A large town, not yet a city, Reading (UK) is typically seen as a commuter hub, with thousands travelling into London every day to get to work. Reading itself may seem unexceptional, even bland, with not much going on there. But, on looking a little closer, Reading has real community, a group of local people who are coming together to create real change.

While many of our problems are global – e.g. the climate and biodiversity emergency, declining fossil fuels, dwindling resources, pollution, overconsumption, food insecurity, inequality – there is much we can do at the local level to make things better. This is what the Transition Town  movement is about: a group of local communities that are reimagining our world at the local level.

These communities foster grassroots projects that focus on increased self-sufficiency, through relocalisation, especially in terms of local food growing and energy use, minimising unnecessary consumption and waste, and building strong, resilient communities, where neighbours know each other and act together to make things happen.

Transition is based more on envisaging a “better world” rather than “fear”. It focuses on positive outcomes, rather than doom and gloom – carrots not sticks.

An essential feature of this approach is to imagine how “the world we want” might look, sound, feel, smell, taste. Then work backwards, from a given future date to the present, to figure out the necessary steps to take, in order to make it happen. This is called “backcasting”.

The first Transition Town was founded in Totnes, in 2006, and became an inspiration for other groups to be created. The Transition Network charity was set up in early 2007, to support these initiatives. The movement has become global, with thousands of communities now involved in Transition initiatives in over 50 different countries. While the overall aims are closely aligned, the specific approaches of each group may vary, according to particular features of its local area.

Transition Town Reading began in May 2009, when Pete Wheat met Colin Pearson in the Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC), having made contact through a “register of interest” action advertised on the Transition Network website. Dave Allen was on board with TTR by September of that year, and hosted the group at Reading University. Essentially, TTR then grew by people in Reading gravitating toward the central idea of Transition. TTR screened the film “In Transition 1.0” in 2010, and by that stage its numbers had grown to about 25-30 active members.

Many projects have spun out from the original TTR group, based around energy, reducing waste, local food growing, and nurturing nature. In only the last 3 years, we have seen the establishment of  Reading Hydro (a microhydro electricity generating station) on Caversham Weir, the further development of Reading Repair Cafe, the Reading Library of Things, and the Reading Community Energy Society (which puts solar panels on roofs of buildings, including schools and churches across Reading), and we connect with other Transition groups, e.g. Incredible Edible Reading has formed a collaboration with one based in Englefield Green, Surrey, and they have been awarded a “partnership” grant from the Transition Network to support this.

TTR also works with the local borough council through the Reading Climate Change Partnership/ Reading Climate Action Network, and has forged links with the University of Reading in regard to soil health and renewable energy projects. More of Reading’s citizens are now engaged with Transition activities, including energy saving, local energy generation, reducing overall resource use, curbing waste, and local food growing. The award of grants, some from the Transition Network and from the National Lottery, has enabled us to expand awareness and practical action in all these areas. We also now feel more connected with the broader Transition Network.

The DraughtBusters project has helped dozens of families across the town to reduce their energy bills and emissions by properly insulating their homes. Incredible Edible Reading and the Reading Food Growing Network (along with its “seed swap”) have encouraged and helped families to grow their own food, in collaboration with Reading Food4Families, and to reduce food costs. Some TTR members are highly active in outreach and explaining issues of climate change, peak oil and energy, to broaden awareness of the fundamental challenges confronting us, and where changes can best be made.

Reading Repair Cafe helps local people to learn about repairing items rather than just throwing them out, while the Reading Library of Things lends tools and other items within the community, thus avoiding the need for lots of people to buy the same devices, but which they may rarely use, individually. TTR’s connection with Reading Borough Council (RBC) enables us to make positive inputs to how things are run here, in regard to reducing emissions and resource use, supporting biodiversity, social equality, and in building community resilience.

Other great things happening in Reading….

The spirit of local community connection and involvement extends widely across many of the town’s activities:

Thus, Ethical Reading helps organisations in Reading to do the right thing by each other, the wider community and the environment and to thrive in the process. It is also a key player in planting trees across Reading, so expanding its green space.

The “RISC roof garden” is a permaculture forest garden, growing in just 30 cm of soil, actually on the roof of the RISC building in the centre of Reading. It serves both to insulate the roof, and hosts a huge range of biodiversity, among the 120 or so different species of perennial plants from around the world that grow there, including a few full sized trees! It is also highly educational, showing how space that we don’t normally think of using, can be made “green” and used for growing food and other plants, many with multiple uses, e.g. for medicine, fuel, fibre, construction, dyes, scents.

Nature Nurture focuses on the health and community benefits of spending time in nature, “Green social prescribing”, and also conservation with Eco-net, connecting the community with nature, school programmes, developing new waymarked walking trails with the community.

“The Marshians” are a large number of people taking action to expand the biodiversity of the largest undeveloped area in Reading (The Kennett flood meadows – Fobney Marsh). This also helps to protect Reading from being flooded during periods of very heavy rainfall, of which we can expect much more as the climate changes.

The artwork on the Reading Hydro turbine house and by the Holy Brook Nook (where Nature Nurture holds events, and there are also raised beds, with herbs and vegetables for anyone to help themselves to, although they are also encouraged to join in with the growing) was painted by  Commando Jugendstil (with help from local volunteers), who also received a grant from the Transition Network to produce a book “The Town that Could Be”, based on an imagined “Transitioned” vision of Reading in 2045, aimed to backcast from so it can be made real.

TTR also collaborates with the local independent cinema (“Reading Biscuit Factory”) to show films with Transition themes, which so far include: “Six Inches of Soil”, “Wilding”, “The Sequel”, “Living the Change”, and some locally produced films. TTR has also actually commissioned a new film, currently  being produced (more details to follow), which we intend to screen there, as part of an event to stimulate further action in Reading’s Transition journey.

“Refill Reading” is a grassroots campaign started by TTR. It aims to reduce the number of disposable coffee cups going to landfill (2.5 billion per year, just in the U.K.) by encouraging people to use reusable cups instead of disposable ones. This project has the support of the Reading Borough Council.

Lavender Place Community Gardens (a space set free by the demolition of the old RBC “civic centre” offices) was temporarily turned into a community garden by Food4Families (F4F), in partnership with Thames Valley Police, and later joined by members of the Forgotten British Gurkhas community. The F4F volunteers (at Lavender Place and in many of Reading’s other community gardens) supplied fruit and vegetables to local organisations for food parcels and free meals during (and after) the pandemic. [In fact, they still do from Craven Road, Ardler Road and Southcote GrowAllot, amongst others]. F4F volunteers also look after the raised vegetable and herb beds at Holy Brook Nook. 

Health and environmental challenges for minoritised communities in Reading, including those from Nepal, are a focus of the Integrated Research and Development Centre (IRDC), while Reading HongKongers CIC was founded in 2022 to support Hong Kong nationals who have settled in the Berkshire, providing them with a diaspora network and helping them to integrate into the local community. Both groups have woven their activities around local food growing and wellbeing.

British Islamic Gardens (BIG) is based in Reading, and run solely by volunteers, to create garden spaces around mosques that grow in harmony with the environment, encouraging community cohesion without compromising on sustainability.

There is very much more happening in Reading, and the above merely provides a flavour of it all. For example, there is  the Reading Volunteer Action (RVA) website, which lists (under “Directory”) all kinds of community and other local organisations that are looking for volunteers.

Relocalisation and community are the foundations of the future.

Resources are precious, and we can use them much better. We can become far less dependent on supply chains spanning the world, often to buy things we don’t really need. We can be more self-sufficient, and produce more energy and food locally, while wasting less of what we have. We can nurture nature, so she can nurture us. We can strengthen our communities.

Undoubtedly, we face many interconnected and systemic challenges, but it appears sage to plan away from the proverbial global village, and more toward a globe of villages. Thus, although Transition Towns thinking was initiated primarily from considerations about peak oil, it has been  stressed that:

“All essential efforts toward re-localisation and community resilience may provide the strongest available single buffer against the many storms that are likely to prevail upon us.”

Reading is a town in Transition, and has its own character. The things we’ve managed to achieve here can be built on to become a place where we love to live, and the whole community of living beings thrives.

We hope that some of what we have done in Reading lights the way for others to see what they might also do in their own town, their village, their street.

It is members of the community, people, who are the force of change. By our own hands, hearts and minds, we make things happen. We can begin to shape our future, ourselves, and not just accept what governments may decide for us, or the prevailing paradigm throws our way.

Transition needs local people to get involved, lots of us – we can all help to build the story of our future, then act together to make it real. We do this for ourselves, for our children, and for our children’s children, who will inherit our Earth.

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