Two contrasting views this week of what “the environment” can mean. The Town Council has members on various organisations in the town. Three of the councillors (a record number) expressed an interest in South Lakes Action on Climate Change / Towards Transition (SLACC/TT) – the group who successfully gained Transition Town status for Kendal this [...]

Interesting debate at the Planning Committee tonight. We were considering a planning application for works at a house in the conservation area in Kendal, to replace an existing porch / conservatory of little merit with a new design. The owner and the architect had obviously studied the Green Building Bible and taken it to heart. [...]

After living in Edinburgh (population 450,000) it’s a bit of a change living in Kendal (population 26,000). We went to a Fairtrade event last night, and were pleasantly surprised at how many people we knew already from other places. I spotted another town councillor plus a district councillor there – it made me wonder how [...]

I’d seen a number of adverts for aerated showers. The idea’s simple – just replace your existing showerhead (a five second swap) and you can significantly reduce your water consumption every time you shower. The claim is that aerated showers give the same ‘feel’, but use much less water. For around £20, it seemed a [...]

Inspired partly by the Transition Town meeting last night – but more so by the lovely spring weather – we decided it was time to start turning the gravel bed at the back of the house into four productive raised beds for growing veggies. But what would we find under the stones? had the previous [...]

At a public meeting last night, Kendal was formally announced as the latest Transition Town (there are apparently around 270). South Lakes Action on Climate Change, a local pressure group, announced they had successfully passed the audit to achieve TT status. The town mayor and local MP were there to add their congratulations. TT’s grew [...]

We bought our new house in January with the intention of ‘greening’ it as a retirement project. We’d been reading resources such as the Green Building Magazine, the Green Building Bible, T-Zero, the Energy Saving Trust, etc. High on the list was improving the insulation of the walls. The house was built in the 1920s, [...]