LAND COMMUNITY
Photographs: Adrian Arbib
Words: George Monbiot
Buried in twenty acres of woods, the hamlet is invisible until you step into it. When the community arrived, most of the trees were larch and Douglas fir, which provide good timber for building and milling, but have a limited ecological value. So the residents have been replacing some of them with native broad-leafed trees. Surplus wood is used for cooking, heating the homes and driving the steam engine.
Tinker’s Bubble leads the way in low-impact living.
back
to top
WHEN TINKER’S Bubble was founded, in 1994, most people gave it a few months. The forces ranged against it were too powerful, the project was too ambitious. There was good reason to be sceptical. The community farm, established on forty acres of woodland, apple orchards and pasture in south Somerset, was not only an ecological and economic experiment, but also a political experiment.
Planning permission for houses outside towns and villages is strictly forbidden, unless you have plenty of money and friends in high places. While strong regulations are necessary to protect the landscape, British planning laws present a massive barrier to people who want to work on the land.
|
Samson, the shire horse, is the main source of traction. He pulls various carts and gigs, extracts timber from the woods and ploughs the fields. The soil is poor, so vegetables and long-straw wheat (used for both fodder and thatching) are rotated with pigs, which both manure the ground and pre-plough it, breaking the soil and grubbing up roots. | ||
The people who founded Tinker’s Bubble sought to challenge this exclusion, by building houses whose impact on the environment is almost zero. They could, they argued, enhance the environmental quality of the land they had bought, but only if they were allowed to live there.
At first, they were fiercely resisted by both local people and the district council. The land, people predicted, would be invaded by new age travellers. If the council granted permission for canvas huts, there would be nothing to prevent the residents turning them into brick mansions. But slowly, the community made friends and won people’s trust. While surrounding farms were grubbing up their apple orchards or diversifying into dirt bike racing, Tinker’s Bubble remained quiet and beautiful.
 |
|||
| Many of the skills the people at Tinker’s Bubble have learnt, such as manual hay-making, have been all but lost elsewhere. When the grass is ready and the weather is right, the community abandons its other jobs and works flat-out for several days. Once the grass is cut it must be ‘teddied’ (shaken out with pitchforks) every morning, then pulled back into rows in the evening, until it’s ready to be carted and stooked. The farm uses no artificial fertilizers or pesticides, so the hay meadows are full of wild flowers, beetles, butterflies, voles and slowworms. |
Eventually, the farm won five-year planning permission for a hamlet hidden in the woods, bound by the strict conditions the residents devised to prevent their homes from blighting the environment. This has become something of a test case for planning law, as several other district councils have reconsidered the concept of low-impact development.
While 800-acre farms in Britain employ just one labourer, at Tinker’s Bubble forty acres of land supports ten adults and four children. The reason is simple: the farm’s economy has been tied to its ecology. The community banned internal combustion engines for ecological reasons, but one result is that the farm’s running costs are tiny. A steam engine, powered by wood and water, runs the sawmill. A ram pump, driven by the stream which flows through the farm, supplies the hamlet and the gardens with water. Electricity is provided by a windmill and solar panels, and all the other labour is supplied by hand and by horse. Once the initial investment had been made, in other words, the farm became both ecologically and economically self-reliant.
Over the past year, Adrian Arbib, one of the most talented photographers
in Britain, has been visiting Tinker’s Bubble to record the results
of this experiment.
 |
|||
| One of the factors which make Tinker’s Bubble socially sustainable is a mixture of private and communal space. Every household has its own home, but the people come together for meals and meetings in the communal roundhouse. While the homes were originally covered with canvas, this is slowly being replaced with local materials. This one is being roofed with Douglas fir planking, milled by the steam-powered saw, and with thatch grown in the fields. The internal walls are made from hazel wattle from the woods and mud and straw daub. |
Subscribe
to Resurgence