Further to several meetings finding out more about each other and the projects, the idea was generated to stage a 'pop-up' Story Studio to explore stories around energy and the landscape with local people. The building we used for the studio was originally a house of worship built in 1899 for the oncevibrant Welsh Calvinistic Methodist congregation 254

in Treherbert. Since 1958, it had served as the local library; however, in 2013, it was really no surprise to any of us that under a banner of public sector cuts, along with many other communities in the UK, we would see our local library close its doors for good. Indeed, by the spring of 2014, there was a list of local services that had now vanished from our community â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the swimming pool, two schools, the post office, and banks â&#x20AC;&#x201C; with many local people were saying that soon "there will be nothing left here for any of us." Just as these were disappearing, other things began changing, and in early 2014 we began to spot signs of what would become the Pen y Cymoedd Wind Farm. We started seeing unusual happenings on the hilltops right above our heads. Even though I knew all about the planned wind farm project, arriving home one day to see a new and very huge, very grey, stick-shaped object, pointing up to the equally grey clouds, on top of an already dominant skyline, was a bit of a surprise I can say. By the end of that year, the Phytophthora ramorum disease that was affecting larch trees in south Wales was becoming more and more evident in the valley. What was described as a technical felling process began with quite large blocks of trees being cut down, leaving them tangled on the ground like a pile of spaghetti. We could clearly see that large-scale landscape change was well on the way. Against, and nestling within, these backdrops of change, in late July 2015 the Stories of Change project arrived, to reopen the old Treherbert chapel/library doors. Over the following two weeks, we heard and exchanged many stories and accounts of this building (locally known as

the sticky chapel, but that's another story), the Upper Rhondda's landscape, and how our need for energy had sculpted it and its people. The Buzz So, what happened? For two weeks, the studio ignited conversations that continue today and have helped us to develop further our story of a positive sustainable future that could happen here. We have now formulated a full community and landscape plan, have been successful in obtaining substantial funding through the Big Lottery Fund in Wales' Create Your Space programme, and have widened our sense of what we can do in Treherbert and the surrounding communities. Much of what I learned personally from Stories of Change was about how rich we really are in talent, experiences, enthusiasm, local knowledge, and community spirit. The buzz that happened for two weeks in the Treherbert pop-up studio helped lift and refocus what our community is, and where it could be heading next. Earlier that July, our community company had submitted the planning application for our first micro-hydro scheme the Cwm Saerbren Scheme. Maps and drawings of the planned system were up for discussion at the Studio. Energy, as intended of course, was a big talking point for much of the time. I heard a complete mix of feelings about the wind farm, which comes with an annual £1.8m local community fund over the next 25 years as payback for people.

got to tell us their stories and their anecdotes in turn. People brought along their personal items to display, in what was now a community space once again. And people just talked about or showed others what was important to them in the past, present, and looking to the future. From the very first small Stories of Change planning meeting I went to in Tonypandy in early 2015 at a pop-up art space, there was a great team spirit in this Treherbert project. By the end, all kinds of people were helping out and getting involved; literally dozens. We grew a greater network of local connections over those two weeks. The Stories of Change studio is talked about in our community still today. I am never 100 percent sure exactly why one event just worked really well, but this one did. I do know the Stories of Change team put some incredible work in to make it all happen. The whole experience has been positive and an important part of empowering many local people to have greater say in decisions that are directly affecting them around energy and their landscapes. ▷▷Ian Thomas works for Welcome to our Woods in Treherbert, Wales.

In those 12 days, the doors opened and, with a group of our woodland volunteers, we got to tell our woodland projects story to everybody who walked in – about 60 people per day. And people 255

On listening to stories from Ynysybwl and Treherbert

Rosie Day

As a researcher, one of the topics that I work on quite a lot is that of energy poverty, or fuel poverty. Fuel poverty is often understood in the UK as needing to spend a high proportion of your income on energy and fuel bills, but the broader term 'energy poverty' is generally taken to mean suffering from a shortage of good-quality energy services, like heating, hot water, cooking ability, electronic communication, and entertainment. This can come about through not being able to afford the energy, not being able to obtain the fuel at all, or not having the necessary infrastructure in place. Millions of people around the world currently suffer from energy poverty in one form or another. For example, a family in the UK living on a low income in a badly insulated house that their landlord doesn't maintain well might find it hard to keep warm, or a family in rural Bangladesh without a good electricity supply or a gas connection might suffer from the health effects of smoke created by burning animal dung and wood indoors for cooking, and not have enough light for working and studying after dark. Listening to the stories that people from Ynysybwl and Treherbert told about their childhoods, it struck me that they were really living in conditions of what we would now call energy poverty. They didn't necessarily spend a lot of money on fuel, because of the concessionary coal supplied to so many involved in the mining industry, but they did really lack energy services that we would consider basic now, and which many people in the wider UK at the time would also have been quite used to. Away from the main fire or range, 256

houses were very cold, especially upstairs. People struggled to keep warm at night â&#x20AC;&#x201C; interviewees talked about piling coats on the bed, for example; there wasn't the extensive and constant hot water supply that we take for granted now; kitchens didn't have fridges and freezers, so shopping and cooking were more frequent and more laborious; there was little in the way of electrically powered entertainment like television. Some people described situations that could be considered real privation. And yet that wasn't how people saw it themselves, even from today's perspective looking back. Many people said they thought life was better then, and in general they showed remarkable tolerance in the face of energy service shortages. As a researcher of energy poverty, I was very interested to know why this was. One reason relates to ideas of what is needed, and what is normal life. People, at the time, felt that they had more or less what they needed and there wasn't a strong sense of not having enough. This was really helped by the fact that most people were in similar situations â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as more than one person said to us, everyone around them was in the same position, everyone had the same. So people didn't compare themselves with others and feel hard done by. Something else that came across really strongly was the extent to which people shared: they shared bed and body warmth with siblings, and washing water with family; they gathered around

hearths and the occasional TV set with family and neighbours; even cooking sometimes made use of shared ovens, for example at Christmas. In this way, the energy services they had, like heating, hot water, and entertainment, served more people and went further. Not only that, but people's stories related how they enjoyed the closeness with other people that this kind of sharing engendered â&#x20AC;&#x201C; although of course there may also have been times when they wished they had a bit more to themselves, too. So the social bonds between family, neighbour,s and community created resilience in the face of what could have been vulnerability to energy poverty. I think this really gives us food for thought for contemporary times, and there are lessons we can learn, but it also raises some questions for me too. These stories of a few decades ago present in one way a very positive picture about the ability of communities to work together to make themselves less vulnerable through being prepared to share some of their resources. This is a valuable prompt to reflection on how we might do the same now â&#x20AC;&#x201C; be both more resilient and more sustainable, do more with less. For me though, the stories also raise questions about why a community of energy production, who were paying such a high price for the extraction of coal in terms of their health and even their lives, profited so little from such a profitable industry, and lived in some hardship. I think such questions equally still apply today when we think about communities of energy production in Wales, the UK and around the world â&#x20AC;&#x201C; what are the impacts on them, and are these being mitigated as much as possible? Where are the profits and benefits going, and is the community being fairly compensated?

It is also salutary to reflect on the modest sense of need that people had at that time, too. People had fewer material goods and used far less energy than now, but did not on the whole feel deprived. That can make us think about how much our sense of what we need has changed, to the extent that our energy consumption is unsustainable. Perhaps that could do with some reevaluation. Clearly, living in a community where people felt similar to each other helped in not fostering a sense of needing more, whereas today's starker socio-economic inequalities tend to encourage comparisons that are likely to make more people dissatisfied with what they have. Again though, I think that we can see both good and bad here: low expectations can undermine communities and prevent them from conceiving of better futures, and while equality is in general a good thing, being equally poor arguably is not. The great value of stories such as these from Ynysybwl and Treherbert is that they prompt such reflection, and raise questions like this which are really at the heart of our societal energy dilemmas: questions that apply as much to where we are today as they do to the past, and as much to new energy systems that might be based on wind and solar as to older systems based on coal. How much energy do we need? What uses of energy are most important? Can we use less by sharing more? How do we stop people being vulnerable to energy poverty, without using large amounts more energy? Who profits from the energy industry and how can it be fairer? The stories bring home how these concerns, and the possible responses to them, are not just the domain of researchers and policy makers, but are absolutely embedded in the everyday life of families and communities. 257

Butetown: Exploring energy with the Somali community

Butetown: Exploring energy with the Somali community Yvette Vaughan-Jones

Butetown, in the docks area of Cardiff, has historically been the home of extremely diverse communities. It is home to some of the UK's oldest and most established Yemeni and Somali communities, who came to Cardiff when it was the largest coal exporting city in the world. The city now has virtually no shipping left, but the communities are still very ethnically diverse, though arguably less integrated than they used to be. New technologies keep young people in touch with their countries of origin through streamed news and current affairs, the internet and smart phone apps. There appears to be less incentive to socialise and share cultures than there used to be even ten or 20 years ago. In addition, whereas it used to be that families rarely if ever returned to their countries of origin after they'd established themselves in Cardiff, now it is common for young people to travel back and forth regularly to keep in touch with their families and peers abroad. This element of Everyday Lives worked specifically with Cardiff's Somali community, most of whom come from Somaliland. We focused on poetry, or as poetry or is called in Somali, de Gabay, as this form of creative work is a very alive and vibrant cultural expression both in Somaliland and in Cardiff. The project involved the National Theatre of Wales, who had already brokered relationships and built up trust with a group of young poets. There were two stages to the project: the research and workshop stage and a final showing of work.

Workshops/interviews were held in a number of locations, including The Red House Seamen's home, with the young men's football club, at the Butetown pavilion, and with a women's group. Transcripts of the interviews were made and the poets created works themselves, as well as working with their groups. The overarching purpose was an exploration of people's relationship with energy. The focus of the groups very much tended to settle on recent changes in Somalia, where civil war has destroyed the electricity and gas lines and people are returning to making charcoal as their main source of fuel. The final showing of work took place in the local community centre. People brought artefacts and furniture from their homes to decorate the space and create areas for sitting to watch the videos and listen to the poetry. The audience included community elders, young people, and members of the public who were interested in the project. There were videos and stills shown on screens powered by bicycles, with people enjoying Somali food prepared locally for the occasion.

Ali Goolyad, one of the Somali Poets carrying some goods in Butetown, Cardiff. 258

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Butetown | Tales and memories of Somaliland

Tales and memories of Somaliland Rashad Ashour Bute Street, Cardiff 2015 So the process of charcoal, first of all they cut the trees, after that they dig a big hole in the ground, after that they put the wood into a crater in the ground and they set it on fire. After it is filled with sand they get a piece of iron which is usually used for roofing to cover the burning wood. After two or three days, they come back and they remove the roof and a lot of smoke comes out and that's when the charcoal comes. Then they clean it, after that they bag it and put it on to the lorry and it's on the way to the docks. The 5 kg bag will cost around 80 to 100 dirhams, which is about ÂŁ30. That's going to be the quality one, it's nice. So now the government and the people with power try to stop the people from cutting the trees. They would say it's illegal for you to cut the property of the country. Even though they would say it's illegal, the business would still carry on. The people would carry on through the black market. Mahamed Faarah Togayo Restaurant, Cardiff 2015 I want to tell you about the lighting and energy of Somalia at different stages. Firstly when the government opened power stations in the major cities, including Burao [Burco], Hargeisa, Xamar [Mogadishu], Erigavo, Borama. If you didn't live in these major cities then people would use lanterns for lighting; there would be no lampposts in these rural areas. Even in the main cities, some parts would receive little or no energy at all; in these houses they would also use lanterns. After the change of government, energy companies became privatised. Even before that government 260

there was no use of gas cookers or electric washing machines. We would cook on charcoal or gasoline fires, the gas was shipped over from Arabia or Ethiopia. Approximately 30 in a 100 people would use propane cookers. In homes there were no radiators, if people wanted to keep warm they would just use charcoal or a lantern. There was a lot of charcoal being used all across Somalia and because of the need for charcoal there were a lot of companies that started cutting trees for it. The government had rules in place that only certain companies could actually produce charcoal. These companies would only be allowed to cut down trees that had died. If they were caught cutting trees that were still alive and still green they would face prosecution. And if you were caught cutting trees without having authorisation you would either face fines or prosecution. This was because it was a strategic law in place to save trees. There were people in all the cities looking after tree preservation, it was their job. But things have changed now. Before it just used to be the specific company who made the charcoal, now it's just anyone and everyone, not only private companies, it's everyone. The government speak of it all the time but people are still doing it. Just like people would sell livestock, the charcoal has become the same, they send it to Xamar and Kismayo, its final destination. The country has cookers but still people choose not to use them. I don't know if it's because it's too expensive or if the people don't know it or if they want to stick to what they know. I don't know what it is. The biggest problem that we face with energy is the trees.

Yusuf Suleman Red Sea House, Cardiff 2015 In our country, we used to use propane fires, coal, and gas, but all that stopped during the civil war. The civil war destroyed most of the gas supplies and coal supplies, and left most people with few energy sources. After the war, when the people who'd been evacuated returned, they returned to a country that was as plain as a table. There was no solar, no gas, no electric. Out of desperation people ended up cutting down trees for charcoal. So then the supply for the animals' food declined, as did the trees used for shade. It was a desert. Abdi Eisse Ali Togayo Restaurant, Cardiff 2015 I've experienced life in a lot of different countries. Firstly, I used to live in Sweden, then I moved to Norway, then I moved from Norway to the UK. I was travelling for almost 30 years and then I went back to my country. When I went back to the country there were a lot of different problems with the living standards, and the trees were all destroyed. The war that had happened prevented the government from providing a lot of people with gas and electric, so just to survive people began to make charcoal from the living trees. Before, people would only cut down the dried-up trees, but out of desperation people were forced to destroy living trees. A sack of charcoal would cost $15, around 5 kg. So the problems caused were that the trees that the animals used to use for shade and food were limited.

and every time I return there, every year is becoming hotter than the year before. There are no major electric resources; all there are is small companies that provide power to only the people that can afford the electricity, through diesel generators. And this is so expensive. Each light bulb the generator lights they charge two dollars, and the place doesn't have laws where if you had any problems someone will come and sort it out. If anyone has any problems, it's their own doing. Another problem is that they built small pylons that connect the electricity and in the night some youngsters would come and would break down the pylons. They would rob the cable wires and then resell them. This happens about two or three times every week. There are a lot of problems with the electricity still, there are a lot of problems on the ground, and there are problems when you cook.

Trees pull the water from the atmosphere, so as a result [of the aggressive logging] the rains stopped. I left the country six months ago now, 261

CHARCOAL I am them those they finger When I turned up with a source you needed to feed your hunger, you was quick to pay You needed charcoal and I needed to get paid Those who worked with me needed a job They fed those at home They got to see their children grow Now you see me as that guy who takes the lives of trees I'm that guy who done it out of need I'm that guy who provided when the government had nothing Yet I'm the guy who they blame for deforestation I'm the guy labelled as the murderer of nature I'm the poor, I'm the needy, I'm human, and humans get greedy.

TREES IN ABUNDANCE TO START Trees in abundance to start In a place that peace was far Charcoal hunters who know only the dirham and not about deforestation And know not about the ecosystem, they don't give a damn about the next generation Trees in abundance to start Now they all fall in the dark To people who are stuck in the past Trees in abundance to start I'm sorry our home will never return to that

ALI GOOLYAD

A play for voices

Louise Osborn

Final rehearsal at the firepit. Photo: David Llewellyn.

I was brought into the project at quite a late stage. I hadn't been part of the community research and interviewing process, so didn't have an immediate 'feeling-ful' relationship to the content of the various interviews. However, I had worked in these communities before, and could hear the 'voices' of the people and was very familiar with the history of coal in the south Wales Valleys. Absorbing all the recorded and transcribed material, therefore, on the question of energy and climate change in these areas was quite an undertaking. I was then faced with the overwhelming task of creating something that had coherent form and would work 'dramatically' – but would also raise the question about what kind of future could be envisioned for the Valleys of south Wales. I had to look for themes within the material. There was a prevailing narrative that things had been better in the past and of being 'forgotten' 264

communities. Vibrant, active communities that had been exploited, used, and then discarded. There was a lot of pessimism and weariness expressed by many of the people interviewed, mixed with those who expressed optimism and activism. I needed to find a way of giving balance to these different 'stories of change.' Elemental forces kept appearing – and this became my 'holding form' for the collection. I divided the material up into several main narrative areas – Earth and Wind; Water and Fire; Waste; and The Future. I created a weave that was a mix of memories from the past, the present and things to come. I also created a second narrative layer – so that there was a kind of metanarrative. This layer held the 'dissenting voices,' as the actors, who were telling the stories of the communities were having a ferocious argument among themselves about their own relationship to the past, the future and to the content of the stories.

Performance at the firepit with Anwen Carlisle and Jams Thomas. Photo: Luke Maggs.

This internal drama was a useful device – it shook the audience up and made them reflect on the questions that underpinned the research. They didn't quite know if it was part of the storytelling or an actor having a tantrum – so it stopped them from being 'lulled' into a kind of comfortable reminiscence project. Fortunately, I'd been able to identify three actors who were from the south Wales Valleys, and therefore understood the arising issues and the passions they evoke. Bringing the actors into relationship with my material was really useful in 'animating' the sections I'd dramatised. We were able to weave in several songs and a lot of jokes, which reflected the irreverent humour that characterises these very special communities.

all sides and the mountains in the distance, it made the perfect setting for the performance. The audience were multi-generational and it was very satisfying to see people nodding in recognition of the stories, singing along with the actors and then engaging vigorously with the questions the piece had raised. ▷▷Louise Osborn is an independent dramaturge, trainer, and mentor to emerging and experienced theatre artists, teachers, and drama-in-education practitioners.

A beautiful fire pit had been built for us to perform around. In the warm, clear evening, with the remains of the old coal mine surrounding us on 265

Recalling energy landscapes

Recalling energy landscapes David Llewellyn

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"And of the three valleys, the valley of Tyleri on the east side of the parish is the most delightful. The trees which are the chief glory of the Earth, especially the beech trees abounding about rivers great and small, the hedges and lanes make these places exceedingly pleasant and the passing-by them delightful and affecting; so that wellbuilt houses with gardens, trees and walled buildings about them in these warm valleys, with the prospect of grand high mountains about them, would make very delightful habitations." – Edmund Jones, A history of the parish of Aberystruth, 1779 "At the extremity of this moor, we approached the descent leading to Cwm Tilery and I was surprised with the view of an extensive district well peopled, richly wooded, and highly cultivated, almost rivalling the fertile counties of England. Slowly descending… we looked down with delight upon numerous vallies which abound with romantic scenery, and passed several rills bubbling from the sides of the hill, and swelling the Tilery." – Archdeacon Coxe, Travels in Monmouthshire, 1801 I had never thought of myself as being born and brought up in, or even being part of, an 'energy landscape.' Not until, that is, I became involved in the Stories of Change project. And not too long in, I found myself immersed in reading, talking and, indeed, writing about landscapes that have been shaped by our human need and thirst for energy. I was, and am, very conscious and proud of the fact I was born and raised in a coal mining community, similar in so many ways to those we worked with in the project. My grandfathers had been miners, as indeed were all my great-grandfathers, each scraping and digging for a living way below the earth's surface. I had some distant undergraduate recollections of a very different type of energy landscape – a physicochemical concept in protein folding. But now it was apparent to me that I was born in an all-enveloping energy landscape, one that my forebears had played their parts in shaping. For much of the 20th century, the landscapes of the South Wales Valleys were ravaged by mineral exploitation and heavy industry. The 1947 South Wales Outline Plan (Lloyd & Jackson, 1949) described the scene as one of "coal-tips… spread about the floors of the valleys and on nearby hillsides… [and] once fair valleys, with woodlands, pure streams and pastoral scenery, widely despoiled." Mike Pasqualetti (2012) has vividly described this transformation of coalmining locations around the world, including the Valleys, as one into "sordid, unsafe, and pathetic energy landscapes (with) scars, pits, shafts, piles of debris, and dismal assemblages of squalid housing." In terms of the actual physical impacts, it would be hard to dispute that. The former pastoral beauty described by Edmund Jones and Archdeacon Coxe, evident right throughout the Valleys, had not entirely disappeared. But around the pits where haphazard, unplanned villages and towns had appeared and grown, it had often been lost and submerged in thick veils of energy-exploiting blackness. Looking down the Tyleri Valley, 1973. Photo: Chris Gwilliam. 267

Recalling energy landscapes

Our village and valley was no different in that respect to others in the Valleys. The lower reaches of the small river, the Tyleri, that gives the valley and village its name was barely visible when I was young in the '60s and '70s. Its blackened, poisoned waters were hidden by mounds of shale and waste as it dribbled pitifully towards another similarly decaying watercourse, the Ebbw Fach, which we called, perhaps somewhat affectionately, the River Stink. Often the reds, oranges, and other vivid hues produced from industrial waste, filtering and swirling through the black dust seemed like some hallucinogenic dream. But it was reality, just like the view from my bedroom window across the valley, dominated by two hulking mountaintop waste tips overlooking the pit that produced them. Below was the colliery, its winding wheels dropping miners deep into the bowels of the earth, and its hooter marking time such that no alarm clock was ever needed. At night, the horizon over the top of the Arael mountain seemed ablaze as the furious furnaces of the huge steelworks in the next valley turned it into a raging redness. To many an outsider, no doubt, the scarred, pitted environment might well have conjured up images of the lunar surface. But "sordid" and "squalid"? That's not how you saw it when you actually lived in a coal energy landscape, despite the spoil and damage all around. At least, I didn't. Nor my friends, I suspect. Yes, there were tips. But they were our tips – a feeling of possession similarly held in some other valleys, it seems. In Treherbert we learned some locals had names for their tips, with even a sense of loss felt by some when the area's landscapes were resculpted. Our raconteurs in Ynysybwl told of playing on the various contraptions devised to discard waste, in the slurry itself, and on the tips. We did too. Our bigger tip, brooding, black, and almost a perfect pyramid, was the 'American Tipper,' named for reasons no one could quite fathom. And we played on it, clambering and scrambling up it as if it was Everest, which, when we saw it capped with snow in winter, seemed not too fanciful a comparison. At Easter, the hardier faithful from the local churches and chapels would gather together to haul a heavy wooden cross to the peak in readiness for Good Friday. It would remain there throughout Eastertide until Ascension Day, around six weeks later. Today, the American Tipper, along with its smaller, older companion further up the valley, has gone – pushed down into the valley below to avert the dangers that were so damningly and cruelly exposed by the Aberfan tragedy. Gone too, at least to the unknowing eye, are the other multiple mounds of waste and slag that had buried the former verdant hillsides. They too have been levelled and greened such that today the area is almost literally unrecognisable from the one I grew up in, resembling more the pastoral beauty again that Coxe and Jones had waxed lyrical about over 200 years ago. Gone too are the pits, and with them the raison d'être for hundreds of villages and towns that were home to thousands of miners and their families. Today, many of these communities cling on, defying global change, in hope and pursuit of a new Snow on the American Tipper, Cwm Tyleri, 1973. Photo: Chris Gwilliam. 268

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Recalling energy landscapes

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purpose. And again, energy is shaping the landscapes. Where once were tips, the mountainsides are witnessing proliferations of turbines, harnessing the power of the wind high above the houses below. How connected are people with these emerging energy landscapes, indeed with energy itself? What role, if any, might energy play in rekindling a new future for these former coal communities? Irene Price's beautiful evocation of waking in the valleys in the past on a crisp, white winter morning, featured in this book, reminds us of the ritual of raking the ashes and making a new fire. When we made a fire we could feel the incandescence, smell it, touch it. We were connected to it and, dare I suggest, understood it. Today, a boiler or a light is switched on, most of us not knowing from where the power emanates. Turbines turn and currents are carried off to distant places, perhaps sometimes to return. What about a new energy future for the Valleys, and indeed elsewhere, where new clean power is generated locally again? Could this help us to connect to, and respect, the processes that generate the energy we use and the fragile planet we call home? What will someone growing up in these new energy landscapes recall in 40 years' time? Will the turbines still be turning, or will the they, like the tips before, be only a memory as we find other ways to power our unslakeable thirst for joules to fire our computers, phones, and other machines? Will future writers recall with any smidgen of fondness the energy landscapes of their youth? As we have seen in the tales and stories captured in the Stories of Change project, the past energy landscapes of the Valleys, despite their undoubted awfulness, helped form and forge communities. Few, if any, within them, though, regret the landscape change that accompanied the change in energy sources. When I now survey the landscapes where I was born, I take solace and satisfaction in the newly regained beauty. But I still burn fiercely with pride at the warmth of my childhood community. In the Stories of Change project, people told us some of their stories, rekindled their own memories, and began to share ideas, hopes and aspirations for the future. For me, that is the major challenge for new energy landscapes, wherever they are â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to maketo make them such that, as Paul Selman (2010) puts it, they tell stories of "endeavour, solidarity, enterprise, community and purpose." That way lies the now and the future.

Lower Lake, Cwm Tyleri, surrounded by spoil, 1973. Photo: Chris Gwilliam. Next Page: Part of Pen y Cymoedd Wind Farm at the top of the Upper Rhondda Fawr Valley, May 2017. Photo: David Llewellyn. 271

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Taking energy stories to the centre of power

Yvette Vaughan-Jones

Top: Play for voices at the Senedd, April 2017 Photo: Nick Treharne.

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In May 2016, the Everyday Lives research project culminated in a performance of A play for voices at Ynysybwl as part of Creative Energy Festival, co-produced with local community organisations. The event took place around a firepit at the site of the former Lady Windsor Colliery, stimulating a great deal of debate. After the performance, people were animated and engaged, with lively discussions continuing well into the evening. People said, however, that it was a pity they were talking amongst themselves and that their voices were not being heard by the people in power. As a result, we decided to take an exhibition and the performance to the seat of power in Wales, to the Senedd. In order to use the public spaces at the Senedd, there has to be support from an Assembly Member, and certain criteria must be satisfied. These include encouraging and developing public awareness of, and engagement with, the Assembly; providing a platform for Welsh influence at home and abroad; and promoting significant historical, constitutional, or cultural events with a clear link to democracy. Clearly, the project had offered a platform to discuss climate change and energy transitions, subjects of national importance. It had involved local people and demonstrated the significant cultural richness of those people and their work. Moreover, in terms of the proposed Senedd exhibition and performance, it sought to "make connections between people's feelings of powerlessness around power policy to the people in power." Seeing and understanding its significance, Adam Price, the Assembly Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, supported the Stories of Change exhibition and performance and contributed an interview for the project. Preparatory work for the Senedd event took place between January and April 2017, when Storyworks UK were commissioned to create a new exhibition of material from the project. This took the form of story booths dressed with original artefacts and material supplied by the project's participants. These featured audio stories from the communities, available on headphones, along with photographs and written testimonies. Louise Osborn, who had created the original Play for

voices performed at Ynysybwl, was commissioned to rework the original material into a 20-minute performance. She was also to direct the piece. Actors Sam Bees, Nathan Sussex, and Anwen Carlisle (who had performed at Ynysybwl) were recruited and rehearsals began, with the event set for 8th April. The next task was to promote and market the event. The target audience was politicians and policy makers, arts funders and policy makers, arts organisations, artists, community organisations, community policy makers, and energy policy makers. In all, over 180 people were contacted and acceptances were received from more than 50, while an additional flow of people into the Senedd also viewed the exhibition. Their responses to the event and the two performances held during the day were highly favourable. In particular, we asked: whether the event had made them think afresh about energy? If they found stories a useful way of talking about energy in society? Whether the approaches used helped a wide variety of voices to be heard on energy issues? And, whether it helped them consider new ways of engaging communities in complex issues and choices? Respondents commented: "Excellentâ&#x20AC;Ś captures the voices of real people in a powerful way." "Very moving as well as informative." As the day concluded with the exhibition being taken down, we were left to reflect on the transformational journey of the Stories of Change project, as well as the much bigger journey of Wales' changing relationship with energy. As Adam Price put it in his address: "That triple nexus of culture, energy, and power has been right at the core of our history for certainly the last century, and here we are at the centre of power."

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Community, creativity and change

Community, creativity and change Hamish Fyfe

One of the poems that appears in the Stories of Change project's publication Windywhirly Things, edited by Emily Hinshelwood, is called 'Dark Prism.' The poem was written by Martin Locock as part of the Stories of Change creative writing activity.

DARK PRISM Glo, they call it Sheened like a beetle's back high the price lives lost or marred white fingers, clotted lungs Senghenydd, Gresford, Six Bells, Aberfan Steam and smoke Fuel to power an empire shovelled into fireboxes and hearths The wealth it brought Turned to ash The land scarred Buildings silent On the ridge grey turbines turn The valley sleeps Its labours done Martin Locock (from Carefully Chosen Words)

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Communities in the former coalfields of the Valleys are used to being researched. The presence of major universities just to the south of the Valleys has ensured that researchers have made their way there on a regular basis. They have wanted to find out about the effects on communities of the end of the deep mine coal industry, the impact of welfare reform, how regeneration schemes have fared, the heritage of the Valleys, the impact of the Valleys' military presence. This research has helped people to make government policy that is intended to support communities and generally make things better for the people of the Valleys. So, of necessity, much of this research examines the negative effects, the deficits of the recent experience of people in Valleys communities. Proving a weakness can ensure that the needs of communities are better understood and better economically supported. But having to describe the life of a community in terms of what it hasn't got fails to celebrate the functional, the dignified, and the strongly communal aspects of these communities â&#x20AC;&#x201C; qualities that continue to mark the Valleys as special places. The Stories of Change project took a different approach in its work, seeking strength in the ideas people shared with us rather than the weakness that comes as a result of 'not really knowing.' The project shows that, when asked, so-called ordinary people go to extraordinary lengths to provide creative and imaginative responses to the challenges of a post-carbon fuel world.

The research approach put people at its centre and the resulting writing, singing, storytelling, recollection, contribution, and participation inspired not just an enquiry into, but a tribute to, the people in these communities. The project attempted to honour the experience of the participants by inviting open and broad participation. The goal was to be inclusive rather than representative. What people met on the High Street in Treherbert was an open door, an invitation to come in, have a cup of tea, and to talk. There was no sampling to focus in on the experience of particular social groups. The pop-up story studios had contributions from anyone in Treherbert during those two weeks who wanted to write or talk about energy past and future. These events demonstrated the commonality of shared experience in the town, while being careful to recognise the differences of people's views and experiences in 'energy.'

The project facilitated connections between and among diverse individuals and organisations who, as in many communities, often live in geographic proximity to each other but don't meet. There is every possibility that, by bringing people together, new understandings across difference can be built. The Stories of Change project has the potential to point in the direction of a variety of new ways of engaging with communities, and working alongside people as they reimagine their futures through examining their pasts.

Storytelling was at the heart of the process but also a sense of heightened listening. Lots of people are talking these days but not many, it often seems, are listening. The project honoured storytelling as a way of knowing and connecting within communities and between communities. By elevating the 'everyday' and dignifying the domestic the story studio approach invites us to look again at the sofas, the cups of tea, and the conversation they promote not just as part of everyday lives but as representative of a way of living.

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Treherbert | Everyday Lives photo booth

Everyday Lives photo booth Tim Mitchell

It must have taken me about two hours to find the right spot for the Energy Question photo booth. Not for a lack of inspiration but for quite the opposite. The Stories of Change team and Storyworks UK had set up the most amazing Story Studio in the old library in Treherbert. I had to find the right setting and background to place my portrait sitters in, that would give a sense of the Story Studio but not lose them in it. It wasn't a vast space, but it was so rich in beautiful information! Everywhere I looked there was a possible spot, each better than the last, with knickknacks aplenty. Books, maps, everyday objects of beauty and utility, drawings, postcards, and photos were everywhere. I could also foresee that the library might become like Clapham Junction, given that this was the first time the library building had been open to the locals since its closure. I eventually settled on a spot bang in the middle of the studio, trying to weave my two big lights, my camera tripod and me into the busy space without causing a serious blockage. Lights peeped over dressers and leaned up against sideboards, and my tripod and I tucked in behind a bucket of firewood – all focusing on a comfy armchair in the central space. The space behind that bucket became my perch for the next two days, watching the talkative visitors flow through the space like a burbling brook as the artefacts in the room sifted out the Valley's priceless energy stories like alluvial gold. Despite my earlier anxiety about choosing, the context now made my job easy. By the time people came to me, either out of interest or through referral from one of the team, the Story Studio had got their cogs a-whirring. They were full of ideas and questions about energy – and especially about their community's future

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relationship with it. Despite the frustrations of long-term economic doldrums, there seemed to be a growing appetite for self-determination and responsible stewardship of the community's beautiful surroundings. Often it took a bit of conversation time for the sitter to select out, from among their many thoughts about energy, a single question to include in their portrait. One conversation that particularly struck me was with a mum visiting with her three children. While the kids drew pictures of the local landscape, we talked about the wind turbines on top of the hill behind her house, itself quite high up the hillside, out of the village. She spoke of having once been able to walk over the hill to the other valleys and villages – a route that has since been fenced off. In the way she spoke, there was a real sense of past ownership and knowledge of the hill, and now of a sudden and saddening lack of it. She'd been told virtually nothing about the turbines and questioned whether their presence really had any advantages for her family. She lived right under them and yet felt she had no agency with them. Despite their sometimes negative relationships with some of the valley's past large-scale energy projects, there was a strong sense that now is the right time for Valleys communities to define and manage their energy relationships for themselves. I hope this set of portraits reflects that and will engage people far and wide in dialogue. After two days of running the booth and seeing a little of the surrounding landscape, I left full of hope, with a deep respect for the people I'd been lucky enough to meet and with an admiration for the landscape they call home.

Photos: Tim Mitchell. 279

Treherbert | Everyday Lives photo booth

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Treherbert | Everyday Lives photo booth

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Stories of Change | Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements Project team

Project management and administration

Robert Butler, The Open University Rosie Day, University of Birmingham Hamish Fyfe, University of South Wales (Everyday Lives Principal Investigator) Peter Gingold, TippingPoint Axel Goodbody, University of Bath (Energetic seminars strand Principal Investigator) Karen Lewis, University of South Wales (Everyday Lives Principal Investigator) David Llewellyn, University of South Wales Mel Rohse, University of Birmingham Bradon Smith, University of Bath, The Open University Joe Smith, The Open University (Stories of Change Principal Investigator; Demanding Times Principal Investigator) Renata Tyszczuk, University of Sheffield (Future Works Principal Investigator) Julia Udall, Sheffield Hallam University Yvette Vaughan-Jones, Visiting Arts Nicola Whyte, University of Exeter Zdenek Zdrahal, The Open University

Kim Hammond Tracey de Beer Chris Bonfiglioli Radha Ray Jan Smith Hazel Withers Xiao Tan

Consultancy support Ryan Bramley

Project Award Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Award number: AH/L008173/1 Stories of Change: Exploring energy and community in the past, present and future

Financial and other support

Graphic design and platform design Gorm Ashurst and Kathy Barber for Bullet Creative

Copy editing Katrina Zaat

Photography Gorm Ashurst Tim Mitchell

Platform engineering Matteo Cancellieri Gorm Ashurst

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The Arts and Humanities Research Council, Connected Communities Programme The Open University, Higher Education Impact Fund (HEIF) The University of Bath, 50th Anniversary Fund The University of Sheffield, School of Architecture (SSoA) The Open University OpenSpace Research Centre Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution

Partners / Collaborators / Advisors Institutions Actif Woods Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) Advanced Manufacturing Training Centre ADVyCE The Almeida Theatre Archive and the Machine Live Project 2015 The Arkwright Society Artis Community, Arts Council of Wales ArtsAdmin Ashden Bauman Lyons BBC BBC Cymru/Wales Archives BEIS (formerly Department for Energy and Climate Change / DECC) Belper Transition Bloc Projects C. Spencer Ltd Canolfan Maerdy Cape Farewell Carbon Brief CISWO (Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation) CISWO Ynysybwl Group Climate News Network Community Energy Coalition Community Energy Wales Cromford Mills Cynon Taf Community Housing Group Daerwynno Outdoor Centre Derby City Council Derby Makers Derby Museums Trust Derbyshire County Records Office Education and Youth Team The Energy Institute Evans Vettori Architects fanSHEN theatre

Fit for the Future Network Freeword Centre Future Factories and Mester Makers Live Project 2016 GLA Peer Outreach Team (POT) Gower Davies Court residents Greater London Authority (GLA) Greenpeace Gripple Ltd Interlink RCT John Smedley Ltd Kelham Island Museum Kingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s College London Leach Colour Live Projects (SSoA) Live Works (SSoA) Made North The Malthouse, Cromford Masson Mills Museum Melbourne Area Transition Mesters Works Monocle Radio The National Theatre Studio The National Trust National Theatre Wales Natural Resources Wales New Weather Institute One Great Workshop Live Project 2014 Penguin Office Services Persistence Works Pervasive Media Studio Pickford's House, Derby Museums Portland Works The Presbyterian Church of Wales RCT Archives and Library Service Rolls Royce Ltd Scarthin Books, Cromford Sheffield Chamber of Commerce Sheffield Design Week Sheffield Hallam University

Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust Sheffield Live! Radio The Silk Mill, Derby Museums The Smallprint Company Smith of Derby Ltd Storyworks UK Strutt's North Mill Museam Studio Future Works (2014-2016) Studio Polpo Timewalk Sheffield TippingPoint Too Good To Waste Transition Derby Trent and Peak Archaeology University Technical College, Sheffield urbed Valley and Vale Community Arts Valleys Kids Visiting Arts Welcome to our Woods, Treherbert Ynysybwl Enterprise Programme Ynysybwl Regeneration Partnership

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Stories of Change | Acknowledgements

People Gilly Adams Armand Agraviador Jodie Allinson Antara Amin Sam Atkinson Sam Austen John Bacon Jack Baker James Baldwin Chris Barker Hannah Barker Dan Barnard Michelle Bastian Irena Bauman Tom Beesley Jack Bennett Ewan Bennie Fatih Birol Richard Black Marsha Blackburn Kemet Blackwood Fiona Booth Sam Booth Paul Bower Helen Bralesford Ryan Bramley Bojan Brbora Helen Breeze Rachel Briscoe Tony Brookes Paul Brown Lord John Browne David Brownnutt Chris Bullivant Joyce Bullivant Tony Burnell Bexie Bush Martin Butchers Tony Butler Jocelyne Bya Tom Cadwallader Cosmina Daniela Caruntu Barbara Castle Kuan-Yu Chen Yuan Chen David Child Tom Chivers 288

Gary Cheung Robin Clegg Eilish Clohessy Peter Coates Andrew Cole Peter Collins Kieran Cooke Alexander Craig-Thompson Benita Dafe Millie Darling Becky Davies Devinda De Silva Alan Deadman Brian Deer Anna DeLange Graham Devlin Alexander Dewick Gordon Dexter Luke Dickens John Dongwon-Jeong Pauline Down Nick Drake Qian Du Clare Dunn Ken Eklund Charlotte Eley Joe Elliot Georgina Endfield Jo Esra Nancy Evans Robert Evans Simon Evans Keri Facer Hugh Facey Alexander Farr John Fawsitt Rose Fenton Alec Finlay Kate Fletcher Hannah Fox Hamish Fyfe Jean-Pierre Gattuso Margaret Gearty Lilli Geissendorfer Alex Gilbert Ali Goolyad Kasthuri Priya Govindaraju Chakrapani Emma Graham

Neill Grant Leonie Greene Richard Grenfell Victor Guang Shi Andy Gull Chloe Hampson John Hamshere Roger Harrabin Colin Havard Bronwyn Hayward Chris Hees Lisa Heledd Jones Maria Henshall Anne Hickley Sara Hill Emily Hinshelwood Amy Hirst Chris Hope Arneta Hoxha Yumeng Huang Derreem Huggins Mike Hulme Russell Hunnybun Christian Hunt Ian Jackson Mark Jackson Michael Jacobs Marianne Jones Richard Keighley Harry Kennard Robyn Kent Nam Kha Tran Alfie Kingsnorth Alex Kirby Fran Kirk David Knight Judith Knight Ken Koyama Patrik Krchnak Charlie Kronick Abdulbari Kutbi Michael Ledger Natalie Lee Ruth Levene Karen Lewis Steve Lewis Jie Li Minjia Li Ruth Little

James Lloyd Vicky Long Laura Lopez Riveiro Terry Macalister Junior Machado Calum Macintosh Ralph Mackinder Ian Maclean Gordon Macrae Jennifer Macro Daniel Martin SiĂ˘n Maycock Karl McAuley Alisdair McGregor Andrea Mercer Jane Middleton-Smith Alexandra Mills Lisa Mills Stuart Mitchell Tim Mitchell Ken Moon Charlotte Morgan Oliver Morton Mark Mouna Shireen Mula John Mumby Max Munday Patrick Murphy Sandra Nakigagga Rachael Nee Ceri Nicholas Kim Nicholas Ann Noon John Norton Karen O'Brien Jon Orlek Louise Osborn Agamemnon Otero Jade Owens Joe Paget Tracy Pallant Rebecca Palmer Hassan Panero Camille Parmesan Claire Patey Walt Patterson Juste Paulauskaite Stephen Peake Rosamund Pearce

Iain Peebles Benny Peiser Matthew Pencharz Alex Pettifer Ruth Potts Joanna Poxon Adam Price Jill Price Nuala Price Wynford Price Josh Pugh Yu Qian Tim Radford Freya Rawling Jamie Reid George Revill Lord Matthew Ridley Pip Roddis David Romaine Mandy Rose Christopher Scaplehorn Alexander Schofield Christian Servini Mary Sewell Kun Shen Lucy Sheppard Chunyang Shi Andrew Simms Sirdeep Singh Nandera Jim Skea Mary Smedley Graeme Smith Guy Smith Nicholas Smith Olivia Smith Steve Smith James Smith Ebenezer Sogunro Niki Sole Jean Francois Soussana Charlie Spencer Glenn Spiby Lord Nicholas Stern Daniel Stern Paul Stevens Anna Stickland Thomas Stocker Harrison Symonds Yuxuan Tan

Tendai Taruvinga Emma Taylor Lucy Tew Ian Thomas Sally Jane Thompson Bill Thompson Jiayi Tian Ying Tian Richard Tol Levan Tozashvili Graham Truscott Nick Turton Carry Van Lieshout Ben van Beurden Phill Vickery David Wagstaff Matt Wainwright Jo Walton Lucy Ward Paul Warde Liz Warren Gill Webber Louise Webster Hockney Robin Webster Phil Williams Jonathan Wilson Michael Wilson Robert Wilson Wenxuan Wilson Wong Wanqing Wong Fan Yang Eva YH Chee Hao Yi-Zhao Jing Yu Tan Ke Zhang Luming Zhang Wanqi Zhang Yang Zhang Wenjie Zhong

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It is easy to forget that the story of humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship with energy over the last two hundred and fifty years is one of constant change: both incremental and dramatic. Today issues such as climate change and air pollution are prompting a new chapter in the story of energy. The Stories of Change project has gathered accounts of energy transitions from the past, present and future. We have worked with and built connections between varied communities related to policy, industry and the everyday in order to tell new stories of energy system transformations. Energetic samples the experiments and collaborations of this collective project. The key thing to remember about stories is that you can always change the ending.

ISBN 9780955753459

www.storiesofchange.ac.uk

9 780955 753459