On Sunday May 6, sometime between 8 and 11 PM, someone set fire to the Orchard storage sheds. They were a ruin before the fire service could get to them. We lost a lot of stuff, and are now looking at how to rebuild our resource base, and how to renew our sense of purpose in the wake of that damage. With that in mind, the focus of this post is to set out various criteria and opportunities for moving forward. We are thinking about these things, and would be glad to hear your thoughts as well.
Renewal
Our main aim is to re-establish a good base for access to tools and materials for our garden work, our greenwood work, and our children & families work. There is a fair bit of overlap between these, but there are also distinct differences. We use scythes, shears and large rakes for keeping the ground cover down. We use a crosscut saw, mauls, wedges, sawbucks, shavehorses and drawknives for splitting and shaping logs. We use fabrics, clay, paints, books, lenses, and kitchenware for activities with children. We are part way though the purchase of yurt. We use gazebos and trestle tables, garden carts and wheelbarrows.
Secure, weatherproof, accessible space is a challenging mix of requirements. But there are opportunities at hand.
Let’s start with our current location, where we’ve had a tool cage for several years, then bought a metal garden shed, and after that were given an insulated metal cabin. All of those are now gone. There’s no point replacing like with like, as those sheds were too vulnerable. So if we are to rebuild at this location, we need a fireproof structure, like a steel shipping container or a concrete panel shed.
Steel shipping containers are delivered on large flatbed lorries, and lifted into place by crane. Our site is not accessible by either of those, so we cannot expect to get a shipping container to the orchard. In contrast, concrete sheds arrive on much smaller vans or trailers. A Range Rover could get those parts to us. So a flatpack concrete shed looks like the simplest solution for an on site cabin.
The next challenge is electricity, wifi for an alarm system, and water for a sprinkler. These are now necessary to help adjust for the hidden, remote character of the site, in that people can make mischief for hours on end without any passerby or neighbour to notice.
The site did have mains water at one point, and there are probably buried mains pipes nearby. Hooking those in would cost somewhere between £2,000 and £10,000 depending on the condition of existing lines. There’d be ongoing costs for water and perhaps sewerage.
Electricity is an unknown. There may have been mains power, but we’ve not seen any traces of it. So the cost of running cable from the nearest trunk could run to several thousand pounds. We’d then have standing charges to pay. It would be more cost effective to set up a solar panel and a battery. This might also work for pumping and filtering rainwater, so that we could be off grid, in line with our emphasis on sustainability.
So if we intend to rebuild on site, we might be looking at £20,000 for having utility services installed.
There are off-site opportunities, if we are mindful of what we mean by that. Most notably, there’s a derelict Queensbridge council depot about 150 metres away. There are also a variety of outbuildings and bits of accessible, level ground within 100m.
Queensbridge Depot is an interesting property, and has been the focus of several community groups wanting the space and access it offers. There are good outcomes from those uses, particularly with the council cutting back on very similar sorts of direct provision. We and other groups would be doing work that the council cannot do, at a fraction of the cost. But this is a challenge that requires political will, in a way that local councillors cannot do. So setting up in Queensbridge, in a proper way, is a medium-term prospect.
With that in mind we will ask our neighbours at Highbury and Uffculme about access to a storage unit on an interim basis.
Purpose
Speaking of political will, we are looking for more of that in expanding our remit to include working with young people, and people at risk more generally, including asylum seekers, people with diagnosed mental health conditions, and making the site more accessible.
These ambitions have been on the table for a long while, but we’ve not had the funding to pursue them. We have just been awarded about £10,000 to work with young people over the Summer and beyond, so that’s a start, but the fire has set us back. We had scheduled some sessions with additional needs children, but have now postponed those.
These are some of the ways we’re looking to renew our sense of purpose. Other ways include the input we’re getting from people as they hear about the level of destruction. A few people have Big Ideas about things to do with the site - purpose built cabin, treehouse, other facilities. But Big Ideas also encompass keeping things much as they are, because a lot of people really enjoy the change of pace that this part of Highbury provides. We’ve found that people are happy to support us in ways we had previously thought unworkable. For example, we might start a membership scheme. It seems that enough people are willing to make a yearly donation that would add up to something significant. Beyond that, we’re looking at themes around healing, from chanting sessions to remediation garden.
So there’s quite a bit to look forward to.
This page will be revised with further details in due course.