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• 1 2025-02-13T00:42:44+00:00 Southwest England: An Overview 14 plain 2025-05-20T05:28:46+00:00 Transition Town Wellington (TTW) started in 2008, two years after the movement was launched by Rob Hopkins in Totnes, Devon. TTW is an entirely volunteer-run, not-for-profit community group, working towards making our town more carbon neutral, sustainable and biodiverse. Over the past decade or so Wellington has built a reputation as an ‘environmentally friendly’ place largely due to the campaigns and visible projects led by TTW: including a regular repair café, a gardening for wildlife and foraging booklets and maps, and the creation of a community forest garden next to the iconic textile mill at Tonedale on the town’s outskirts. 
  
  
  We began this oral history project with a two-day training session in Feb 2024 conducted by Rib Davis, chair of the Oral History Society’s special interest group on climate change and the environment. We wanted to open this opportunity to as many people as possible, so we put a call out using posters as well as social media. Fourteen people registered for the workshop, and quickly cohered into a supportive and close-knit group, sharing skills, ideas and technical know-how. Together, the team came up with a list of potential interviewees, and decided our first step would be to interview each other. 
  
  
  We devised our key questions and topics, and informally agreed upon a methodology that would work for this particular project, trying to get the balance right between personal histories and people’s experiences with TTW. We wanted to understand better how people engage with issues around climate change and the ecological crisis, and to find out what kind of impact this has had on their own lives. 
  
  For us, any truly sustainable change for the good must come from the ground up, from people’s lived realities. TTW’s oral history project has been a chance to understand the impact of the group’s work over the past 16 years, and to engage in some deep listening to help us in taking action for the benefit of all – human and non-human alike.  
  
  
  The oral history project is led by Anita Roy, a writer and editor, and Anita Corbin, a professional photographer, both of whom have been active as part of the core organisational team at Transition Town Wellington for several years. 
  
  We would like to thank all of the volunteers who attended the oral history training days and carried out the interviews and all of our interviewees from Wellington and the surrounding areas, Rib Davis for initiating the project and coordinating it so supportive, Padmini Broomfield from the OHS for all her advice, Serai’ya Crawley and Jessica Taylor for transcription of the interviews and website development, Braziers Coffee Roasters for providing meeting space, Ben and Victoria Fox of the Big House Company for allowing us to use Tone Dale House for our training session days, and Transition Together for their generous funding that helped support us to the first stage of the TTWOHP. Find out more at ttw.org.uk.